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As others have said, trans people (and other gender non-conformists) are a significant part of the rationalist community. The points you mentioned simply do not come up when it comes to the daily interactions that people in it would have.
Take the prototypical Bay Area trans woman someone like Scott Alexander would know: autistic, nerdy, moderate-to-high income, involved in tech, polyamorous (but mostly dating other trans women), and largely similar to other rationalists in terms of mentality. This type of individual is not particular athletic (unless it’s rock climbing), unlikely to be involved in criminal activity or engage in violent behaviour (much like the average male nerd).
This is a stereotype perhaps, but familiar to anyone that hangs around those circles; there’s very little downside to being accepting of them, and the factors you brought up have no direct impact and are in fact very low-probability events when it comes to that demographics.
Sure. Obviously, a lot of the externalities with transgenderism go away if you have a social norm to actually be nice, including not using transgenderism for bad results.
But I understood Scott (and others) to be talking about trans people in wider society. I would have less of an issue with them if they clarified that they were only talking about trans people in the context of the rationalist community.
Or if they drew a line in the sand and said, no, actually, it's not acceptable to give Norton the head of Rutherford B. Hayes, and we need policies on emperor-identified people to ensure that doesn't happen.
One point is that trans people are far more likely to be the victims rather than the perpetrators of sexual assault and violence, and you won’t have much luck convincing groups like rationalists to focus on the statistically smaller externalities of bad actors that they don’t know, versus the statistically more common occurrence of their friends being threatened, abused, raped or victimised.
But moreso I fail to see why trans people need any special policies. Assault or sexual harassment in bathrooms is illegal regardless of the perpetrator’s gender or biological sex; trans people should go where they pass/are safest. Segregating by biological sex is a losing battle; if trans men are forced to use the bathroom of their biological sex, they can get assaulted for being “men in women’s bathrooms”.
Rape in prisons should not be tolerated, people who sexually assault their cell mate should be isolated and dealt with appropriately.
Women’s sports is more thorny, but I don’t see anything wrong with banning anyone who went through male puberty or more generally went above a certain threshold of exogenous or endogenous androgens in the past (a former trans man who took T from ages 13-17 would have an advantage against cis women, a trans woman who took puberty blockers since the age of 12 would not).
Do you have a source?
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The actual answer here is, on a fundamental level ‘then they should not be trans women, and this is a consequence they took upon themselves when they decided to become one’.
The practical level answer is, of course, that no one cares about technically-very-confused-woman using the men’s room/locker room/whatever, even if it’s de jure illegal. Just don’t extend special protections and ignore the problem because it isn’t one you have to worry about.
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Source? I was under the impression that they're actually less likely to be the victims of any crime, although it is a pretty small sample size to draw any significant conclusions either way.
Okay. But they should at least edit in a little disclaimer that says their writings on trans people are meant to be read in the context of the rationalist community, right? (Actually, they should do that for basically everything, but that's a different story...)
Well, why do we have an age of consent? That could be considered a special policy for children, since violating someone's sexual consent is already against the law.
The reason is that there's enough gray area in the law that it's far more prudent to draw a line in the sand and add a special policy that forbids any sex with anyone below the age of 18. This way, we can cut the Gordian knot and end the otherwise interminable debates about whether a minor really consented to sex in this instance or not.
The meta-reason is that children are different enough than adults and thus need a special policy for them. So it goes for trans people too.
The trans person in the news story you linked to, Noah Ruiz, pleaded guilty to aggravated disorderly conduct. I'm guessing that this is referring to "defense mode":
So I doubt the story that Ruiz claims. The TikToks that Ruiz has posted don't really amount to anything significant, nor do they support the claims. It sounds like Ruiz started the altercation (and not for looking like a man in a woman's bathroom).
Again, I don't believe this narrative of trans people just being flat-out attacked if someone thinks they are doing the wrong thing.
Yes of course, that is already the policy. But my focus was on women being impregnated, because the easiest and simplest way to 100% prevent prison pregnancy is to separate by sex and disregard prisoners' trans identity.
It's a misconception that you can simply "stop" puberty. I mean, you can, but the rest of the body still develops. I would also object to this being possible in the first place because I don't believe taking puberty blockers is good for the physical health of any minor. They'll have many health problems for the rest of their life.
Here's a different idea - why not just let trans people compete with men, or create a separate sports category for trans people?
My understanding (sorry no source) is that this is largely due to a greatly disproportionate number of MtF transgender people working in the sex industry.
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I don't get it. Why are we supposed to be concerned about the outlier of trans men being assaulted in women's bathrooms, but shrug off the outlier of women being assaulted or perved on by trans women?
If that was even slightly realistic, we wouldn't need sex segregation in prison to start with.
Do we know this for sure?
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