# Religion, Transphobia and Category Errors **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [February 4, 2025, 5:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religion-transphobia-and-category-errors/1013878 "2025-02-04T17:08:53Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2025, 4:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religion-transphobia-and-category-errors/1013878/21 "2025-02-05T16:09:33Z")
> [@We\_re\_wolves\_not\_werewolves](#): > > I would agree with this. I don’t think it is moral to question how someone feels about their gender, absent clear evidence of their lying. But the question then becomes should you treat a trans gender person the same as a biological female, i.e. should you treat a biological male self identifying as a woman the same as a biological female? And the answer there is sometimes yes and maybe sometime no, depending on the context and depending on the issue at hand. The vast majority of the time, I would. The exceptions are when I need to interact with their genitalia–and it’s vanishingly rare that I need to interact with the genitalia of anyone who’s not me or my spouse. That biological reality just isn’t the important part of how I interact with people. ---
**Author:** ![Whack-a-Mole](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/whack-a-mole/32/141_2.png) [@Whack-a-Mole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Whack-a-Mole)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2025, 4:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religion-transphobia-and-category-errors/1013878/22 "2025-02-05T16:11:24Z")
I’m not sure I see a useful distinction between the OP’s Bad Religion and Good Religion person beyond “Good” religion person trying to be “better” by accepting others might have a different opinion while they, personally, are in the same camp as “Bad” Religion. ---
**Author:** ![We\_re\_wolves\_not\_werewolves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/838e76/32.png) [@We\_re\_wolves\_not\_werewolves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/We_re_wolves_not_werewolves)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2025, 4:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religion-transphobia-and-category-errors/1013878/23 "2025-02-05T16:30:36Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > The vast majority of the time, I would. The exceptions are when I need to interact with their genitalia–and it’s vanishingly rare that I need to interact with the genitalia of anyone who’s not me or my spouse. I think the obvious other one is men’s and women’s sports. Separate sports leagues were created, at least in large part, to account for the generalized athletic advantages biological men have over biological women. There have been some rare, but well publicized examples, of trans women competing in women’s competitions where it seems, at least to a casual observer, that the trans woman has a clear, overwhelming physical advantage over the biological females she is competing against. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2025, 4:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religion-transphobia-and-category-errors/1013878/24 "2025-02-05T16:54:27Z")
> [@We\_re\_wolves\_not\_werewolves](#): > > I think the obvious other one is men’s and women’s sports. Separate sports leagues were created, at least in large part, to account for the generalized athletic advantages biological men have over biological women. There have been some rare, but well publicized examples, of trans women competing in women’s competitions where it seems, at least to a casual observer, that the trans woman has a clear, overwhelming physical advantage over the biological females she is competing against. I’m just not about that, for reasons that we’ve been over too many times to count. Briefly: 1. I think sports are overrated, and the extreme emphasis we put on them (for wealth and for access to higher education) are much greater harms than any hypothetical harm from the participation of trans athletes. Let’s fix those enormous problems before we start perseverating about imaginary problems. 2. We don’t adjust for any number of other hereditary advantages in sports. There isn’t a separate basketball league for short guys, or a swimming league for people with stubby little legs, or a golf league for people who wear spectacles, or a chess league for people with ADHD. Treating the biological segregation of sports as sacred is ahistorical and inconsistent with our general laissez-faire attitude about genetic advantages. Yes, there might be a transwoman who has a biological advantage over a ciswoman, but there are also ciswomen who have biological advantages over ciswomen. It’s never been a pure contest of skill. 3. _There’s no there there_. Transwomen _aren’t_ dominating any sport where they’re allowed to compete; the few victories are absolutely edge cases. That said, this thread is about religion, transphobia, and category errors. If there’s anything more to be said on these lines, we should probably take it to a different thread. ---
**Author:** ![Jay\_Z](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a3d4f5/32.png) [@Jay\_Z](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jay_Z)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2025, 6:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religion-transphobia-and-category-errors/1013878/25 "2025-02-05T18:10:31Z")
Religion is hardly ever a completely internal process. Judaism isn’t at all. Christianity and other religions have heretics. You can’t simply declare by your internal process that are you are one with them if your articulated, external beliefs don’t match up with others who have already appropriated the term and are using it in a group sense. So in that case your feelings don’t matter. If you believe by your internal process that Jesus was really a woman, you are not going to be in the group with other Christians who do not believe this. We have other groups, racial groups, where it is considered offensive to declare that by your internal process you are part of the group. So it’s a question for others that taking the ability of subgroups to define themselves away is an unalloyed good. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2025, 6:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religion-transphobia-and-category-errors/1013878/26 "2025-02-05T18:21:44Z")
> [@Jay\_Z](#): > > You can’t simply declare by your internal process that are you are one with them if your articulated, external beliefs don’t match up with others who have already appropriated the term and are using it in a group sense. Of course I can. I can say, “I am a Christian, and I also believe that Jesus was a woman.” Who the hell are you–or anyone else–to tell me that I don’t identify as a Christian? ---
**Author:** ![Thing.Fish](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thing.fish/32/9168_2.png) [@Thing.Fish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thing.Fish)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2025, 7:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religion-transphobia-and-category-errors/1013878/27 "2025-02-05T19:05:24Z")
It just occurred to me that there’s a very close real-world religious analogy to the trans debate, and that my own positions at first glance seem inconsistent. I’m talking about the “Jews for Jesus” movement; ethnically Jewish people who have accepted Christ as their savior and go around wearing crosses and studying the Gospels (all OK so far)…and who insist that the religion they are practicing is called “Judaism” (this is where my head explodes). In order to express their sense of their personal identities, those people are asserting themselves to be members of a group which, for the last several millennia, everyone has considered them to be, by definition, not members of. And I CAN’T STAND THOSE PEOPLE! So what’s the difference here? Am I simply being hypocritical? On reflection, I think the distinction is that these groups pose actual threats to the normative Jewish community. They are actively attempting to convert Jews, and particularly target people with a vague ethnic sense of Jewishness, but not enough religious knowledge to realize what they’re being sold. Moreover, by popularizing the notion that one can convert to Christianity and still be “Jewish”, they could encourage anti-Semitism against the “unreasonable” Jews who refuse to do so. In short, I dislike them because I feel threatened by them. Which I suppose is exactly how the transphobes feel about trans people. The discussion then turns on the question of whether those feelings are rationally justified, which is going to be much more productive than abstract philosophical arguments about what words “really” mean. Also, I want to be clear that my dislike for “Messianic Jews” extends to wanting to publicize their dishonesty, and to ostracizing them from the Jewish community. I don’t want the government to forbid them from calling themselves Jews or from wearing yarmulkes, or public libraries to refuse to carry their books, nor do I want their rabbis to be arrested for teaching false doctrine to children. So I guess there are still some significant moral differences between myself and the transphobes. (Wow, on preview, it looks like the conversation was already moving in this direction! Great minds and all…) ---
**Author:** ![eburacum45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eburacum45/32/8690_2.png) [@eburacum45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eburacum45)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2025, 7:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religion-transphobia-and-category-errors/1013878/28 "2025-02-05T19:05:48Z")
> [@Jay\_Z](#): > > You can’t simply declare by your internal process that are you are one with them if your articulated, external beliefs don’t match up with others who have already appropriated the term and are using it in a group sense. Plenty of other Christians have done this in the past. That’s why we have sects, denominations and religious movements in general. ---
**Author:** ![Thing.Fish](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thing.fish/32/9168_2.png) [@Thing.Fish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thing.Fish)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2025, 7:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religion-transphobia-and-category-errors/1013878/29 "2025-02-05T19:16:49Z")
> [@Jay\_Z](#): > > So it’s a question for others that taking the ability of subgroups to define themselves away is an unalloyed good. I think the analogy breaks down when we consider genders to be “subgroups” in the same sense as racial or religious groups, though. Most people would agree that members of those sorts of groups have the right to decide who is in the group, and their definitions may evolve over time. People who think that the categories of “men” and “women” are biologically determined _don’t_ think that the people in those categories are free to change the definition of the category. ---
**Author:** ![RitterSport](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rittersport/32/6326_2.png) [@RitterSport](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RitterSport)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2025, 7:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religion-transphobia-and-category-errors/1013878/30 "2025-02-05T19:23:05Z")
> [@Thing.Fish](#): > > I’m talking about the “Jews for Jesus” movement Just a side note that J4J is not Jewish people who accept Jesus, it’s an evangelical Christian movement founded by a Baptist minister. The only ones I know were Catholic, converted to Judaism so they could join the J4J. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2025, 7:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religion-transphobia-and-category-errors/1013878/31 "2025-02-05T19:27:17Z")
> [@RitterSport](#): > > Just a side note that J4J is not Jewish people who accept Jesus, it’s an evangelical Christian movement founded by a Baptist minister. The only ones I know were Catholic, converted to Judaism so they could join the J4J. Yeah–Jews for Jesus are one of those very rare cases where I believe someone is lying about their internal state. The gender equivalent would be a group of folks who stopped identifying as men and identified as women and immediately started going to women-only spaces to advocate for men’s rights ideology. There are two important differences between those folks and trans women: 1. I wouldn’t believe their professed gender identity; and 2. Unlike transwomen, they’re imaginary. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Strangelove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr.strangelove/32/6613_2.png) [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2025, 7:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religion-transphobia-and-category-errors/1013878/32 "2025-02-05T19:30:59Z")
> [@Pleonast](#): > > But just because you think the choice of dualism vs materialism is a core part of a person’s identity doesn’t mean other people do. Even if they’ve made the same choice as you. No, I’m not. The existence of people that don’t care about this are completely irrelevant to my argument. But among people that _do_ care, it’s a part of their identity, and a deep one at that. I’m certain there is at least _one_ person in the world for whom it is really, really important to their being that they have an immortal soul, to the point where they construct their entire lives around the idea. And I am here telling you that I think this person is deluded and that their inner experience on this front is a fiction. And that it’s not hate speech or even particularly frowned upon for me to announce this. (in practice, the number is much more than one, but I only need one for my argument) ---
**Author:** ![WalterBishop](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/aeb1de/32.png) [@WalterBishop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WalterBishop)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2025, 9:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religion-transphobia-and-category-errors/1013878/33 "2025-02-05T21:20:45Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > Of course I can. I can say, “I am a Christian, and I also believe that Jesus was a woman.” Who the hell are you–or anyone else–to tell me that I don’t identify as a Christian? That’s true, but only within reason. If a man tells me he identifies as a Muslim, but then I catch him burning a Quran while wolfing down a bacon sandwich and sputtering _”Christ is King!”_ between mouthfuls, it’s more reasonable for me to assume that the man is either lying or simply doesn’t know what a Muslim is than it is for me to assume that he sincerely identifies as a Muslim. Similarly, if a male tells the world they self-identity as a woman, but they then proceed to make _absolutely no concessions to femininity whatsoever_, to what extent should I accept that this person even understands what they’re saying? This isn’t hypothetical, by the way. I used to work with someone who self-ID’d as a woman but still presented as very masculine. I get that such cases are rare, but they’re not unheard of. ---
**Author:** ![Aspidistra](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aspidistra/32/3894_2.png) [@Aspidistra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aspidistra)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2025, 9:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religion-transphobia-and-category-errors/1013878/34 "2025-02-05T21:46:42Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > Depends on what you mean by “socially important categorization scheme.” Self-identification as Christian, Republican, Democratic, Jewish, or Bengals fan is entirely an internal experience that can’t be verified by anyone else, but these are also, in a sense, “socially important categorization schemes.” Those who identify as Republicans are the only ones, in many states, allowed to vote in Republican primaries. There are churches that don’t allow you to take communion if you don’t identify as a Christian. There are bars where if you’re not a Bengals fan, you’re not welcome. Yes, all those things you mention are internal experiences, just like sense of gender. That’s why the way we deal with them is a good guide to the way we deal with people’s attribution to themself of gender feelings. For instance, churches that don’t want you to take communion unless you’re Christian are indeed subject to the possibility that people might just lie about that for the purpose of getting a bit of bread and alcohol. They’ve decided that they can pretty much live with that possibility, because the only danger is that they might have to extend their bread and wine budget (any other consequences are on the atheist communion-taker). When it comes to more important situations - like, who can get jobs in the church - they will usually do more investigative digging to find out not just whether the person has an internal feeling, but are their real-life actions consistent with it. If I told you I was gay, and you were aware that I’ve been married to a man for 25 years, and then asked how many times I’d kissed a girl and I truthfully reply “zero”, then add “but I really feel like I’m gay on the _inside_”, probably you wouldn’t believe that. If I said I’m a Bengals fan but I’ve never been to a game, and there’s a different team that I go to all the games of and cheer for enthusiastically, then probably I’m fooling either myself or you. Checking people’s claims about themselves against objective measures, then deciding whether to believe or not, is a very normal human activity. > [@](#): > > There are a shit-ton of internal experiences people have that can’t be verified from the outside, and we believe people. If someone tells me they have a headache, I don’t tell them they’re delusional, or insist that they can’t take the actions that someone with a headache might take (lie down, take an aspirin) until they can prove it. I don’t tell them that Republican is defined a certain way (“Only people who have run for office as Republicans are Republicans, so you can’t vote in the next primary!”) If your primary school age child tells you they have a headache and that they’re too sick to go to school, you might very well try to do some external verification (are they wincing? Moving slowly? Look pale?). If it was on the day of a big test in some subject they weren’t good at, doubly so. Because saying you’re sick for the purpose of getting out of school is a pretty common small child behavior. > [@](#): > > So: absent an extreme reason to believe you’re lying about your internal state, I’m going to accept you at your word; and absent a strong reason not to treat you according to your claims about that state, I’ll treat you accordingly. In order to claim a benefit that other people are not allowed to have, the standards need to be higher. For instance, it used to be the case in most of Europe that to be in government or do various jobs, you needed to say you believed whatever the dominant variant of Christianity was in that country. We generally stopped doing that, because it’s a bad idea. a) anyone can just make a belief claim, and b) in any case, your religious beliefs should be irrelevant to whether you can do a good job in Parliament. This is a very good match for eg the womens’ sports situation. a) anyone can make a claim of internal womanhood if they like, and b) gender feelings are irrelevant to sport. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2025, 10:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religion-transphobia-and-category-errors/1013878/35 "2025-02-05T22:12:30Z")
> [@El\_DeLuxo](#): > > Yeah, it really is. It’s calling them crazy, their minds defective and inferior to your own, their beliefs false, and their experience unreal (implying that they’re either lying or too stupid to get something right). Hateful in the sense of being an insulting, ugly, dismissive thing to call a person, meant to make them shut up and feel like shit, even though the SDMB allows the behavior and frequently encourages it. Right. Disagree if you want to, but insulting a belief is being a jerk. > [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > But most religious claims _aren’t_ about internal experiences, but are claims about the universe. “God is everywhere, God is good, Jesus died for your sins and rose again, an altar to Lakshmi will bring you wealth, God created the earth in seven days, God only made two sexes and you were born with the one you are”–these are all claims about the universe. If God is everywhere, that’s not just true for you, that’s true for me, too. And if I disagree, I’m not attacking you or being obnoxious, I’m just expressing a different view about the world. Disagreeing is fine, but not mocking or insulting. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2025, 11:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religion-transphobia-and-category-errors/1013878/36 "2025-02-06T11:28:36Z")
Religion and assertions gender identity don’t compare well. Gender identity has _far_ more scientific support, and at least as important people asserting a gender identity aren’t trying to force their identity on everyone else like the religious tend to do. Transwomen aren’t insisting on mandatory estrogen treatments for everyone, nor are transmen doing the opposite, which they’d have to be doing to make the analogy work. There’s also the issue that it’s the religious who are trying to hurt people who don’t fit into their neatly assigned gender-boxes and not the opposite; this is _entirely_ too much like trying to blame the victim. > [@Thing.Fish](#): > > To a fundamentalist Christian, it’s whether someone has accepted Jesus which determines what they truly are at their core; the distinction between Muslims, Buddhists, and atheists is insignificant. No, it’s a big deal; atheists are considered the worst by far _because they deny the value of faith._ To paraphrase from memory a quote I read from some bishop as a kid that has stuck from me over the decades, “It’s better to kill for Kali than save people as an atheist, because at least killing for a false goddess upholds faith.” And I have in later years heard Christian fundamentalists talk approvingly of Islamic fundamentalists taking over a nation because even a “false religion” is better than the utter evil of secularism. I’ve heard it used as an argument for why the US conquest of Iraq was a good thing; at least it destroyed the secularism that Saddam imposed on Iraq and let the Islamic believers impose themself on everyone. Since they have no facts to support them - and fundamentalists _certainly_ don’t want their beliefs judged on their actions - they _have_ to uphold faith as an all-important virtue or they have no justification for their beliefs at all. Muslims and Buddhists and so forth don’t threaten that; atheists do. There’s a reason that fundamentalists tend to believe that salvation is achieve through “faith, not works”; they _really_ don’t want is to be judged on the latter. Or worse, to actually feel compelled to do nice things for people. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2025, 11:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religion-transphobia-and-category-errors/1013878/37 "2025-02-06T11:30:22Z")
> [@Aspidistra](#): > > If your primary school age child tells you they have a headache and that they’re too sick to go to school, you might very well try to do some external verification (are they wincing? Moving slowly? Look pale?). First, I often treat children differently from adults, thanks. Second, there’s a long and storied history of kids and adults faking illness to get out of unpleasant experience, so long and storied that there’s a word for it, “malingering.” No such history exists of trans folks; it is vanishingly rare, despite Hollywood and Shakespeare, for a child or adult to pretend they’re a gender they’re not for personal gain. > [@Aspidistra](#): > > If I told you I was gay, and you were aware that I’ve been married to a man for 25 years, and then asked how many times I’d kissed a girl and I truthfully reply “zero”, then add “but I really feel like I’m gay on the _inside_”, probably you wouldn’t believe that. Did you mean “I told you I was straight”? Otherwise this makes no sense. If that’s what you meant, it’s still very silly, _because that doesn’t happen._ Repeatedly, metaphors that attack gender identity reference either analogical events that don’t exist, or trans people that don’t exist. There’s a reason for that. Meanwhile, defense of gender identity reference real-world analogies and real-world trans people. There’s also a reason for that. ---
**Author:** ![WalterBishop](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/aeb1de/32.png) [@WalterBishop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WalterBishop)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2025, 11:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religion-transphobia-and-category-errors/1013878/38 "2025-02-06T11:33:08Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > Did you mean “I told you I was straight”? Otherwise this makes no sense. I believe **Aspidistra** is a woman 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2025, 11:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religion-transphobia-and-category-errors/1013878/39 "2025-02-06T11:37:11Z")
> [@WalterBishop](#): > > I believe **Aspidistra** is a woman 😉 Ah, thank you! Bad assumption on my part. I have no objective evidence that this is true other than her words, but I’ll trust her gender identity. ---
**Author:** ![Pleonast](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pleonast/32/1183_2.png) [@Pleonast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pleonast)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2025, 12:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religion-transphobia-and-category-errors/1013878/40 "2025-02-06T12:39:09Z")
> [@Dr.Strangelove](#): > > I’m certain there is at least _one_ person in the world for whom it is really, really important to their being that they have an immortal soul, to the point where they construct their entire lives around the idea. So what? Are you advocating that this board’s rules should be determined by the existence of this person? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religion-transphobia-and-category-errors/1013878.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religion-transphobia-and-category-errors/1013878.md?page=3)