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Notes -
A mental characteristic which is strongly, but not perfectly, correlated with natal biological sexual characteristics.
I will concede that this is usually not falsifiable with our current abilities, but, as an analogy, if a young child says that she is afraid of a particular object (e. g. a painting or a piece of furniture) in her bedroom in the dark, and wants either said item removed or a nightlight installed, her fear is also not falsifiable. She could be lying for some ulterior motive, or just to enjoy the ability to manipulate her parents. However, if her father were to refuse her request, in order to avoid the slight possibility of her getting away with anything, while subjecting her to the far larger likelihood of spending every night for many years terrified out of her wits, I would be well justified in considering him a right arsehole, and struggle to judge her if, when she is fully grown and he is in his dotage, she gets him placed in the bleakest old-folks'-home she can find and never calls or visits him, or if she manipulates him into signing all of his assets over to her.
Crazy how you always use these rambling irrelevant "analogies" when someone points out a hole in your worldview. Just a coincidence, I'm sure.
As ever, there's a rather obvious elision in your analogy which you seem determined not to acknowledge:
I agree that if a girl is scared of something in her bedroom and wants a nightlight, the most parsimonious explanation is that she really is scared of it. The ratio of girls who claim to want nightlights because they're really scared of something in their bedrooms vs. girls who do so for some ulterior motive must be heavily weighted in favour of the former category.
But for your analogy to work, we need a good reason to assume that "people don't lie about their gender identity" is the null hypothesis. You seem to have essentially decided that the number of people telling the truth about their gender identity is vastly in excess of the number of people lying about it for ulterior motives. I genuinely don't know how you arrived at this conclusion.
Bryan Caplan had an article this week talking about how many socialists (and progressives, by extension) seem fundamentally incapable (or unwilling) to grasp the basic concept that people respond to incentives. I feel like I'm going nuts, because proponents of gender ideology will scoff at the idea that anyone would lie about their gender identity – then immediately turn around and say "so, anyone who identifies as a woman should be permitted to compete in female sporting events, should be allowed to use dating apps for female lesbians, should be sent to a woman's prison if they're convicted of a crime, should be eligible for grants and scholarships earmarked for female people, and there should be no gatekeeping on any of this because People Know Who They Are, and anyone who suggests that people who've never been diagnosed with gender dysphoria aren't really trans is a Nazi, and it doesn't matter if someone only discovered they were trans after being convicted of a crime..."
"Why would someone lie about their gender identity?" My brother in Christ, you just told me. The policies you're advocating are the reason they would lie.
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