Someone who isn't hiding around a corner with a dath ilani adds that Anomalans are roughly half and half on physical sex but only about two thirds of each sex make any attempt to inhabit the corresponding aesthetic and social role. Also the translation is rendering "soul" as the name of a literary trope/magic system element where people have second copies of their brains that can sometimes get unsynced from the ones in their heads, because they really needed another three moons of debugging. Sorry.

In the unlikely event that 'purple flowers' were real, dath ilan would want the technology; there's around ten thousand boys per year who'd rather be girls.

Dath ilan will actually try asking out loud what the Bobbis want for a flower sample or synthesis schedule.

Dath ilan is interested in the deepconcentration drug!  Dath ilan has made a civilizational decision not to put all their smart people on drugs except in extreme circumstances, due to not really finding anything without any side effects, but they've built up a comfy library of enhancement drugs just in case.  Does Firstplanet want this one for operating on sleep deprivation in emergency situations?

Malachitians are roughly half and half on biological sex but trying to list all their social genders would be like trying to list every genre of music. By the time you get halfway down the list another three have been created and six have splintered off.

....and sure, they'll take the summary, although from everything the malachitians have heard of Ozytopia they're really not optimistic that it's going to apply to their own people in any kind of way. 

Sure, sleep deprivation fix sounds great! They try to have enough people on call for emergencies that nobody has to do emergency response on no sleep but there's a tradeoff with throughput when things are going well and having that on hand will shift it nicely. How about this other one that's good for slowing brain aging at the cost of random muscle twitches? And are they interested in recreational drugs at all?

If they have any tall-purple-flower-women at all who aren’t being allowed to be tall-purple-flower-women that’s horrifying, everyone who wants domesticated!pueraria mirifica seeds can have them for free. Do they not know how to synthesize bioidentical estrogen, here’s how you synthesize bioidentical estrogen, it works nearly as well. Here’s a set of guidelines on how to administer purple flower tea and/or sublingual bioidentical estrogen and a set of guidelines on what it does. Also differently-domesticated!spearmint helps too, they can also have that.

Okay, so there are a lot of implementation details and best practices re: getting people to stop making bad decisions, but basically what you want to do is listen to them carefully and nonjudgmentally while they explain why they're making terrible decisions and empathize with them and tell them that it makes a ton of sense that they're doing what they're doing and anyone would do it in their shoes, and then once they feel understood you can ask them why they're doing what they're doing and what the pros and cons are of it, and then eventually they'll talk themselves into making better choices. This works because everyone can listen to the voice of the logos inside them, it's just that sometimes you need a rubber duck to talk yourself through all your feelings so you can find it. 

Souls are the part of you that makes you you! They used to think it was immaterial but now they know it's in your brain. 

The Greens want to make sure they know what "gender" is translating as here? They have half external genitals, half internal genitals, with some small fraction with something weird up, and most people prefer to line up with archetype that has appropriate civilizational aesthetic accretion with their half, but that's, not, like, a law, or anything. They have synthetic estrogen and that's one reason somebody might take it. Same with testosterone.

Why would you tell someone that it makes a ton of sense that they're doing what they're doing if what they're doing doesn't make sense? That sounds like Lying.

Anomalans mostly take synthetic hormones to look prettier by their standards, or be stronger, or not menstruate. The one third of people who don't do the matching aesthetic thing are more likely to do this but not all of them do.

"We cryosuspend people because it's predictable that we'll be able to revive them later," a dath ilani says to the elf.  "How does your branch predict things?"

Dath ilan is interested in Firstplanet's brain-aging-slowing drug, maybe they can figure out how to fix the muscle twitches.  Most of Civilization doesn't do recreational drugs and has sort of held off optimizing it too hard, but Civilization isn't, like, going to stop Firstplanet if they want to fill out another three shelves in the Shops of Ill-Advised Consumer Goods.

Dath ilan has already got as far as at least having estrogen available to those ex-boys, thank you.  Do the Bobbis have anything else for increasing the similarity of born boys to standard women on maturity?  Dath ilani boys with this issue almost always want to be as close to standard female as possible post-transformation, and won't be anything like happy until they're not a purple flower variant in any way that anybody else can detect without instrumentation.

Elves sometimes take synthetic hormones if they want their bodies to be different, and they have half genitals on the inside and half on the outside more-or-less, but they don't seem to have the same sort of large body of tropes about it?  If anyone has the tech to attach functional-and-adequately-nerve-connected external genitals or uteruses elves would totally trade for that, though! Lots of people wish they could have both!

They can have the formulas for some ill-advised items and a list of which approval agencies have approved which ones and a documentation wiki on the standards of all their approval agencies. (The stuff they shared earlier was approved by even the strictest ones.)

Actually everything people do makes sense from their own perspective or they wouldn't do it, even if it's a terrible decision. So, like, starving yourself to death is a terrible decision but you might want to do it because it's a tragic-beautiful-death-where-you-fall-into-a-glowing-cave-and-all-of-your-enemies-go-‘wow you look so pretty in that cave, I regret everything’-and-everyone-envies-how-beautiful-your-death-was*. And your spiritual counselor is going to agree with you that it makes a ton of sense that you want to do it, and then once that's agreed upon you can think about it more carefully and realize that it's probably better to not have a tragic-beautiful-death because it would be bad to make everyone who loves you sad and also dead people don't get to eat ANY cake. 

*This word translates from the Bobbish straightforwardly into a single four-syllable word in Ozytopian. 

Dath ilan knows how to solve most mental problems if they get to raise people from infancy, for what it's worth.  Dath ilan needs a better picture of everything the other planets are currently doing wrong in order to figure out what sort of training would patch the current adults.

Dath ilan actually does say this part out loud.  It wasn't the Keeper or the prediction market leader who did it, and it wasn't the 60-year-old woman, let's put it that way.

Ozytopians are happy to share the curriculum of their Virtue classes with dath ilan to see if dath ilan can patch any obvious mistakes but they're kind of suspicious that dath ilan is a planet of saints. 

Liran here minored in historical sociology when fae were becoming a diplomat and can explain gender-splintering at a 101 level! Gender in malachitinous society started out as the archetype thing the Greens mentioned, and there used to be fewer archetypes, but it turns out that malachitian sex-based archetypes splinter a lot, and now they have this vast array of archetypes which branched off from other archetypes when the people in them got sufficiently rebellious about the concept of archetyping. Lots of people take synthetic hormones but it's at least as common to transition socially into an archetype and not make any biochemical changes about it at all. This is also why malachitinous languages that have grammatical gender at all have an enormous tangled mess made out of layers of neologism.

Also the malachitians are really goddamn offended about the idea that they collectively need patching by outsiders!!

Does dath ilan need Ozytopian best practices about getting people to stop doing horribly counterproductive things, Ozytopians think that dath ilan is maybe not very good at this, possibly because it is a planet of saints. 

Souls are translating to the Bobbis as ‘the narrow unbroken thread of probability space containing your subjective experience which persists indefinitely because of the infinite nature of the universe’, do the ozytopians have another word for that.

... the Bobbis are unclear on why that would be an issue, Dath Ilan. Tall-purple-flower-women aren’t, like, mistakable for men, men usually take steroids or growth hormones and there’s a lot of preexisting dimorphism anyways, and there’s significant physical overlap between tall-purple-flower-women and regular-women anyways? Are they just, like, not letting their tall-purple-flower-women take estrogen until their twenties, or something, or do they not have vaginoplasties or womb transplants?

What is this "really goddamn offended" behavior pattern.  Dath ilan is having trouble parsing it; they can't figure out what equilibrium it's a signal inside.

(The Rememberer of the Past is increasingly considering popping the damn sphere; there's not much point in this if dath ilan is going to have contact with other civilizations with unscreened pasts, anyways.)

...counterproductive, like, criminals who try to steal vast amounts of money?  That's productive under their own utility functions.  What sort of 'horribly counterproductive' things are Ozytopians talking about here?

"Do all of the other putative civilizations here, if taken at face value, seem kind of insane to you?" a dath ilani says to an Anomalan and a Green.

"The Anomalans seem lovely? I'm not sure there's anything glaringly wrong with the elves either," says Shrey.

"Yeah, kind of--not you, Shrey, and not the elves, the rest of them. The splintering aesthetics thing makes sense even though we don't build it off of sex mostly, but we don't understand the suicide or the censorship or the doing things that aren't in your own interests. I think I see where the beautiful death people are coming from but I don't know if I could pass an intellectual Turing test on it."

"It's lovely for fiction," allows Shrey. "But not so lovely that huge fractions of the population ought reasonably be doing it in real life."

"Ideally nobody would do it on purpose at all! But, like, if someone is dying and holds on long enough to finish the tapestry they're weaving and then calls an ambulance and collapses at their loom, that's more beautiful than if they had died and left it unfinished." (This is said levelly; the delegate would not have been chosen for this mission if they were going to be distracted by strong emotions.)

"We may be asking you for... cultural assistance, at some point, if the Others make more sense to you than to us.  We are very confused by how societies such as those could arise or be stable, and if we are confused, that means that we may believe something that is fiction.  Our prediction markets are registering an increasingly high probability that all of them are pulling the same sort of elaborate pranks on us that we use to test the competence of children and teach them to be skeptical of adult authority."

No, counterproductive like wanting a tragic-beautiful-death-where-you-fall-into-a-glowing-cave-and-all-of-your-enemies-go-‘wow you look so pretty in that cave, I regret everything’-and-everyone-envies-how-beautiful-your-death-was. Or like lying in bed crying all day because of how miserable you are because you're lying in bed crying all day, or cutting yourself so people will notice how sad you are except actually if people notice how sad you are you will feel horribly guilty, or smashing your favorite cup because you want to punish yourself for being bad, or hitting your partner because you love them and that makes you want to see how badly you can behave and keep them around, or watching TV when you'd rather spend time with your kids.

Normal people do that kind of thing all the time. People who do things because it seems like a good idea to do them are saints. The whole diplomacy team is saints, obviously, you don't want to send normal people off to do delicate diplomatic work. Except dath ilan is an entire planet of saints, which is why they have spare resources for things like cryopreservation and aren't busy trying to make sure everyone has washing machines. 

(Do other people know about washing machines? Ozytopians are very impressed by washing machines.) 

"We don't lie to our children, but it does seem possible this is something less than fully honest," acknowledges Shrey, "and we can try to do some cultural translation insofar as possible. Should we pull in another delegate to learn more about dath ilan and specialize in translating for you specifically?"

Green has washing machines. And also, sometimes, watching TV when you'd rather spend time with your kids, but the other stuff is far less common.