I will put these people into whatever "imaginary social boxes", as you call them, that I please. And as such, if I do not put her into the box she desires, she will not considered a man to me, in which case she is indeed not a man according to your very own definition.
And the only thing you are doing by that is purposefully offending someone. Like deciding to put someone into the category of "uncool", or more closely analogous, telling someone that they're not a real insert-social-clique-they-identify-with (geek/hippie/punk/nerd/hipster/goth/emo/whatever). Because genders are just social categories like those cliques, and all you do by denying someone's membership of one they identify with is insult them. It has no other meaning than that.
Super pedantically, gender, being a social status, is known at birth; when someone say "it's a boy/girl!" they are gendering that baby. Gender identity, which is a psychological state regarding that social status, is something that doesn't develop until later and can't be known until it's expressed.
Say you meet a hot chick with tits out to here and you take her home to bang her in her tight pussy. Things go so well you end up doing it over and over again and get to know each other really well and actually develop a loving romantic relationship that ends in marriage. Of course in the course of this relationship you learn all about her childhood, including the fact that she was (as expected) born female and has been female her entire life. In time the two of you decide to have a child, but upon failing to conceive repeatedly, you seek the advice of a doctor. After many tests of much more likely conditions, the doctor tests your wife's sex chromosomes, and finds that she has a rare condition called androgen insensitivity syndrome, whereby she has XY sex chromosomes, but her cells don't react to the androgens that those cells make, so she developed as anatomically female in every way, but the chromosome mismatch means she's infertile. (This is a real thing that actually happens).
Was she a man the whole time? Are you gay now? Or are you going to be a "Genetics-Denier" and say her genetics don't matter?
If you define x as F and then find a non-F thing that is obviously an x, your definition was wrong, simple as that. Doesn't matter how rare non-F x's are, if there are any x that are not F then F-ness cannot define x-hood. F-ness may still make a good sign of x-hood, but it can't be part of the definition.
Sex chomosomes may be a good indicator of someone's sex almost all of the time (that's why they're called sex chromosomes), but the existence of females with XY chromosomes, and all manner of people of various sexes with sex chromosomes other than XX and XY, means that sex chromosomes cannot define sex.
Also, as I already said, trying to define sex by chromosomes means that for most of human history nobody knew what sex anyone was, because nobody even knew what chromosomes were. Sex is defined by anatomy, and always has been. We've just learned that some chromosomes correlate strongly with anatomy, and usually (but not always) play a causal role in its development. But it's the anatomy that has always been foremost.
In the technical terminology that's more than twice as old as you (turning 66 this year!), "man" and "woman" are the names of social categories, while "male" and "female" are the names of biological categories. I myself have some disagreements about naming things this way (I would have coined New Latin terms-of-art instead or repurposing common English) precisely because it breeds this exact confusion (and for other reasons related to nonbinary genders), but that's how they got named and there's not much to be done about it by now.
And the need for two sets of terms is very real, and originally had nothing to do with transgender issues. Rather, the distinction was coined because there are some people, intersex people, who are not biologically male or female, but somewhere in between, and yet still get put into one of the social categories of "man" or "woman". In some cases, they are biologically much closer to the sex opposite their gender, but because they were ambiguous at birth and people feel compelled to put them into one of those two boxes they picked one, and picked wrong, and someone who's biologically much closer to female was raised as and identified as and is identified by everyone else as a man, etc.
Technically, your gender per se is that social box that other people put you into; a social property of you, a social status, like a rank or title. By that super pedantic technical standard, only passing transwomen are truly "women" (and likewise transmen); if society sees you as a gender, you are that gender, because gender is nothing but the state of how society sees you. Your gender identity on the other hand is a mental property of you, a mental state, about or regarding that social status: it's what box you would like other people to put you into, relative to the box you were put into at birth. Super pedantically technically, nobody (who knows what they're talking about) claims that "wanting to be a gender makes you that gender"; rather, being seen as a gender makes you that gender, because gender is all about how people see you. But in an effort to not be massive assholes to people, it's generally considered polite to consider people to be in the social category they would like to be considered as, even if that wouldn't be your first assumption.
Which is all a long way of saying: no, a trangendered man is not a woman who wishes she was a man. A transgendered man is a man -- someone considered by society to go in that social category -- who was not considered a boy when he was born. And if you're not an asshole, you'll put people into the imaginary social boxes that they want to be in instead of the imaginary social boxes you want them to be in, and consider a biological female who wants to be considered a man as a man, at which point he is a man... to you. He was already a man to himself. And any argument between you and him over which imaginary social box he belongs in is literally a matter of baseless social opinion, like arguing over whether the new kid is cool or not; it's entirely about nothing more than either accepting or shunning someone, so the only question is whether to be an asshole or not.
OT, but this is a pet peeve because I used to do it too and now I feel dumb whenever I see something old I wrote doing it: the term you want is "prescriptive", not "proscriptive". Prescription is any kind of normative speech, saying what should or should not be. Proscription is a specific subset of that, saying that something must not be. You can prescribe that someone do something, or prescribe that they refrain from doing something, but if you proscribe something (not "proscribe that someone...") you're saying it mustn't be done.
You're the one who brought up intersex people and started making ridiculous statements about them, I'm just pointing out how ridiculous those are. You wrote:
Yes, I'm aware a very small number of people are born with both [...] And generally they should use the mens room."
That's what this subthread is about. You saying a dumb thing like that, lumping all intersex people in with males. I explicitly set aside the broader topic (where you're also wrong) in the first clause of my first post to focus in on how dumb this specific assertion is. I'll take your unwillingness to even attempt to defend it as admission that you're complete unable to. Go ahead and retreat, I won't chase after you.
Normal men will say "oh gosh, so sorry, and rush out the door in embarrassment".
Men up to no good will not. Those are the threats.
Firstly: no, just being there is not itself threatening, not nearly enough to warrant violence. There could be many reasons for a man to be in a women's restroom on purpose; just one example someone else gave in this thread is they may have a baby in need of changing and the men's room may lack a baby changing station. Or, an example I've seen myself, they may have a daughter who needs help using the bathroom; would you rather the little girl have to go to the men's room, than her daddy help her in the women's room? Or maybe their daughter went in to use the room by herself and hasn't been hear from since, and the father is checking in to make sure she's OK and still in there and didn't slip past him outside and get lost. I'm sure you can come up with more scenarios yourself. Point is, unless the guy's response to "this is the women's room, why are you here?" is to glare menacingly at the woman's breasts or something, just being in there is not in and of itself a threat to anyone.
Secondly, and correct me if I misunderstood you, but you seem to be lumping transwomen in as "men" (for being biologically male), in which case, they are not "up to no good", they are using the bathroom where they're less likely to get beaten up by homophobic neanderthals. This, the very case under discussion, is in itself a counterexample against the notion of any biological male in the women's room on purpose being "up to no good", which you're trying to use to keep exactly these not-up-to-no-good people from using the bathroom where they feel safest.
Thirdly, say a transman (born biologically female, on androgens and looks and acts and identifies as male now) walks into a women's room. Should the women there feel threatened because he looks like a man, or is it all fine because he's genetically female? Note that this law in question now requires that he use the women's room, where, I expect, you will say it's justified for the women there to assault him, for doing as the law mandates.
What you are actually saying is that if a man were to walk into her home...
That's her home. Sex and gender have nothing to do with it at that point, she has every right to control who is or isn't in her home and enforce that as necessary. You are begging the question if you say the cisgender people in public restrooms have that same right to determine who shares the bathroom with them; the question at hand is precisely who does or doesn't belong in what bathroom, and leaving it up to the cisgender masses is basically condoning a public mob to chase trans people out of every bathroom with the threat of violence.
You were already talking about the rare cases, intersex people. And flatly saying they should all (or "generally") count as male, at least where bathrooms are concerned. Even though, within that small set of people we're talking about, a large percent of them are much closer to female than they are male. That's ridiculous.
Setting aside that you're conflating sex and gender: did you seriously just suggest that all (or at least most) intersex people should be lumped together with males? Including the woman with abnormally large, penis-like clitoris, but otherwise female appearance in every way? Including the woman who was born with a vagina and a normal-sized clitoris and grew breasts and puberty and apparently female in every way but happens to have XY chromosomes and a genetic insensitivity to androgens?
If a man walks into a woman's bathroom, she has every right to feel unsafe and expect him to leave. If not, either the law can get involved and arrest him or she can defend herself. Or leave, if leaving is an option.
Or mind her own business until someone does something genuinely threatening to her. That's an option too; the correct one. Her irrational fear of someone just because of their sex does not justify assault, and especially does not justify state-aided assault, abduction, and confinement.
I live in a pretty progressive part of a pretty progressive state, so maybe my experience is unusual, but for as long as I can remember being aware that baby changing stations existed, they've been in mens rooms too.
Usually vandalized to read "baby charging station", but still.
Since we're quibbling, technically people* are born male or female, and then usually immediately categorized as a boy or girl.
*(Most of them at least. The exceptions to this rule are why we distinguish sex from gender in the first place, because even those who aren't born male or female still usually get immediately categorized as a boy or a girl).
If we as a society weren't irrationally concerned with people seeing other people's bodies outside narrowly defined, culturally relative bounds of acceptability, that would be a complete non-issue.
There are nudist colonies where children of any sex can see adults of every sex all the time and they're not psychologically traumatized by it.
There are and always have been societies around the world where all sorts of people routinely see all sorts of people naked and nobody fucking cares.
Our culture's hangups about what parts of which sex have to be covered by what garment is just a slightly lesser version of the same ideas that lead to mandatory burkas in Islamic countries.
The law should not mandate anything about clothing except where it might be a public health concern (e.g. the kinds of places where hairnets or gloves or whatnot are mandated).
Laws about clothing are the "feelings" based laws in the first place. Oh noes, you're offended by the sight of someone's body; or worse, by someone else's sight of someone else's body! Who fucking cares. You're free to be offended and to shame or disassociate from such people as you like, free speech and association and all that, culture's going to do what culture does and if naked people are uncool, whatever; but they should be legally free to dress (or not) as they like, because it's not harming anyone.
Also, bathrooms should all be unisex (as far as the law is concerned) for similar reasons, except in that case who the hell's genitals are visible to other people even in a bathroom? (At least without going to creepy, obvious efforts to look at them, which should be as much a problem for cis men creeping each other in the men's room as transwomen creeping other women in the women's room... not that it's even really possible in a women's room, since there are no urinals and toilet seats get private stalls).
Yes indeed, thank you. Before gender as something separate from sex even gets involved, sex itself is already more complicated than two jointly exhaustive and mutually exclusive boxes.
In fact, the sociological concept of gender as something apart from sex was coined by John Money in 1950 specifically to address the way that intersex people in the middle of that spectrum of biological sex still get categorized into one of those two binary social gender categories.
In other words, it's the "MEN ARE MEN AND WOMEN ARE WOMEN DAMNIT!" people who have always been denying the complexities of biology and trying to force artificially simplified social categories onto people whose biology doesn't fit them.
And now that society is starting to acknowledge more complexity in its artificial, imaginary, socially-constructed categorization scheme, those same people are rebelling against that and trying to retreat to biology, ignorant of the fact that that biology has always been more complicated than they would like, and the social overlay on top of it is only just now catching up to it.
Equating gender identity with "brain sex" has all the same problems as the idea of a "gay gene".
Most prominently, the erasure of people in the middle of those respective spectra (does a bisexual/pansexual person have the gay gene or not? what brain sex does a bigender/pangender person have?), and the rhetorical blunder of resorting to a "they can't help it, they were born that way!" attempted 'defense' of something that needs no defending because there's nothing wrong with it (it shouldn't matter whether or not anyone was born with their gender identity and sexual orientation, or developed them over time from life experience, or conscious choice, or some combination of the above).
Not to mention the problem that it would mean most of the time we don't really know, we're just assuming from behavior, what someone's sexual orientation or gender identity is; including the most problematic case of that, that someone might, upon testing of their biology, learn that they were "wrong" about what their own orientation or identity were. (E.g. what if someone who identifies and lives as gay finds out they don't have the gay gene? Are they "really not gay"? What if someone who identifies and lives as a transwoman finds out they have male brain sex? Were they "really a man all along"?)
Minds are complicated things and while biology undoubtedly has some significant influence on it, it's not the bottom line, and mental attributes are not directly reducible to biological attributes. (Which is not to say that there is anything nonphysical going on; just to say that software is something different from hardware, and it's the function of the software we're ultimately concerned with; hardware merely facilitates that function).
I complete agreed with your original main point about gender being social/psychological (technically gender and gender identity are different things, the former social and the latter psychological) and sex being biological, I'm just nitpicking about the exact nature of biological sex.
If sex were defined by chromosomes, then most of the time we wouldn't know what sex anyone was because most of the time we don't know anything about what anyone's chromosomes are; we might make some safe assumptions, but we don't actually know unless you've had your blood tested for it. For most of history, nobody knew what a chromosome was, but they could still tell the sexes apart -- by their anatomy. Because sex is about anatomy, not about chromosomes.
Sex chromosomes usually mostly determine (in the sense of "cause", not "indicate") sexual anatomy, so most males have XY chromosomes and most females have XX chromosomes and it's probably safe to bet that way, but sex is not defined that way; the woman with androgen insensitivity syndrome is not "technically male", she's just one of the rare females with XY chromosomes. But she's still female, despite those chromosomes, because in her case those chromosomes failed to determine (cause) her sex in the usual way.
Why would a transgendered man want to use the women's restroom? That is the complete opposite of what they want, and that is what this new law is mandating, contrary to their wishes.
Oh wait, I see, you just don't know how to use the phrase "transgendered man" correctly. Hint: a transgendered man is someone who was born female and now identifies as a man.
Although to be fair, many women would probably be uncomfortable with such a person in the women's room, but not because they're transgendered; because they're a man. Which is why such a person should be free to use the men's room instead, where he will fit in, which this law prohibits.
Sex is not defined by chromosomes, it is defined by anatomy. There are women, who were born women, with vaginas and all, grew breasts at puberty, and have always identified and been identified by others as biologically female, who just happen to have XY chromosomes and a genetic insensitivity to the androgens that that Y chromosome produces, so they develop as female anyway.
It's rare, but it happens, and if you pin sex to chromosomes, you end up having to call such people male; and also say that most of the time we have no fucking idea what sex anybody is.
By "it is properly missing" I meant something more like "properly speaking, i.e. technically, it is missing", not that the missing of a comma is proper and correct. I agree that Oxford commas should always be used.
Yes, my last sentence was saying that an Oxford comma was missing. The first example sentence does not have an Oxford comma; it has an extraneous comma where no comma should ever go, turning "shoot" and "leave" into verbs instead of nouns by accident.
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I will put these people into whatever "imaginary social boxes", as you call them, that I please. And as such, if I do not put her into the box she desires, she will not considered a man to me, in which case she is indeed not a man according to your very own definition.
And the only thing you are doing by that is purposefully offending someone. Like deciding to put someone into the category of "uncool", or more closely analogous, telling someone that they're not a real insert-social-clique-they-identify-with (geek/hippie/punk/nerd/hipster/goth/emo/whatever). Because genders are just social categories like those cliques, and all you do by denying someone's membership of one they identify with is insult them. It has no other meaning than that.
Which makes you an asshole.
What kind of broken browser / operating system allows clicking a link to install new software?
Download an installer (or just the app itself for sane operating systems that don't need "installers"), sure, but run it?
In any software environment that's not pants-on-head retarded, the steps required to get infected this way would have to be:
- User opens email.
- User clicks link in email.
- User runs program that link downloads.
At which point it's the damn user's own fault; you can't protect a computer from errors between keyboard and chair.
But if merely viewing a message or document can execute code, then the error is in the software somewhere.
Clicking on the email apparently installs malware...
What the hell kind of broken mail client executes random code just because the user asked to view a message?
Oh right, Outlook. Well, there's your problem.
What kind of dumb OS autoruns anything off of any volume the moment it's connected without any request from the user?
Oh right, Windows. Well, there's your problem.
Super pedantically, gender, being a social status, is known at birth; when someone say "it's a boy/girl!" they are gendering that baby. Gender identity, which is a psychological state regarding that social status, is something that doesn't develop until later and can't be known until it's expressed.
I'm not a Genetics-Denier like you.
Say you meet a hot chick with tits out to here and you take her home to bang her in her tight pussy. Things go so well you end up doing it over and over again and get to know each other really well and actually develop a loving romantic relationship that ends in marriage. Of course in the course of this relationship you learn all about her childhood, including the fact that she was (as expected) born female and has been female her entire life. In time the two of you decide to have a child, but upon failing to conceive repeatedly, you seek the advice of a doctor. After many tests of much more likely conditions, the doctor tests your wife's sex chromosomes, and finds that she has a rare condition called androgen insensitivity syndrome, whereby she has XY sex chromosomes, but her cells don't react to the androgens that those cells make, so she developed as anatomically female in every way, but the chromosome mismatch means she's infertile. (This is a real thing that actually happens).
Was she a man the whole time? Are you gay now? Or are you going to be a "Genetics-Denier" and say her genetics don't matter?
If you define x as F and then find a non-F thing that is obviously an x, your definition was wrong, simple as that. Doesn't matter how rare non-F x's are, if there are any x that are not F then F-ness cannot define x-hood. F-ness may still make a good sign of x-hood, but it can't be part of the definition.
Sex chomosomes may be a good indicator of someone's sex almost all of the time (that's why they're called sex chromosomes), but the existence of females with XY chromosomes, and all manner of people of various sexes with sex chromosomes other than XX and XY, means that sex chromosomes cannot define sex.
Also, as I already said, trying to define sex by chromosomes means that for most of human history nobody knew what sex anyone was, because nobody even knew what chromosomes were. Sex is defined by anatomy, and always has been. We've just learned that some chromosomes correlate strongly with anatomy, and usually (but not always) play a causal role in its development. But it's the anatomy that has always been foremost.
In the technical terminology that's more than twice as old as you (turning 66 this year!), "man" and "woman" are the names of social categories, while "male" and "female" are the names of biological categories. I myself have some disagreements about naming things this way (I would have coined New Latin terms-of-art instead or repurposing common English) precisely because it breeds this exact confusion (and for other reasons related to nonbinary genders), but that's how they got named and there's not much to be done about it by now.
And the need for two sets of terms is very real, and originally had nothing to do with transgender issues. Rather, the distinction was coined because there are some people, intersex people, who are not biologically male or female, but somewhere in between, and yet still get put into one of the social categories of "man" or "woman". In some cases, they are biologically much closer to the sex opposite their gender, but because they were ambiguous at birth and people feel compelled to put them into one of those two boxes they picked one, and picked wrong, and someone who's biologically much closer to female was raised as and identified as and is identified by everyone else as a man, etc.
Technically, your gender per se is that social box that other people put you into; a social property of you, a social status, like a rank or title. By that super pedantic technical standard, only passing transwomen are truly "women" (and likewise transmen); if society sees you as a gender, you are that gender, because gender is nothing but the state of how society sees you. Your gender identity on the other hand is a mental property of you, a mental state, about or regarding that social status: it's what box you would like other people to put you into, relative to the box you were put into at birth. Super pedantically technically, nobody (who knows what they're talking about) claims that "wanting to be a gender makes you that gender"; rather, being seen as a gender makes you that gender, because gender is all about how people see you. But in an effort to not be massive assholes to people, it's generally considered polite to consider people to be in the social category they would like to be considered as, even if that wouldn't be your first assumption.
Which is all a long way of saying: no, a trangendered man is not a woman who wishes she was a man. A transgendered man is a man -- someone considered by society to go in that social category -- who was not considered a boy when he was born. And if you're not an asshole, you'll put people into the imaginary social boxes that they want to be in instead of the imaginary social boxes you want them to be in, and consider a biological female who wants to be considered a man as a man, at which point he is a man... to you. He was already a man to himself. And any argument between you and him over which imaginary social box he belongs in is literally a matter of baseless social opinion, like arguing over whether the new kid is cool or not; it's entirely about nothing more than either accepting or shunning someone, so the only question is whether to be an asshole or not.
OT, but this is a pet peeve because I used to do it too and now I feel dumb whenever I see something old I wrote doing it: the term you want is "prescriptive", not "proscriptive". Prescription is any kind of normative speech, saying what should or should not be. Proscription is a specific subset of that, saying that something must not be. You can prescribe that someone do something, or prescribe that they refrain from doing something, but if you proscribe something (not "proscribe that someone...") you're saying it mustn't be done.
You're the one who brought up intersex people and started making ridiculous statements about them, I'm just pointing out how ridiculous those are. You wrote:
Yes, I'm aware a very small number of people are born with both [...] And generally they should use the mens room."
That's what this subthread is about. You saying a dumb thing like that, lumping all intersex people in with males. I explicitly set aside the broader topic (where you're also wrong) in the first clause of my first post to focus in on how dumb this specific assertion is. I'll take your unwillingness to even attempt to defend it as admission that you're complete unable to. Go ahead and retreat, I won't chase after you.
Normal men will say "oh gosh, so sorry, and rush out the door in embarrassment".
Men up to no good will not. Those are the threats.
Firstly: no, just being there is not itself threatening, not nearly enough to warrant violence. There could be many reasons for a man to be in a women's restroom on purpose; just one example someone else gave in this thread is they may have a baby in need of changing and the men's room may lack a baby changing station. Or, an example I've seen myself, they may have a daughter who needs help using the bathroom; would you rather the little girl have to go to the men's room, than her daddy help her in the women's room? Or maybe their daughter went in to use the room by herself and hasn't been hear from since, and the father is checking in to make sure she's OK and still in there and didn't slip past him outside and get lost. I'm sure you can come up with more scenarios yourself. Point is, unless the guy's response to "this is the women's room, why are you here?" is to glare menacingly at the woman's breasts or something, just being in there is not in and of itself a threat to anyone.
Secondly, and correct me if I misunderstood you, but you seem to be lumping transwomen in as "men" (for being biologically male), in which case, they are not "up to no good", they are using the bathroom where they're less likely to get beaten up by homophobic neanderthals. This, the very case under discussion, is in itself a counterexample against the notion of any biological male in the women's room on purpose being "up to no good", which you're trying to use to keep exactly these not-up-to-no-good people from using the bathroom where they feel safest.
Thirdly, say a transman (born biologically female, on androgens and looks and acts and identifies as male now) walks into a women's room. Should the women there feel threatened because he looks like a man, or is it all fine because he's genetically female? Note that this law in question now requires that he use the women's room, where, I expect, you will say it's justified for the women there to assault him, for doing as the law mandates.
What you are actually saying is that if a man were to walk into her home...
That's her home. Sex and gender have nothing to do with it at that point, she has every right to control who is or isn't in her home and enforce that as necessary. You are begging the question if you say the cisgender people in public restrooms have that same right to determine who shares the bathroom with them; the question at hand is precisely who does or doesn't belong in what bathroom, and leaving it up to the cisgender masses is basically condoning a public mob to chase trans people out of every bathroom with the threat of violence.
You were already talking about the rare cases, intersex people. And flatly saying they should all (or "generally") count as male, at least where bathrooms are concerned. Even though, within that small set of people we're talking about, a large percent of them are much closer to female than they are male. That's ridiculous.
Setting aside that you're conflating sex and gender: did you seriously just suggest that all (or at least most) intersex people should be lumped together with males? Including the woman with abnormally large, penis-like clitoris, but otherwise female appearance in every way? Including the woman who was born with a vagina and a normal-sized clitoris and grew breasts and puberty and apparently female in every way but happens to have XY chromosomes and a genetic insensitivity to androgens?
If a man walks into a woman's bathroom, she has every right to feel unsafe and expect him to leave. If not, either the law can get involved and arrest him or she can defend herself. Or leave, if leaving is an option.
Or mind her own business until someone does something genuinely threatening to her. That's an option too; the correct one. Her irrational fear of someone just because of their sex does not justify assault, and especially does not justify state-aided assault, abduction, and confinement.
Looks like someone doesn't realize there's no such thing as a "-1, Disagree" mod option.
I live in a pretty progressive part of a pretty progressive state, so maybe my experience is unusual, but for as long as I can remember being aware that baby changing stations existed, they've been in mens rooms too.
Usually vandalized to read "baby charging station", but still.
Since we're quibbling, technically people* are born male or female, and then usually immediately categorized as a boy or girl.
*(Most of them at least. The exceptions to this rule are why we distinguish sex from gender in the first place, because even those who aren't born male or female still usually get immediately categorized as a boy or a girl).
If we as a society weren't irrationally concerned with people seeing other people's bodies outside narrowly defined, culturally relative bounds of acceptability, that would be a complete non-issue.
There are nudist colonies where children of any sex can see adults of every sex all the time and they're not psychologically traumatized by it.
There are and always have been societies around the world where all sorts of people routinely see all sorts of people naked and nobody fucking cares.
Our culture's hangups about what parts of which sex have to be covered by what garment is just a slightly lesser version of the same ideas that lead to mandatory burkas in Islamic countries.
The law should not mandate anything about clothing except where it might be a public health concern (e.g. the kinds of places where hairnets or gloves or whatnot are mandated).
Laws about clothing are the "feelings" based laws in the first place. Oh noes, you're offended by the sight of someone's body; or worse, by someone else's sight of someone else's body! Who fucking cares. You're free to be offended and to shame or disassociate from such people as you like, free speech and association and all that, culture's going to do what culture does and if naked people are uncool, whatever; but they should be legally free to dress (or not) as they like, because it's not harming anyone.
Also, bathrooms should all be unisex (as far as the law is concerned) for similar reasons, except in that case who the hell's genitals are visible to other people even in a bathroom? (At least without going to creepy, obvious efforts to look at them, which should be as much a problem for cis men creeping each other in the men's room as transwomen creeping other women in the women's room... not that it's even really possible in a women's room, since there are no urinals and toilet seats get private stalls).
Yes indeed, thank you. Before gender as something separate from sex even gets involved, sex itself is already more complicated than two jointly exhaustive and mutually exclusive boxes.
In fact, the sociological concept of gender as something apart from sex was coined by John Money in 1950 specifically to address the way that intersex people in the middle of that spectrum of biological sex still get categorized into one of those two binary social gender categories.
In other words, it's the "MEN ARE MEN AND WOMEN ARE WOMEN DAMNIT!" people who have always been denying the complexities of biology and trying to force artificially simplified social categories onto people whose biology doesn't fit them.
And now that society is starting to acknowledge more complexity in its artificial, imaginary, socially-constructed categorization scheme, those same people are rebelling against that and trying to retreat to biology, ignorant of the fact that that biology has always been more complicated than they would like, and the social overlay on top of it is only just now catching up to it.
Equating gender identity with "brain sex" has all the same problems as the idea of a "gay gene".
Most prominently, the erasure of people in the middle of those respective spectra (does a bisexual/pansexual person have the gay gene or not? what brain sex does a bigender/pangender person have?), and the rhetorical blunder of resorting to a "they can't help it, they were born that way!" attempted 'defense' of something that needs no defending because there's nothing wrong with it (it shouldn't matter whether or not anyone was born with their gender identity and sexual orientation, or developed them over time from life experience, or conscious choice, or some combination of the above).
Not to mention the problem that it would mean most of the time we don't really know, we're just assuming from behavior, what someone's sexual orientation or gender identity is; including the most problematic case of that, that someone might, upon testing of their biology, learn that they were "wrong" about what their own orientation or identity were. (E.g. what if someone who identifies and lives as gay finds out they don't have the gay gene? Are they "really not gay"? What if someone who identifies and lives as a transwoman finds out they have male brain sex? Were they "really a man all along"?)
Minds are complicated things and while biology undoubtedly has some significant influence on it, it's not the bottom line, and mental attributes are not directly reducible to biological attributes. (Which is not to say that there is anything nonphysical going on; just to say that software is something different from hardware, and it's the function of the software we're ultimately concerned with; hardware merely facilitates that function).
I complete agreed with your original main point about gender being social/psychological (technically gender and gender identity are different things, the former social and the latter psychological) and sex being biological, I'm just nitpicking about the exact nature of biological sex.
If sex were defined by chromosomes, then most of the time we wouldn't know what sex anyone was because most of the time we don't know anything about what anyone's chromosomes are; we might make some safe assumptions, but we don't actually know unless you've had your blood tested for it. For most of history, nobody knew what a chromosome was, but they could still tell the sexes apart -- by their anatomy. Because sex is about anatomy, not about chromosomes.
Sex chromosomes usually mostly determine (in the sense of "cause", not "indicate") sexual anatomy, so most males have XY chromosomes and most females have XX chromosomes and it's probably safe to bet that way, but sex is not defined that way; the woman with androgen insensitivity syndrome is not "technically male", she's just one of the rare females with XY chromosomes. But she's still female, despite those chromosomes, because in her case those chromosomes failed to determine (cause) her sex in the usual way.
Why would a transgendered man want to use the women's restroom? That is the complete opposite of what they want, and that is what this new law is mandating, contrary to their wishes.
Oh wait, I see, you just don't know how to use the phrase "transgendered man" correctly. Hint: a transgendered man is someone who was born female and now identifies as a man.
Although to be fair, many women would probably be uncomfortable with such a person in the women's room, but not because they're transgendered; because they're a man. Which is why such a person should be free to use the men's room instead, where he will fit in, which this law prohibits.
Sex is not defined by chromosomes, it is defined by anatomy. There are women, who were born women, with vaginas and all, grew breasts at puberty, and have always identified and been identified by others as biologically female, who just happen to have XY chromosomes and a genetic insensitivity to the androgens that that Y chromosome produces, so they develop as female anyway.
It's rare, but it happens, and if you pin sex to chromosomes, you end up having to call such people male; and also say that most of the time we have no fucking idea what sex anybody is.
By "it is properly missing" I meant something more like "properly speaking, i.e. technically, it is missing", not that the missing of a comma is proper and correct. I agree that Oxford commas should always be used.
Yes, my last sentence was saying that an Oxford comma was missing. The first example sentence does not have an Oxford comma; it has an extraneous comma where no comma should ever go, turning "shoot" and "leave" into verbs instead of nouns by accident.