Have you been following the debate on trans rights lately? I have, through @HJJoyceEcon and @janeclarejones and others. It's pretty disturbing.

I am not an expert. And my sex / sexual preferences / other life privileges mean that I am not directly affected. I don't know what right if any I have to be a participant in this debate. Probably none.

If you haven't followed it, look into it. I arrive thus far with the following concerns....

...notwithstanding the backdrop of tolerence we should all have for whatever people want to do to themselves, call themselves, wear, whoever they want to sleep with, look like, be taken to be...

1. Amongst the trans rights advocates there is a strain of denialism: denying biological facts about our birth status.

2. This denialism leads some of the same to have empty definitions of what it is they think they/those they are concerned about are. There is no proper answer, for example to the q what it is to be a woman, or a man.

3. The absence of a proper answer leads to the answer that it is whatever it is women or men tend to be like. Which can have the damaging side effect of reinforcing stereotypes/subliminal instructions sent by society to its new participants.

4. The suggestion that self-identification should be all understandably IMO leaves women [here meaning born female] feeling like they will lose safe spaces, like toilets, bathrooms, refuges, reserved offices in organizations ['women's officer'].

5. Relatedly, self-identification undermines the segregation of sports by biological sex at birth. Some trans rights advocates [eg Rachel Mckinnon, but others too] deny obvious realities about unequal toolkits biology lends male and female born to enage in sports.

6. At the same time, in the movement to provide support for children in their gender identification choices, there has been an inevitable increase in those undertaking medical transition, leaving q's in my mind, bequeathed by sceptical writers, as to whether this is desirable.

7. The most extreme form of denialism in the debate seems to be the phenomenon of labelling lesbians who have a preference not to engage in sexual activity with those transitioned from male to female as prejudiced.

8. The denialism, abuse of science/biology, is depressing; an example on the left of the general tendency on the extreme right to indulge in the tactic of insisting that up is down and black is white to press political programs.

9. A common tactic is to use the label 'transphobic', IMO often inappropriatey. Standing up for one's own rights in a contested ethical space [eg the right to certain safe spaces or reserved offices or sports categories] cannot be presumed to be the serious wrong of transphobia

10. Resorting to labels like that without due care does the same harm to the task of tackling genuine anti-trans and other prejudice [homophobia, racism, misogyny] that Trump does to the task of combatting fake news when he shouts 'FAKE NEWS' at news that is not actually fake.

11. @AmandaGosling3 pointed out that firms, govt and council organizations have started collecting, or might start to collect data only on the basis of self-ID, which undermines the attempt to monitor outcomes for sex-at-birth categories.

12. If you think patriarchal oppression, conscious or otherwise, operates in some respects against sex-at-birth categories [it surely does at least for heterosexual violence and harrassment, homophobia directed against lesbians and more] then not collecting this data is bad.

... as you lose the ability to monitor the effectiveness of policies at combatting said social ills. Collecting it involves another contested ethical space, obviously, namely the desire for privacy with respect to details about sex at birth by those who self-ID later.

Going back to concern 6: there is the possibility - I don't pretend to know how seriously it should be taken, only that it is an open question - whether disphoria is in some individuals caused by the oppression of the gender stereotypes society confers/instructs.

That is to imagine eg an individual sexed male at birth observing male and female stereotypes/behavioural rules and preferring not to abide by the 'male' 'rules'.

The vehemence with which this possibility is dismissed leads me to worry that those closely involved don't always deal with disphoria appropriately, that too many might be guided down medical transition, a path their future self might regret yet cannot entirely undo.

At the same time, this vehemence/hostility may, with dark irony, lead to the entrenchment of the harmful gender stereotypes in the first place. This is on top of the original entrenchment that comes from self-id being about id-ing as what society has ruled are the categories.

OK, getting back in my econ/finance/Brexit box.

Appending a few other thoughts on this issue, in light of recent re-circulation.

PS2: I harbour the optimisim that commercial interests will soon weigh on the debate about sex segregation in sports. I forecast that an overwhelming majority of sports lovers will not want to watch the farce of male-born people competing against women...

...this will at some point prompt sponsorship interests to pressure sporting authorities to stop it, as otherwise they will lose ££££.

PS3: philosophical point. [I'm not a philosopher either, so this advanced in same tentative spirit as the rest of this thread]. Recalling the 'what is it like to be a bat?' connundrum, title of article about assessing nature of others' experiences by Nagel.

Let's just for the sake of argument concede the existence of male and female 'essences' distinct from the bodies with male and female sexual characteristics and chromosomes. I don't accept that this notion should be conceded, but to make a point:

For a trans man to claim that they posess and experience this male essence that they claim I also have and experience as a male born person requires them to objectively assess my own experience of myself. How on earth is that possible with any certainty?

Unlike with a bat, a trans man can at least communicate with me to try to get me to agree to consider if I do subjectively experience a male essence, and whether that is anything like what they think they experience.

But the exercise is going to be fraught with unresolveable uncertainty. And at best it would be about box ticking things we both think and like and like to do. So we are back to definitions based on behaviours and thoughts, not essences.

Problem infinitely more difficult if we try the game of conceding non-binary essences, and imagining a hypothetical situation where one person who claims a non-binary essence tries to assess the validity of this claim by interrogating the experience of another 'on the spectrum'.

PS4: Recalling earlier points about how the debate is being conducted, one of the most chilling and objectionable interventions - indicative of a broad tactic - was this: https://twitter.com/youngvulgarian/status/1101232269870751746?lang=en