Eternal Growth

These options provide much less scope for a prospective single mother to choose desirable characteristics for the sperm donor. Related article: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/magazine/319dad.html?fta=y

I think the issue requires more nuance. Blinding a person is a form of aggression, whether it is done through direct physical force or via a laser from a far distance. The potential for causing permanent blindness alone is enough to make this activity criminally stupid and reckless - when you add in that the person being blinded (temporarily or permanently) is an aircraft pilot, fatalities and property damage are a very real possibility. I don't think a person with empathy could point a laser where a human with eyes might be, and I would personally prefer to live in an area where (via private contractual agreements, or simple social ostracism) such devices weren't used. In the event that someone points a laser at another person and does cause damage, the same process of restitution would be necessary as for personal/property damage caused by any other method. Of course, a 14 year prison sentence is a completely arbitrary way for the state to deal with this complex social issue. I would be more interested in finding out how the kids buying these lasers and pointing them at people were parented, considering the extreme irresponsibility and disregard for the bodily integrity of other people the act entails.

Thank you for your thoughtful responses. I certainly agree that it is better to be in the habit of productivity than to be in the habit of parasitism even if productivity is being highly taxed. Not only because it's a more satisfying existence and one will be respected by quality people, but because it provides options and opportunities for the future. Anyway, "parasitism" in the current system is a very wide spectrum of things. There are those on welfare, but it usually isn't much and few respect it as a lifestyle (except in the case of pensioners, who are the biggest beneficiaries of government spending in the UK yet it is considered not only respectable, but not enough - something about them being a big voting bloc). The big parasites are the politicians, civil servants and other public sector employees. Other parasites are those in the private sector making more than they otherwise would as a result of a government program (which could be licensing restricting competition, other regulation favouring established players, subsidies, government contracts, entire industries that live on state distortions of the economy such as the UK financial sector, etc.) Moving to another part on the world at some point is in my plans, though more for the cultural aspect than the lower taxes (which there would still be in each country I'm considering). British culture is collectivist, stifling and has an awful stench of post-empire decay - I'd love to get out of here.

He took the (huge) risk of building it without planning permission from the local council, and as a result is having to retrospectively apply for that permission (and the council isn't happy about it and is warning people not to use it). If his application isn't successful, the state will send men to demolish the road. Though if he had tried to secure such permission beforehand, the road would never have been built.

There are actually a lot of stories of trans people who get married, have children and then only come out to their partner later. I think what this reveals is the enormous lack of intimacy and openness that was in the relationship to begin with, although such lack of intimacy could be understandable for those in a culture with a heavy stigma against trans people who have to hide it for survival. In some of these cases the relationship stays intact (there was sufficient intimacy between the two consciousnesses that the relationship could survive one person's physical changes and changes in external identity, and the coming out may be regarded as a movement towards more intimacy), whereas in many there is a break-up. For those in that situation either option could be the more appropriate, though ideally the situation would never occur to begin with, if sufficient intimacy and honesty had been established prior to marriage. I'm mostly heterosexual but panromantic, so although physical appearance is important to me for sexual attraction, I can have a "life partner" arrangement with someone of any physical appearance so long as the psychological intimacy is there. That's a really good point. In my post I was making it out as though there was a very strong divide between the brain and the rest of the body (though I was doing this in the context of the false dichotomy of completely changing the brain or completely changing the body), whereas in actuality the brain and body are constantly in communication and influencing each other via the endocrine and nervous systems. In my case, the psychological effects of taking estrogen and suppressing testosterone were actually some of the most beneficial effects I experienced from the treatment. For background: My entire life between the onset of puberty at ~12 and starting HRT at 17 was completely non-functional (I was a Western hikikomori and spent 5 years out of school). Within months of starting HRT, even though I was still presenting male at the time, my life began an upwards trajectory that continues to this day. Philosophy also explains part of the upward trajectory, however I had been involved in it for multiple years prior to starting HRT without reaping much benefit. Under the influence of testosterone, I can't even say that I was depressed all of the time: I was completely emotionally numb. Not once during those years of male puberty did I smile, cry, feel sadness or even laugh. I also had to deal with the distress of my body and face becoming covered in hair and my voice deepening (complete horror for a teenage girl). Moreover, the mode of sexuality testosterone stimulates wasn't compatible with me. I was an active and outgoing kid until the onset of male puberty (in a suboptimal family environment but getting by), and became unable to leave the house for months at a time. Though I don't think being trans and the testosterone were the exclusive reasons for the dysfunction in my life during that period. The parental response when my social withdrawal started certainly played a role in its severity. This is an area in which I am pursuing further self-knowledge. It does seem to be the case that depression and underachievement are very common in trans people prior to transition and tend to improve afterwards, though some trans people seem to be able to meet social, educational and career commitments without trouble pre-transition, so an area to explore would be what differentiates the two. I'd just like to disclaimer the above (given that we live in a society which has coined the phrase "testosterone poisoning" yet not "estrogen poisoning") that I don't think testosterone is worse than estrogen overall. My point is not that testosterone is bad - it is that testosterone was incompatible with me, reduced my ability to function, and that it did that because, as a woman, I have evolved to thrive on estrogen, just as men have evolved to thrive on testosterone. There is a lot of evidence that anyone can find on Google showing that when cis men have reduced testosterone levels they experience depression and lack of motivation, and there is a lot of evidence showing that when cis women have reduced estrogen levels they also experience depression (see: the menopause). The same is the case in trans people when their levels of sex hormones aren't within the healthy ranges of their identified sex. Being on estrogen, I have the ability to connect to my emotions, both positive and negative. I can process my life situation, and have the basic drive/motivation necessary in order to work with it. Getting back to your question, I guess it depends to what extent we see emotions (to the extent to which they are influenced by hormones) as being part of a person's identity. Certainly, I am the same consciousness I was at 15 and have the same memories and mostly the same personality, but my way of engaging with my emotional life is very different now than it was then, and this was largely influenced by the medical suppression of testosterone and administration of estrogen bringing me to standard female levels. To answer your question about the partner of 20 years who starts HRT: Well, why are they starting hormones? If I have been intimate with the inner life of my partner, I might understand the problems that their current hormone levels are causing them. They will remain more or less the same person inside as they are taking HRT, the way in which they experience their emotions will just experience changes. If these changes are positive for my partner, and I am with them throughout the gradual process of them taking place, is there any loss in intimacy between my consciousness and my partner's consciousness? I don't think so. Thank you! I really appreciate and find interesting the points you are raising very interesting. ​It seems fine. After all, the brain can only develop in the presence of stimuli that is sensed by the body.

If anyone is interested in my reasoning for that earlier statement, feel free to PM me. I don't want to spam this thread with the unrelated. In any case, these two posts demanding a response from me have been two more instances of my clearly-stated preferences not being acknowledged. To quote myself previously: "this will be the absolute last I acknowledge you."

Imagine posting to a feminist forum "I've been with my wife for 5 years now. I'm very ashamed to say I hit her for two years of our relationship. But even now I lose control and hurt her physically. I desperately want to be the kind of husband my wife needs. " Well, that is the situation you're in. Except it is even worse than that, because by the nature of your relationships with your children being voluntary for you and involuntary for them, the standards can only be even higher for you than they would be for you were it a mutually voluntary relationship with an adult woman, where she chose to be there and could leave at any time. What's more: in a relationship between two adults, the brain and personality of each has largely already been formed and won't be affected much by the relationship. In the parent-child relationship, the child's brain is still forming - and it is forming in response to the environment the parent exposes the child to. For your son, that has been an environment in which he was regularly physically assaulted. I am sorry to hear about your own upbringing. How connected do you feel you are with the immorality of how your parents treated you as a child? How angry are you towards them?

As an individualist, I say: let those who wish to engage in an animal-level form of existence do so. The only real problem is statism, where these people control the guns pointing in the faces of those with depth and a capacity for intimacy and connection.

If you were married to a person for 20 years and you were given a choice between either their brain becoming that of a completely different person (so their personality is different, they have different interests, they don't remember the relationship, they have no idea who you are, etc.) yet their body remaining identical or the opposite - their identity remaining the same but having a completely different physical appearance, which would you choose? I suspect the general population would overwhelming vote for same brain, different body, and that this would be even more so on FDR where people are more in touch with their inner lives and those of the people closest to them. Intimacy happens with another person's consciousness - not with external appearance. And we would do that when the person involved is another person. Given that on a hierarchy of intimacy it is unavoidable that our own self must be at the top (i.e. there is no identity we can be more intimate with than our own), it is even more important - infact, essential if we are to continue to exist - that we choose same brain, different body when it comes to ourselves. Wrt. the brain being "just another organ", I know you said you were speaking purely from a biological perspective, and it is indeed interesting to think about biology. But only very rarely does "purely biological perspective" mean the same thing as "perspective from which it is healthy, useful or even required for a human being to live their life". To look at something from a purely biological perspective, and expect a human to live their life in accordance with it, is to dehumanise them. Case in point: your desires for love, intimacy, connection, meaning, life fulfilment, freedom and happiness are from a purely biological perspective urges with no significance beyond getting you make babies before you die. We recognise the biology, but in order for us to be organisms that are functioning at a level above the "be born, eat, reproduce, die" cycle in which most life functions, we have to see something more than the purely biological - our identity, consciousness and ability to reason and make value judgments (and those of other humans), all of which happen in the brain (and in the brains of other humans). The physical body (independent of the brain) doesn't have an identity. Identity is a psychological/neurological phenomenon.

The author of the article seeks to define society as an arrangement in which some individuals steal from and legislate regarding the lives of the rest, while the impoverished and exploited basically have to put up with it. His argument comes down to: unless you accept this arrangement, you against "group interdependence", "reciprocity", "basic needs", "biological survival and reproduction", "common interest", "general welfare", "right to life" and "self-government." And yet, all of these are virtues that CAN ONLY come about to the extent to which people are able to engage in voluntary interactions. It is when there is a state denying property rights and individual liberty that the ability of a person to satisfy their basic needs, survive and reproduce, contribute to the general welfare and co-operate with others in reciprocal relationships is destroyed. What is happening here is easy to see: this social sciences academic knows that in a statist society he will be in close proximity to the ruling class who will provide him with a very comfortable material lifestyle in return for endless verbiage that has the vague appearance of being an intellectual justification (expropriating virtues that can only exist in the absence of coercion) for their coercion against the host population. In a free market, if he wanted to keep his high social status and economic reward, he would have no option but to find a way to provide value to people who had no stolen money to pay him with. Expressed concisely: he is a prostitute of the ruling class, probably knows it, and those looking back at the 21st century in the future definitely will.

Your title describes this as "parenting"; this is clearly sexual abuse and would be readily identified as such were men inflicting an equivalent upon their daughters.

Doing a small amount of research about the sexchangeregret website, it seems that the man behind it is a Christian with multiple personalities, one of whom is female. Because of this female personality, he received a diagnosis for gender dysphoria and transitioned. He later detransitioned and received a diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder, and today works to petition the state to introduce force into the voluntary interactions between trans people and medical professionals. His message to trans people is, instead of transitioning, to find salvation in Jesus. I don't see a lot of rational philosophy and self-knowledge going on here, and this seems essentially the trans equivalent of the religious ex-gay movement. Given the very strong connection between DID and childhood sexual abuse, my guess would be there there is a whole lot of dysfunction going on in his case beyond the religiosity. As a side note, this would be another instance of religious groups targeting the vulnerable for recruitment (overwhelmingly of course happening to children, though they manage to grab the occasional alcoholic, drug addict or repressed gay or trans adult too.) Personally I'm skeptical whenever a person uses the term "sex change". It is a tabloid term that no trans person, no person with trans friends, or any person with non-dogmatic intentions or mild familiarity with the topic uses. I've seen medical professionals using "gender reassignment", whereas with other trans people it is always "transition". A couple more who I can name who are active (and highly respected within academia and the media) in the UK are Germaine Greer and Julie Bindel. I would agree. It is also worth exploring that "transgender" is a blanket term for a variety of identities or modes of expression, only some of which are argued to be, and have evidence for being, biological in origin (e.g. transsexualism).

MMX: I am not posting here to be the target of your abuse. If this forum had a user blocking feature, I would have employed it against you. A small percentage of what you're saying are interesting points that I would enjoy discussing, but because you're being extremely disrespectful, this will be the absolute last I acknowledge you. Considering that you're talking about a topic which does not really concern your life at all and yet concerns the lives of others enormously, more sensitivity would be my recommendation. Wear the clothing and hairstyles, participate in the sports and activities, be able to identify and be perceived as one, and things like that. The feeling of "rightness" was one of internal harmony, of self-actualisation, and of being who I was. From every direction the social pressure coming at me was to be masculine, so not only was there nobody for whom it would have been preferable that I were a girl, I've never had anything close to a people pleaser personality, and so it wouldn't be in my nature to choose an identity or behave in a certain way in order to be liked or more convenient to others. If anything, my experience of being trans has been the opposite of meeting peoples' preferences. Though I don't discount the possibility that a cis male who has a people pleasing personality, little self-knowledge, a dysfunctional home environment and who is surrounded by anti-male influences (as many little boys are) could develop the feeling that being a girl was more "right", I don't think this is representative of trans people or what causes them to transition. I envied girls because they had the social role and body that I would have been most comfortable in. My parents didn't divorce, though from a very young age I wanted them to. There is that Dr Phil quote about kids preferring to be from a broken home than living in one, and my experience couldn't have been more in agreement. Too young, too immature, too incompetent, too uneducated, with dysfunctional backgrounds of their own that were entirely unprocessed, with mental health issues where there was not even the desire for examination or treatment, and with such lack of financial responsibility that they could only house/feed/clothe my brother and me through government welfare and going deeply into debt. Yes, I would call it neglect. There was deprivation in a lot of areas. I presume for your latter questions you mean specifically in gender-related ways? There is a lot I could write but nothing in particular stands out as significant in the context. In terms of freedom of expression (especially for things which are gendered), girls (pre-teen) are in a more privileged position in modern society than boys are. Though I think it balances out in the teen years and beyond, because the social pressure for women to be physically attractive is so extreme. Would you apply the same standards to cis people? Assuming you're familiar with Rand's works, would you consider Dagny Taggart and Kira Argounova to have "male brains, but choose to be female"? Something to be aware of is that it is rather common that trans people are criticised both for the ways in which they are masculine and for the ways in which they are feminine, creating an "impossible to win" situation. A trans woman who is too masculine is told she is "actually still just a man", whereas a trans woman who is too feminine is told she is "acting out a stereotype of womanhood". In both cases, the standards applied are never applied to cis people. My mother would do both of these - criticism of the ways in which I was feminine as well as the ways in which I was masculine. I realised at some point that there was no honesty in either criticism, and that her only intention was to make me self-attack. Though I think it can arise out of misunderstanding as well as abusive intent. (I understand you didn't state that as a criticism, at least insofar as you didn't define what was meant by "male brain".) It is my pleasure. The implications of philosophy and libertarianism for trans people is something that very little has been said about, and I don't think there has been a single FDR podcast or call-in show where the topic came up. I know there are a number of trans women in FDR's audience and in libertarianism though they tend to stay in the background. A voluntary decision to undergo SRS by an adult who would typically have spent years of research, therapy, jumping through medical hoops, discussing with other people who have gone through the procedure, who will generally already have been presenting in the target sex for a long period of time (this is called the "real life test" or "real life experience" and multiple years of it are required to receive SRS, unless you find a surgeon in the third world who doesn't care), and who also prior to presenting as the target sex experienced gender dysphoria for most of their lives, is a very different situation to the involuntary genital mutilation of children, and you certainly have my deepest sympathies for being a victim of that. The numbers who undergo hormone therapy are a lot higher than those who undergo SRS - with hormone therapy in general being a very safe treatment (for those who are voluntarily choosing. I think the way in which you are wording your questions suggests an misunderstanding of the internal experiences of (most) trans people. It's not that one day there is a man and the next day there is a woman - this is just the outside appearance of transition. There is a long, if not life-long internal discomfort with the assigned gender role that precedes the (desire to) transition, and Adrej Pejic said as much in your quote of her. Moreover, the decision to transition is not a pragmatic decision that people take after weighing out the pros and cons of what society gives each gender. I don't think women are happier, on average, than men - yet knowing this was completely irrelevant to my decision to transition. It is not about what society gives to each gender: it is about whether my internal identity is concordant with my external presentation, and for genuinely trans people, transition does make them a lot happier as the study I linked to in my previous post (and other sources) confirms. Transition isn't a panacea: you still have to live your life and be concerned with as many worldly things as a cis person is - yet in this specific area of life, in gender identity, it brings harmony and removes distress. With respect to the discussion about the numbers of trans men vs. the numbers of trans women, it is honestly quite difficult to say. Whenever I have gone to groups for young trans people (and I have been to quite a few), trans girls have been a small minority, with a clear majority being trans guys. The popular conception of there being more a lot more trans people who were assigned male at birth than trans people assigned female at birth as far as I can tell arises out of gender variance being more socially stigmatised for those assigned male at birth. Though I wouldn't doubt that there are more trans women receiving "bottom surgery" than trans men, and as Lucas suggested, that has mostly to do with the logistics of the situation. Entering into a discussion about feminism, one thing that is of note is that there has been a big history of feminist opposition to the existence of trans women - transphobia, exclusion of trans women from their groups and events, and rejection of the identities of trans women. If female supremacism has created trans women (which I don't believe in the slightest, especially in light of the reality that trans people have always received worse treatment as a group by society than either men or women), they certainly don't approve of their product.

I think most people just derive a feeling of comfort, predictability and security from submitting to the most powerful alpha, with the most powerful alpha being the state and the men in blue costumes with guns being its agents. The comic book character costume guy is potentially in competition with the most powerful alpha, and so people want him to be disposed of in order to ease their anxieties and return to the state of comfortable exploitation.

It's difficult to say an age. I can recall memories of wanting to be a girl (by which I mean, wanting to be able to do girl things without provoking social ostracism, and being a girl feeling more "right" to me than being a boy) and envying cisgirls as young as 5 or so, though it wasn't until I was 12 that I discovered that trans people were a thing / were allowed to exist. I never told my parents - they discovered by opening my referral letter to London's child and adolescent gender clinic that came in the post (addressed to me) when I was 16. Gender/sex lessons I learnt while growing up is an interesting area that I probably haven't put as much thought into as I should have. A major theme throughout my childhood and adolescence was social isolation, so there aren't an enormous number of experiences to think back to in any case. Within my family, both my mother and father embodied very poor models of femininity and masculinity respectively, and I wouldn't want to imitate or be anything like either of them. If it adds anything, I was slightly closer to my father. From being around other children, the lessons I learnt were that: Girls were allowed to be more sensitive, expressive and open about their emotions. Boys were expected to engage in explicit competition (sports, etc.), to be "tough", etc. In many ways throughout my life I've actually had stereotypically male interests such as being interested in building things, in systems, in maths and computers, etc. and have been less interested in stereotypically girl things such as make-up and gossiping, though I haven't perceived any of this as being in conflict with my identity as a girl/woman. Because, at least with current technology, it is a lot easier and more successful to change the physical to match the mental than it is to change the mental to match the physical. Moreover, the mental is where a person's identity resides. To change a person's brain is to change fundamentally who they are. In comparison, a physical transition keeps a person's ideas, thoughts, feelings, personality, identity, inner life, etc. intact, it just makes their body compatible with the person inside. There has been no successful corrective psychological therapy to convince trans people to be comfortable in their assigned-at-birth sex, and this isn't for lack of trying (much as has been the case with attempts at corrective therapy for gay people). There was a study recently performed in the UK on the mental health of trans people that is available here (section 4.2 and beyond is most relevant): http://www.gires.org.uk/assets/Medpro-Assets/trans_mh_study.pdf I quote from the study: "The participants were asked if taking hormones had changed how satisfied they were with their bodies. Of 417 people, 85% were more satisfied with their body since undertaking hormone therapy. Only 2% were less satisfied. The participants were also asked if hormones had changed how satisfied they were with their overall lives. Of 398 people, 82% reported greater levels of life satisfaction than pre-hormones. As before, only 2% were less satisfied. " My experience, and the experiences of other trans people who I've known, are entirely concordant with these results. Physical transition is an extremely successful treatment for gender dysphoria in those individuals who want it, greatly reducing suicidality, depression, self-harm and so forth.

Hi FDR, I want to start a conversation about taxation. Specifically, how to respond to it in a way that is self-respecting. I am still a university student, so I am not even much of a taxpayer yet anyway. Yet the amount of effort I put into building human capital while at university will directly effect my productive capacity afterwards, so these concerns are already on my mind. I am in the United Kingdom, though it is my understanding that rates of taxation are even higher in most of the rest of Europe. I've done some basic calculations with salaries I could expect in the years after I finish university and it seems: - 35-40% would be taken directly out of my salary (income tax, national insurance, inflated student loans) - 20% would be taken on almost everything I buy (value added tax) - At least £1000 would be payable to the local council wherever I live (council tax) Leaving, from these three alone, less than half of my salary remaining. Which isn't even scratching the surface of all of the other taxes, charges, mandatory insurances, tariffs, duties, etc. there are, nor the inflated living costs resulting from state interventions in the economy, nor reductions in my productivity and salary as a result of economic regulations. There is also the money, albeit a comparatively minuscule amount, lost through falling victim to private crime. After factoring all of these in, I don't even want to guess what tiny percentage of my true earning power I would be left with might be. How does a person respond to this situation with self-respect? If I work hard and realise my productive capacity to the extent that the system allows me to, I would have to face the reality that in a year's worth of work, at least 6 (almost certainly more) months were spent working exclusively to fatten the state, with my reward for getting up early in the morning, commuting to work and creating value every day from January to July being £0. Choosing to participate in such an exploitative relationship does not seem self-respecting. If I "go galt", as they say, and withdraw or work below my productive capacity, or even make efforts to go off the grid (though this seems much less possible in Europe than it is in say the States), I wouldn't have as much of my life stolen from me, but I would also be sacrificing my own standard of living, pursuit of happiness, and humanity. Moreover, I would have to face the reality that I allowed the state to cause such a major disruption in how I lived my life. This option is for its own reasons self-destructive and lacks self-respect. So what does one do? I recognise the option of emigration, though nowhere in particular is standing out as a libertarian paradise. I recognise the option of focusing more on the aspects of my life that aren't taxable (relationships, hobbies, etc.) than those which are. While this seems like the most FDR response to the problem, especially with regards to personal relationships, it doesn't get rid of the reality of needing to work for some standard of living. I recognise the option of, being unable to beat the parasites, becoming one by entering one of the circles where government money comes flowing in. Though I would hate myself every day if I took this option, so I don't see it as being on the table.

With no intention of ruining anyone's fun, Bitcoin mining has long since become dominated by people using FPGAs or ASICs with much higher hashrates and much lower electricity requirements than desktop graphics cards. Even before FPGAs and ASICs were developed, mining was generally only profitable by having access to cheap electricity and using large farms of certain GPU models that worked especially well for the task. So there is no client that is going to make it successful in terms of making more money from mining coins than is spent on electricity.

But you don't get the point, and it makes sense that you don't get the point because you're cisgender and have never experienced discomfort with your involuntarily assigned and from then on heavily enforced classification. You are arguing that, at birth, a midwife looks to see if there is objectively a penis or a vagina and writes down "penis" or "vagina" on some piece of paperwork and is done with it. The reality is that a classification is assigned, which yes in many cases is heavily influenced by the objectively-present physiology (although not in all cases, if you read the stories of many intersex people). However, along with this classification comes an enormous amount of coercion for the rest of one's childhood, adolescence and adulthood to conform to the ruleset of "objectively penis-having people" and to never do anything in the ruleset of "objectively vagina-having people", lest one face very negative familial, social, legal, etc. repercussions. The involuntary infliction of behavioral requirements, whether influenced by objectively-observed physiology or not, is what individuals are guilty of. To give an analogy: Imagine a society in which those born with dark hair had a "D" written on their birth certificate and those born with light hair had an "L" written on that birth certificate. This already faces problems, because what about a baby born with an intermediate colour? What about a baby born with no hair? What about babies whose hair colours will change throughout their lives? However, one character on a birth certificate surely can't mean much, can it? So let's say it is fine, and nobody is guilty of anything. But let's now say that the D babies will go home find their bedroom painted pink, and the L babies will go home to find their bedrooms painted blue. The parents of the baby will be asked every day "Is it an L or a D?". The D babies will have their hair grown long and styled, and be put in dresses. The L babies will have their hair kept short, and be required to wear pragmatic clothing. Throughout the entire childhoods and adolescences they will be heavily regulated in every aspect of their lives to conform to the set of social expectations of their classification, and when at the age of 16 a D person would feel more comfortable dying their hair a lighter colour and following the social expectations of L people, they are disowned by their family, face a multiple-year legally-enforced procedure of being mocked by medical gatekeepers in order to access the chemicals that will change their hair colour, have offensive articles written about them across the media, face issues because they go to a school that is only for Ds, face legal issues achieving any recognition of the new hair colour, etc. If there were just the partially objectively-derived classification at the moment of birth, it would be an amoral situation. The enforcement of everything else is where it becomes immoral, for those for whom it isn't voluntary (certainly there are a lot of people who are comfortable with their assigned classification and its ruleset, and no trans person denies this). Your points (1) and (2) don't make sense to me, could you please elaborate further? Regarding (3) and (3a), the extent to which gender identity is biologically and culturally defined is something I have personally discussed with other trans people, so I don't understand how you can make such a blanket statement. I don't understand (4) either; it is a non-sequitur. Moreover, describing a trans person as being "born as a man and then deciding to become transgender" is taking a purely external view of their situation, showing no empathy for their inner life and internal version of events. "Born as a man" means that the classification "man" was involuntarily placed upon them by people around them then they were a child. "Deciding to become transgender" is generally inaccurate in the case of trans people - they are uncomfortable with the involuntary classification, and want to take steps to reduce that discomfort. I would be interested in knowing what stake you hold in the existence of trans people (I've declared mine - I am trans myself), as it is quite unusual for a presumably cisgender, heterosexual, 38 year old man to be so interested in critiquing the lives of a very small minority of the population that already face enormous social opposition to their existence and who, in general, are just trying to live their lives without facing violence and exclusion.

Whatever physiology is physically present is irrelevant to the fact that a classification is involuntarily imposed that will be used for many years into the future as the basis for aggression ranging anywhere from mild social rejection to murder* if the rigid code of permissible self-expression that accompanies it is considered to be violated. *The transgender community being distinguished in that its only annual day is the Transgender Day of Remembrance, where the trans people murdered over the year prior are memorialised.

At birth it is declared that you are gender A or B. You are given no input on this classification, i.e. it is involuntary/coercive. Based on this involuntary classification, you will then go through childhood and adolescence: 1. Being required conform to the classification's dress code 2. Being required to conform to the classification's code for mannerisms and behaviour 3. Being required to go to a school with exclusively other members of your coercively-assigned gender (in some cases, including mine) 4. Being required to go by a name of the coercively-assigned gender 5. Being required to use toilets, changing rooms and other facilities of the coercively-assigned gender 6. Being required to be seen as a member of the coercively-assigned gender 7. Facing legal obstacles to accessing medical treatment for gender dysphoria (e.g. hormone therapy if uncomfortable with the effects of hormones of the coercively-assigned gender)

Freedom is just a precondition for man's thriving, it isn't the thriving itself. Rather than "what else is there to live for", a fully voluntarist society would be a "finally, I can now live" scenario. The nature of freedom is that the onus would be on individuals to decide what their goals and purposes are. As for me, I would be wanting to put my life towards (among others): - Developing the best relationships - Maximising material wellbeing for number of hours worked - Maximising mental wellbeing, physical health and longevity - Space technology - Sustainability in the environment, technology and standard of living

Gender variance has always existed, in the same way that variance in every other biological (or for that matter, sociocultural) trait exists. The only things special about the 20th century are 1. advances in medicine that make hormone therapy, various surgeries etc. possible to those who want to present as the other sex 2. general secularisation and liberalisation of the culture and legal system that made it possible for trans people to live openly without facing extreme violence, familial disownment, poverty, unemployment, social exclusion, discrimination, etc. My experience as a young trans woman is quite the opposite: upon discovery of my gender identity, there was a very strongly negative reaction from my parents, with my mother claiming to be "mourning the loss of her son", acting deeply upset and employing the biggest weapons in the bad parent's toolbox (threatening to make homeless, isolating from rest of family, etc.) in response to my exhibiting any individuality that deviated from her narcissistic image as to what "her son" was, and denying my capacity to even have an internal experience. As a trans child I experienced extremely strong pressure to conform to my coercively-assigned gender identity and social ostracism for any deviation, and as a result stayed in a repressed, non-self-expressive shell until my late teens when intellectual, social, legal and to some extent financial independence made being myself in the world possible (noting that I am in one of the world's countries with the most rights for trans people, though that doesn't say much).