You’re right. I have no answer to that, and I apologize. Lila wants to be called Lila and referred to as “she”, and there’s no reason for me not to indulge her in her preference. Mea culpa.
I would associate myself with the perspective provided by the first person I quoted from that articcle, a father of a girl at the school: “If she wants to be identified as a girl, we should respect that.” And although it’s not clear from the article, I doubt he has a problem with her using a stall in the girls’ bathroom. The stalls are, after all, private from each other. But showering or changing in front of girls is another matter entirely.
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But it doesn’t have to be another matter. If I were a legislator in this town, I’d do the same thing I’d do to someone who expressed concern about their kid showering with a black person, or a gay person, or a Muslim, or some other group – educate them about how there’s nothing wrong with any of these categories, that these are just decent and hard-working American folks just like them, and that their kids are in no more danger from being near them or even naked near them than from any other kid. That’s the kind, decent, compassionate, reasonable, etc., response. Some won’t like it, of course, just as some resisted racial integration and tolerance of gay people. But that doesn’t change what’s right and what’s reasonable and what’s appropriate.
It’s amazing to me that you can possibly think this is a good comparison, or that a majority of voters would sign off on this perspective. I mean, holy SHIT. I can’t believe I have to point this out, but no one has ever been raped by a black girl’s dark skin. Dark skin is not something some members of almost every family are born with, and which every culture on Earth keeps covered in mixed company. Jesus.
If Lila’s cock is no threat to the girls, then why have gendered locker rooms at all? Is there some special reason a cisgender boy’s cock is a problem?
Thanks. I consider you an honorable debate opponent as well, even if some of your positions (like the one I just responded to) are baffling to me.
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Why? Is it that you are afraid that they will get turned on? Is it because you are afraid that a boy will go through all of the hurdles required just in order to shower with the girls?
What is it that so terrifies you of having a transgender student share a shower with cisgendered?
Now, personally, I wouldn’t have a problem with getting rid of the whole showering in public requirements altogether. I was never a big fan of it, and I’ve always been relatively secure in my gender and orientation. But, as long as a school requires that students shower as a group, then they should do so along the lines of the genders the identify with, not the ones that other people tell them they have to follow.
Nobody’s ever been raped by a cock, either. It’s human beings who commit crimes, not their component organs. A trans girl’s cock is not going to go wandering around the girls’ shower raping the cis girls, any more than a black girl’s skin is going to wander around the shower getting black pigmentation on the white girls (and how the hell this discussion ever ended up at this Dadaist porn flick plot is more than I can tell).
If a transgender girl is a rapist, then I completely agree she should not be allowed to be using the shower with other girls. But I thought you were so vehemently opposed to accusing people of sexual misconduct before it’s been shown that they did anything wrong?
And in the case of this transgender girl, AFAIK there isn’t even any suggestion that she has ever been accused or suspected of behaving inappropriately towards other girls. So why get all freaked out just because she has a cock?
Well, boys have long been socialized to regard obtaining sexual gratification from girls’ bodies, whether the girls consent to it or not, as some kind of manly accomplishment. That attitude is not unreasonably perceived as hazardous to girls. Of course, there’s no intrinsic reason that boys couldn’t be socialized to regard it differently: indeed, I myself went to a co-ed college thirty-some years ago where we had shared-gender bathrooms and showers, and it wasn’t a problem because nobody tried to perv on anybody else who was just trying to take a damn shower. But we were a self-selected bunch of young adults who were perhaps more thoughtful and civilized about such issues than it’s reasonable to expect a random group of high-school students to be.
So in the present state of society,I don’t have a problem with maintaining traditional gender segregation for student washroom/restroom facilities if the students overall are comfortable with that. But that segregation is fundamentally about gender, not genitalia. A person who identifies as a girl is not more likely to rape her fellow girls in the girls’ locker room just because she has a cock.
Okay, you got me for a poor choice of prepositions. Exchange “by” for “with”, and my point stands.
You seem to be asserting that a teenaged cisboy might objectify teenaged girls, but a teenaged transgirl would not. I’m not sure what the evidence is for that proposition; and in any case, how can you prevent a boy from insincerely claiming to be a transgirl to perv out on the girls? I’m not saying Johnny Football, BMOC, is going to do this—but you can’t tell me that it’s not possible some creep somewhere who’s already a social outcast might pull this “dick move” (heh).
I think if you are going to be consistent, you have to say all schools should be like your college (where on Earth was this, BTW?), which is a nonstarter, or insist that they all have private changing rooms (expensive to retrofit, but at least feasible).
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And BTW, I don’t think the “current social state” is about gender rather than genitalia, fundamentally. Traditionally it’s been easy enough to see the two as intertwined; but I think when you come down to it, most girls and women don’t want people with penises in their private changing area; and any boys/men (cis people with penises, if you prefer) who are uncomfortable changing in front of girls/women, it’s probably because of insecurity about the size of their equipment (or other body flaws).
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It’s not like a boy can just go to the gym teacher, and say, “I want to be a girl today, lemme in the showers.” They have to go through quite a bit, with school officials, with their parents, with professional psychologists, and with their classmates. It is not something that is just done on a whim.
Now, that said, could someone be pervy and determined enough to lie to their parents, teachers, and classmates, get quite a bit of social stigma, as being trans isn’t fully accepted yet, all to sneak a peek at girls in the shower? Sure. That is a thing that could happen. I am sure it has crossed the mind of at least a few horny teenagers. Carrying it out though, I suspect that that would be ultra rare.
You also have lesbians, who may enjoy seeing other girls in the shower, and they don’t have to go through any hoops to do that. Should lesbians have to declare their orientation, so that they too can be segregated? Gay males shouldn’t be allowed to shower with other guys either.
Allowing trans people to use their gender-ID bathroom doesn’t even increase this chance, since a boy can try to disguise themselves to enter the girl’s bathroom whether or not the rule exists. If the rule doesn’t exist, a boy could claim to be a transgender boy, but biologically a girl who then had surgery, to claim they’re really a biological girl and thus use the girl’s bathroom.
Pretty far-fetched, but so is the concern; a boy pretending to be a trans-boy is no more unlikely than a boy pretending to be a trans-girl.
Not really. Since most parts of the human body are covered with skin, people are raped with skin even more often than they’re raped with cocks. It is a statistical certainty that some people sometimes even get raped with black girls’ dark skin, since women and girls, including black girls, can and do commit rape. Transgender women, cocks or no cocks, are no more dangerous to other women than women in general are.
I’m not denying that plenty of cisgender people will initially be uncomfortable about (knowingly) sharing facilities with transgender people, even if a majority of people already agree that such sharing shouldn’t be legally prohibited. But you know, as others have pointed out, lots of white people back in the '50s and '60s were plenty uncomfortable about sharing facilities with black people. As a society we managed to survive that transition, and we’ll manage to survive this one too.
Our dorm was a bit more mega-communal in that we didn’t even have separate shower stalls, but residents negotiated the options like sensible adults (which I agree it’s unreasonable to expect high-school students to be): before getting into a shower already occupied by a person of the opposite gender, you checked to see whether everyone was comfortable with that, and if not, you just waited until the other person was through.
Seems very daring to many young people nowadays raised in smaller families with more bathrooms, but most of us back then were used to sharing bathrooms with multiple siblings, and also liked to show off how civilized and matter-of-fact and mature we were about natural human issues like bodies and nudity. (And to be honest, those of us who were severely myopic, like yours truly, would never have seen anything of an opposite-sex showermate’s anatomy even if we had tried to look. And of course there weren’t water-resistant cameras everywhere in those days so the possibility of some creep snapping a naked pic wasn’t even considered.)
Cite that there were professional psychologists in the Missouri case? I am dubious of this, as I think it would likely have been mentioned in one of the news stories (I have read a lot about the case).
Iiandy, your scenario is too absurd to respond to, except to say that there are light years between falsely claiming to have had surgery and falsely claiming to have a belief inside your mind.
I would add BTW that it’s not only a pervy teen boy who could do what I described, but a sarcastic prankster. Everyone in the school could know he was full of shit (which is what he would want), but they couldn’t actually prove it. If the law says you have to take someone at their word and they file an affidavit or whatever, the fact that they are smirking when they hand it to you, and then high-fiving their bros, is not good enough to counter the law being followed. Nor could you disqualify them based on their “not acting feminine enough”: can you imagine the shitshow among TWC if this became a criterion?
Come to think of it, if I were still in high school, I myself might well be tempted to pull this stunt. (I was the only one at my high school to refuse to say the Pledge, despite heavy peer and teacher pressure on me.)
ETA: If I did, I would “change my genderconforming” or whatever at the last moment–not actually go through with it. But I would have made my point.
…the hilarious thing is that SlackerInc genuinely considers pivoting from one subject to another to be a legitimate debate tactic. So legitimate he encouraged me to do the exact same thing.
Of course SlackerInc isn’t taking his own “friendly advice.” When he finds his position untenable he doesn’t “concede the point” (except for one exception above), but just quickly (but not smoothly) pivots to another argument.
I vote that from now on, every time SlackerInc pivots in this thread, we point and laugh and post this video: