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I don't think I've ever endorsed the view that trans people can choose their gender at any given moment, any more than I've endorsed the view that you can just adopt an orphaned child at any given moment. I think in most cases and with most social groups, honorary statuses will require some kind of "social proof" for a group to accept them. In the case of adoption, it might look like filling out a bunch of forms with the government. In the case of trans people, it might look like paying $50 at your DMV to get your sex indicators changed on your driver's license.
The "social proof" doesn't have to involve the government, though that is usually the "easiest" path since it means that the people with the ability to enforce contracts through their monopoly on force recognize your claim as legitimate. However, if a national disaster created a 10 year state of anarchy, I think people in a community that already believed in the basic legitimacy of child adoption could have informal adoption with enough social proof that most of the people in a community recognized the validity of the claim.
But it very clearly is the view that is being pushed throughout societies. There already are laws passed in various European countries that literally allow this, the only limit that I'm aware of being frequency. It's all fine and well that you might not support it, but you can't act like you're steelmanning a view, when that's clearly not the view being put forward.
Could you point me in the direction of these laws? Do they allow you to self-ID without letting anyone know until you're called on it, or do they require you to file paperwork with the government still? Because filing paperwork is still a form of social proof in my book.
The most commonly discussed ones are the German Selbstbestimmunggesetz and the Spanish Ley Trans. Of course they require you to file paperwork, how else do you imagine the process to work?
These laws make it mandatory for everyone to treat you as a woman, including putting penalties for misgendering. They have already been used by people to get into women's prisons, and to silence critics.
It's an administrative process that cannot be rejected, I don't consider it social proof of any sort. Originally I didn't mean to imply you support this, but you clearly seem to.
And with that you should answer the original scenario. Should I be able to change my race to black, by filing some paperwork?
I mean, in some places all it takes to get married is to sign a piece of paper with a witness. I would still consider that a form of social proof - even if "throwing a party with all of our friends and family where we state our commitment to one another" is probably a more central example of social proof.
I don't support the punitive aspects of such laws. I'm a big believer in pluralism and free speech culture, and I would rather the government didn't force people to say or do things that go against deeply help beliefs of theirs.
I'm okay with fairly lax laws for letting the government know you want to adopt an honorary sex role though. That's up to every society and subculture to decide for themselves, including the decision to reject it entirely.
EDIT:
I think I already said that I accept transracialism up thread, and even think that it is far more common than usually thought (cf. Hispanics becoming "white" in the US.)
I tend to think that more costly social proof is more likely to be widely accepted, but I have nothing against a culture or subculture making the gatekeeping for honorary statuses as low as they collectively decide.
This might depend on the country, but I don't think you actually need any witnesses, unless you mean the public official that oversees the whole thing.
In any case, all this means is there doesn't need to be social proof to get married, which is how I believe it should be. If you tell me "you believe anyone should be able to get married whenever they want", I'm not going to claim I never endorsed that position, and probably will go just with a "well... yeah" (+/- being legally an adult, not being able to have more than 1 active marriage at any given time, etc - all things that have nothing to do with social proof in itself).
That still means you're in favor of sending men to women's prison because they've had a sentencing-day realization that they're trans (or even a post-sentencing-day one, and transferring them), of letting men pommel women in sports like boxing during the Olympics, or of telling the women complaining about a bloke with a raging erection in their women-only naked spa, that they're the one in the wrong. Correct?
Sorry, I'm a bit weary when someone brings an example that is non-central, in the sense that it's the least offensive instance of a broader controversial category. Since we're on the topic of social proof, you don't happen to have a record of defending Elizabeth Warren identifying as Native American? Specifically: in the sense that you don't believe she has any biological ties to that ethnic group, but it's ok for her to claim that identity, and reap all the benefits associated with it.
Incorrect.
Adoption laws don't force us to pretend that adoptive parents will likely be possible bone marrow donors, and honorary sex laws have no necessary legal connection to a package of particular treatment norms.
We could have the institution of honorary sex, and decide to still segregate some or all of the spaces you listed. The only one I'm actually inclined to push for is bathroom honorary sex integration, because I think that the requirement most societies will have to show social proof will usually prevent same day declarations by malefactors, and my assessment of risks versus rewards just doesn't agree with the integration pessimists. (Especially because I think a pseudo-trans malefactor who would want to lie could always be smart and say something like, "Hey, I don't want to be here either, but I'm a trans man - a biological woman - and the stupid laws require me to be here. I'll try to be quick and do my business in private without getting in your way" - before assaulting a victim when they let their guard down. I don't think any enforcement mechanism can fix the problem of a motivated invader without getting overly draconian.)
Okay, I'm sorry for how this conversation has been going but I have a tendency to read between the lines, so when I gave an example of laws that require total integration, and you only mentioned being against the penalties for speech, I assumed this means you must be ok with integration.
That said, how do you expect me to give any weight to the claim that we could hypothetically have a different version of the law, given how the entire trans movement has panned out in reality?
Can you step me through how this is supposed to work? If you consider filing paperwork to be social proof, how is that supposed to stop any malefactors at all?
Well, if the potential rapist can pull off being a 5-foot-tall manlet with a frog voice, that might just work. In any case the advantage here is that women will have the right to call security to resolve the situation (check the ID, which will be unmodifable, for example), rather than being cowed into submission by default.
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