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I'm not sure I agree that any amount of biting bullets is necessary for the "socially/legally adopted sex" model to function. All that's required is clearly spelled out legal/social policy about where adopted sex matters, and where it does not.
The state could decide important things that need to be decided like what locker room an adoptive woman uses, how anti-discrimination laws will be interpreted re:adoptive sex, or which sports teams they will play on at the high school level in public schools, and then everything else could be left to private organizations to sort out. So for independent sporting bodies for adult athletics, they could all decide on a sport-by-sport or organization-by-organization basis whether it makes sense to group by adoptive sex or natal sex.
The solution lets everyone use their judgement outside of a small group of top-down decisions that remove any confusion for any involved.
I think the bathroom issue is one where, as a practical matter, enforcing a trans bathroom ban is too difficult. It would be much easier to allow people to use the bathroom or locker room of their adoptive sex, and then just make stricter rules about harassment and unacceptable behaviors in bathrooms. With sufficiently strict and well-publicized enforcement, I think it's the best compromise between privacy, safety and accommodation.
Why is accommodation something that’s worth compromising the other two things to accomplish?
I think the issue is more that privacy is the hardest thing to preserve if you want to not accommodate trans people.
If you make the rule "people must use the bathroom of the sex on their driver's license (which cannot be changed)", that would preserve privacy (compared to a genital inspector regime), but it would be a very easy system to game. All one would have to do is get a fake ID, which minors already do to get drinks before they turn 21. And it also ignores the fact that in the United States no one is required to carry an ID, and in many states no one can be compelled to show their ID if they don't want to.
Plus, it would result in the situation of passing trans people being forced to use a bathroom that might still make the occupants uncomfortable, and it has the issue that butch women might be harassed more in bathrooms by people doubting their right to be there.
What's your proposal for enforcing trans-exclusion in bathrooms, that is resource-efficient, doesn't create a whole bunch more bureaucracy, doesn't accidentally target gender-non-conforming cis women, and doesn't make anyone uncomfortable with their bathroom-mates?
I mean the answer is ‘people shouldn’t become trans. If someone obviously trans goes into the wrong bathroom, question them, and maybe Benny Butch can suck it up and deal with it because everyone else’s right to be normal comes before your right to be weird. If Caitlyn Jenner gets away with using the wrong bathroom, oh well, worse things have happened, but if ‘she’ shows ‘her’ penis off in the woman’s locker room that’s a much bigger deal that can be dealt with when the women report it.’
Does deputizing everyone to become informal bathroom police really make anyone safer? This just seems like a further realization of Freddie deBoer's Planet of Cops - another instance of the dictatorless dystopia where people are the wardens of their own prisons.
I don't think a lot of people will find your solution to butch women very satisfying either. And besides butch women, there's going to be the issue of naturally "masculine"-looking women. In your model the butch women are choosing to be "weird" and thus asking for it, but what about the unusually tall women, the ones with naturally square jaws, the ones with hirsutism? Those women aren't choosing to be weird, and they almost certainly outnumber transwomen by a significant margin. Do you really think that this is the best of all possible systems for keeping cis women safe, if it involves throwing a lot of innocent ciswoman victims under the bus, and telling them to just "suck it up" because they were cursed to look unconventional?
Why can't we just strengthen anti-harassment laws, and create institutional commitments to enforcing policies that keep women safe without trading off against other things?
I'm not aware of an epidemic of trans people harassing women in bathrooms. Even the much celebrated Loudon school case doesn't really suggest a trans exclusionist approach. The girl and boy were long-time sexual partners, and they had arranged to meet in the school bathroom for hook ups on several occasions. On the day of the incident, they had arranged to meet up again, but this time the girl wanted to cut things off, the boy didn't take kindly to her rejection and raped her. "Raped by a trans person I invited to meet with me in the bathroom, to tell them our bathroom hook ups are off" is hardly the typical example of what people fear when they imagine a trans woman invading women's spaces.
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