Do the existing rules prohibit people from debating the gender of people who identify as transgender?

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I’m the person who created the JKR thread which went so off the rails, and I have a few objections to rules against misgendering:

  1. It prevents some people talking about their ‘lived experience’, especially due to the rule that it applies retroactively. Think of partners who married a person who - as far as they could tell - was one sex but has now transitioned to the other, or kids who were raised by a mother and father, and are now told they can never talk about their previous lives in the way they experienced them.

  2. We are sold the ‘no misgendering’ as the kind, polite thing to do, which is fine, but it is then treated as a deep philosophical truth, one that has extremely troubling real world implications (yes, including the sports @BigT mentioned). It becomes very difficult to argue against these harmful and unfair policies if you have already conceded the main philosophical point in order to avoid hurting people’s feelings. This strikes me as a fundamentally dishonest and unfair method of winning an argment and getting your desired outcome (though I’m not claiming anyone is doing so consciously, just that that is the result).

  3. This one is petty, but I really resent being forced to use ‘she’ for biologically male people committing chactristically male crimes, and who many times have good reason to be lying or mistaken. Why must we take the word of generally dishonest people on this one issue?

I don’t know what happened with Eve and Una Persson because I wasn’t around then, but I’m surprised harassment of posters isn’t already against the rules. I’d be happy for a rule saying no intentional misgendering of posters here, though there would need to be some allowance for mistakes (eg for some reason I was convinced @What_Exit was female until I saw someone else get corrected).

As for the larger issue, I’ve learned that most people are decidedly ill informed on the current state of the scientific and medical knowledge. It would be a huge disservice to the board’s mission of fighting ignorance if we were banned from discussing and linking to scientific studies as @BigT apparently wants.

I hope @monstro will give her opinion too. She’s always a lot more articulate than me.