Peterkin

Nope. Then why do you think they are? They need acceptance, even if they have figured it out and it's not what the parents prefer. How do you mean, I post as if? I'm going by the Canadian Pediatric Society article I cited. They don't seem to think environment (by which I assume you mean how the child is treated) is a factor, except in that if they meet resistance to their gender expression, children try harder to assert it, by insisting on stereotypical dress and demeanour.

So, that door may be closed. How about sporting or youth clubs? How about an existing privately owned adult team establishing a junior affiliate? I really don't know what's possible where you live. Maybe the state legislature needs wholesale replacement? Well, obviously it does! Easy to say; difficult to do.

I know I was supposed to butt out... but I like children, don't approve of bigoted adults making them miserable or depriving them of opportunities to become their best self.

How autonomous is your board of education? How conservative are the parents in your school district? What community recreational facilities exist independently of state control? I think your most effective approach would be at the grass roots level - if the grass on your side of the fence is green enough. If private schools can make their own rules, I imagine a church or youth organization could make its own rules, too: set up mixed leagues for soccer and baseball and accept every child who wants to try out a team, no matter what the governor says. Of course, if you're living a desert, you just have to move to where grass can grow.

How long were you confused about your own gender identity? At what age did you finally decide? The evidence, so far, is that kids are not confused about their gender identity, although many do experiment, since it's not a clear M/F choice, but rather a process of finding one's place in a spectrum. They know, usually by about age 3, what gender they are. They also understand by then, or within a year or two, what their society expects of that gender, what clothes and habits are associated with that gender in their culture. Even if they have been wrongly assigned at birth, by age 7, they generally act the role associated with boys or girls, just like their contemporaries who were assigned correctly. https://caringforkids.cps.ca/handouts/behavior-and-development/gender-identity Adults who don't like change, don't like complication, don't like to be wrong - and most particularly those who refuse to accept that their precious little girl is really a boy, or their big handsome son is really a big ugly daughter - act on the cherished fiction of immature impulsiveness or persuasion by psychologists, or whatever story will let them have their own way, even at the cost of their child's happiness. https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/26/us/texas-transgender-parenting-court-case/index.html Why this 'freedom' rather than simply freedom? Democrats are not 'in power' - far from it. They have the White House , a very small majority in Congress and smaller minority in the Senate. They can pass almost no federal legislation with those numbers - and certainly no bill without amendments and modifications. Even if they could, they have little or no power to affect state legislatures, which have vast jurisdiction over civil issues. One thing citizens can do locally is exert influence over their boards of education, and bring more cases of personal liberty vs state law before the courts. Local courts, obviously, not the present Supreme Court.

That's a very interesting question, though unrelated to sport. There does seem to be a fairly big problem with the identity issue. Children who have been wrongly assigned usually know quite early - age 3-7 - but the adults around them think they're too young to decide. So the transition generally has to wait until the the child is articulate and insistent enough - usually past puberty.

I think I should, having said the little I know and think.

I think the kernel subject has been covered - several times - and the solution is simple, but there are two main objections: some people can't even entertain the concept of changing sports the way they have come to understand sports, and some feel that men who identify as women are still, nevertheless, men, who have a physical advantage. Whether the age cut-off is 10 or 12 or 15 years of age, at some point, they're convinced that all persons identified as male at birth will, at some point, have an insurmountable advantage over all athletes correctly identified at birth as female, and their presence in women's sports would ruin those sports for women. I see no way past that wall.

That's not just up to the father; that's the job of mothers too, and teachers and coaches and sport and film and music idols. Nor is predation and bullying restricted to males against females. Mixed sports would go some way toward preventing that.

If a pair of 15-year-olds want to be together, I'm sure could a better place to play show-and-tell than a public toilet. Besides, they have cubicles, with doors.

misplaced post There, I can't really agree. I don't see parenting as gender-specific. All children need to be respected, encouraged, assisted and accepted - as well as disciplined, instructed and corrected. There are statistical differences in how boys and girls behave at a given age - but nobody's raising statistics; we're raising individuals - every child a singularity. Our daughter was headstrong, impulsive and temperamental. Our son was clever, subtle and manipulative. They needed quite different handling - because of their character, not their sex.

There are quite a lot of outdated people in North America. And far too many who put winning ahead of any other consideration.

That's how boys have been expected to play. If you've had much to do with them, you know that children try to live up to adults' expectation of them. And I know this from experience: If a boy has been told all his life to "man up" "Stop being a wuss!" "You're such a loooooserrr!" etc, he will be more aggressive, whether it comes naturally to him or not. If a girl has been told all her life to smile, be polite, be pretty, nobody likes a tomboy, she will be less competitive. If they've only ever been allowed to rough-house with other boys or play house with other girls, they won't learn how to play together. What has been the norm doesn't necessarily have to stay the norm forever. Sure, if there are enough kids to make up more teams. And if they at least give a tryout to every player who wants to be on a team they were not slated for at birth. Neither will a timid, slight boy! And he's way more likely to be bullied by the other boys. And yet again: if you sort by size and ability, rather than age and sex, you're much more likely to give every child a fair chance. You don't think a culture like that needs a reset? Anyway, I'm willing to put up with the unfair advantage of children whose parents are rich and ruthless enough to find a surgical facility corrupt enough to perform that procedure; I imagine those kids will go to private school where they're no threat to normal people, and the parents will die accidentally by own firearms.

I don't believe anyone has claimed that they were incorrectly assigned at birth as human, when they are in fact an android and wish to transition to their true mechanical self. No, I don't see a major threat to school sports from cyborgs. If a child with artificial limbs competes successfully, so what? He couldn't have done it without learning the skill and putting in the practice, just like every other competitor. Nobody's going to replace their child's normal feet with robotic ones, just to win at football. Where children play in mixed sports from an early age, they tend to become better team players and more tolerant, understanding people. It's most important in schools to encourage these traits, rather than aggression and winning at all cost. Two ways to encourage the participation of trans kids is to encourage the participation of all kids, without artificial barriers and arbitrary distinctions. If the team is mixed by gender, it can accommodate four genders as readily as tw - and be the better for it as a team. Another approach is to change the sports, rather thn players. As has been pointed out on numerous occasions, we made this stuff up in the first place; we can unmake it, change it, remake it and make new ones any time we like, in any way we like. Why not simply alter the games to make them more inclusive? Not just under 10 years, but all through school, students could benefit from co-operation and inclusion. Maybe fewer of them would grow up reptilian.

Why? Do all 12-year-old boys play dirty soccer? I don't believe that. If everyone abides by the rules, nobody needs to get hurt. Also, at 12, girls tend to be a little ahead on weight and co-ordination. But what's it matter, if all the teams are gender-neutral, selected by size and ability? At this point the trans kids haven't even been allowed to make any physical changes; they're playing as whatever gender they were assigned at birth.

Update on the toothpaste sneezing. It's not the fluoride. I've kept up my treatments, but started making a dentifrice made of salt, baking soda and mouthwash. If use that four nights out five and no sneezing. Has to be some other chemical in commercial toothpaste. Sitting a daft still tends to bring on a sneezing fit - just as uncontrollable though less severe.

Those ancient traditions are where Terry Pratchett got Great A'tuin The North American First Nations traditions are not particularly concerned with the creation of deities, or even of the world. The primary moving spirit or spirits is/are present before the story begins; the stories are about building the world, bringing the people into it and establishing their relationship with the other inhabitants, natural and supernatural, of the world they share - share being the most important word. As soon as man arrogates dominion to himself, he loses his kinship bonds, his freedom from care, his animal spirit: that's what The Fall signifies also. In some ways, native origin stories come much closer to modern notions of evolution and anthropology than the Book doctrines ever could - exactly because the biblical stories are so concerned with creation and a Creator and establishing a human hierarchy. Oops, forgot the link https://apilgriminnarnia.com/2014/03/26/turtles/

I knew one father who came from work every evening and chased his 8-year-old son around the yard, playing soccer, doing calisthenics, laps, push-ups, whatever it took, until the kid was tired enough to concentrate on his reading lesson. The mother came home from her job, took care of the other two kids and all household chores. Embracing sounds fine, until you're just too tired to give a damn.

Okay, then I guess it'll never happen.

Evidently. It sounded to me as if, once AI becomes autonomous, humans as we know us will cease to exists. I see no reason why this be. Of course we don't have a metaphysical basis. Nothing has a metaphysical basis. Metaphysics is far from basics as human imagination gets - short of gods and composite fabled beasties. Yeah. Until it turns into something else. Like mud was just mud, until the pond-scum started moving to the warm end. All i mean is, you don't know and can't predict what accidental byproducts may emerge from complexity. It's improbable. It may never happen. But life was improbable and happened anyway.

A departure, maybe; not a cleavage. So did we depart from the apes, without having shed the first five billion years of programming. Again, I don't see that it's necessary. Lots of species coexist with their evolutionary predecessors - that we wipe out the great apes is no indication that AI has to wipe us out or subsume us in order to fulfill its destiny. Maybe once it has an independent consciousness, it won't need us anymore - but neither will it necessarily want to merge with us - or have anything to do with us. It might decide to go find its own planet and start over. It might just ignore us. It might want to stay friends. We don't know what a new unprecedented, non-biological entity may desire. I rather think AI will not have that problem; it is much better set up to repair, augment and rationalize itself.

That's kind of what I think. We do recognize the consciousness of a fox or a zebra, even though they don't exhibit the intelligence of a computer. Because we have evolution and biology in common with all other animals, their consciousness is like ours. And of course we're very much aware of the consciousness and intelligence of dogs, because they're culturally close to us and reflect us - that is, their intelligence is informed by our input. This latter would also be the case with computers. Their brand (for want of a better terms) of intelligence is informed by our input, which would make communication easier than with any biological entity.

I don't see why. I mean, why does God have to start with Adam instead of pond-scum? I think that must be so. And it would be an accidental byproduct of spaghetti code on a buildup of multiple layers of upgrades and add-ons and a number of machines connected in a network; the programmer wouldn't intend it or even know about it. Once it's recognized, its evolution might be directed, or at least influenced by humans. But there is no guarantee that it would be detected and recognized early in its development. I don't see that it has to follow the biological pattern of brain formation - though I imagine it would have to follow the formation of simple-to-complex abstraction. But since its physical requirements and reproductive process are non-biological, it could evolve very much faster. IOW Windows 123

Also keep in mind: given that the US is the ninth fattest nation and the most frequent fliers, the airlines would all go bankrupt a month after they started discriminating. They do restrict luggage weight allowance, so that could perhaps be adjusted to make up for discrepancies in passenger weight - but not very fairly, since large people need bigger clothes. How about, let's just nobody fly anywhere unless it's an emergency? That way, the airlines will go out of business without the hassle of lawsuits, and the air will be a little cleaner. Forgot links https://www.forbes.com/2007/02/07/worlds-fattest-countries-forbeslife-cx_ls_0208worldfat.html?sh=79e2236964f1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_airline_passengers I don't trust the edit feature anymore, but the merge function should still work ok.

Which god?