-Suppose that, around the time of the social transition, the child reportedly responded to "Hey kiddo, I love you" with, "I'm a girl and I'm a vegetarian." In the skeptic's view, both halves of that sentence were probably generated by the same cognitive algorithm—something like, "practice language and be cute to caregivers, making use of themes from the local cultural environment" (where grown-ups in Berkeley talk a lot about gender and animal welfare). If you're not going to change the kid's diet on the basis of the second part, you shouldn't social transition the kid on the basis of the first part.
+Suppose that, around the time of the social transition, the child reportedly responded to "Hey kiddo, I love you" with, "I'm a girl and I'm a vegetarian." In the skeptic's view, both halves of that sentence were probably generated by the same cognitive algorithm—something like, "practice language and be cute to caregivers, making use of themes from the local cultural environment" (where grown-ups in Berkeley talk a lot about gender and animal welfare). In the skeptic's view, if you're not going to change the kid's diet on the basis of the second part, you shouldn't social transition the kid on the basis of the first part.
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+It's not hard to imagine how differential treatment by grown-ups of gender-related utterances could unintentionally shape outcomes. This may be clearer if we imagine a non-gender case. Suppose the child's father's name is John Smith, and that after a grown-up explains ["Sr."/"Jr." generational suffixes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffix_(name)#Generational_titles) after it happened to come up in fiction, the child declares that his name is John Smith, Jr. now. Caregivers are likely to treat this as just a cute thing that the kid said, quickly forgotten by all. But if caregivers feared causing psychological harm by denying a declared name change, one could imagine them taking the child's statement as a prompt to ask followup questions. ("Oh, would you like me to call you _John_ or _John Jr._, or just _Junior_?") With enough followup, it seems plausible that a name change to "Kevin Jr." would meet with the child's assent and "stick" socially. The initial suggestion would have come from the child, but most of the [optimization](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/D7EcMhL26zFNbJ3ED/optimization)—the selection that this particular statement should be taken literally and reinforced as a social identity, while others are just treated as a cute but not overly meaningful thing the kid said—would have come from the adults.
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+Finally, there is the matter of the child's behavior and personality. Suppose that, around the same time that the child's social transition was going down, the father reported the child being captivated by seeing a forklift at Costco. A few months later, another family friend remarked that maybe the child is very competitive, and that "she likes fighting so much because it's the main thing she knows of that you can _win_."
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+I think people who are familiar with the relevant scientific literature or come from an older generation would look at observations like these and say, Well, yes, he's a boy; boys like vehicles (_d_ ≈ 2.44!) and boys like fighting. Some of them might suggest that these observations should be counterindicators for transition—that the cross-gender verbal self-reports are less decision-relevant than the fact of a male child behaving in male-typical ways, but nice smart liberal grown-ups in the current year don't think that way.
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+One might imagine that the [inferential distance](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HLqWn5LASfhhArZ7w/expecting-short-inferential-distances) between nice smart liberal grownups and people from an older generation (or a skeptical family friend) might be crossed by talking about it, but it turns out that talking doesn't help much when people have radically different priors and interpret the same evidence differently.
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+Imagine a skeptical family friend wondering (about four months after the social transition) what "being a girl" means to the child. How did the kid _know_?
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+A parent obliges to ask the child: "Hey kiddo, somebody wants to know how you know that you are a girl."
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+"Why?"
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+"He's interested in that kind of thing."
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+"I know that I'm a girl because girls like specific things like rainbows and I like rainbows so I'm a girl."
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+"Is that how you knew in the first place?"
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+"Yeah."
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+"You know there are a lot of boys who like rainbows."