How deep do you want to drill into that, though? The reason we have those traditional gender norms in the first place wasn’t based on sexual orientation (which didn’t really exist as a concept when those norms were developing) but on preserving clear lines of descent and inheritance - in other words, not to prevent fucking so much as to prevent pregnancy. And since pregnancy isn’t a concern with gay sex, there’s no problem with having lesbians in the women’s locker room.
Hee hee. Sometimes I have the brain of a 13-year-old.
I haven’t heard that theory of gender separation norms. Interesting. To be clear, I was neither trying to justify nor attack single-sex locker rooms. I was just making the empirical statement that their existence does have something to do with sexual orientation. Whether our breaking down assumptions and norms about gender and orientation affects how we structure locker rooms I’m not sure, but it’s certainly part of the equation.
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There is a decent chance she is either straight (and not interested in other women) or asexual. Estimates vary wildly, but my educated guess is between 40-60% would fall into that category.
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If she’s been on hormones for more than a year, there is a good chance her “male equipment” is barely or non-functional. Past two years on hormones, the number who can still use said equipment are uncommon (younger ones can have better luck, but then you don’t usually hire 16 year-olds to be gym coaches).
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What Marley said:
Yeah, one could argue that the point of having separate male and female locker rooms is so that everyone in the room has the same equipment, so there’s no reason to stare or be stared at. Which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with sexual orientation.
How closely this matches the psychological reality, I don’t know…
I guess it would depend upon the lesbians behavior.
If she “just happens” to always be standing there when the girls are undressing or taking a shower and especially if she stares, the concern is probably valid - she’s a perv and gets off on young female bodies. I’d say fire her.
If she had any values and respect she should stand just outside the door though. Close enough to monitor if anything bad was happening but far enough to give some privacy.
No different than the many times its men who are coaching womens sports teams and sometimes must be go into the locker rooms. They know where to stand and face and to always give warnings when they are coming thru.
Female athletes I know say the issue of lesbians checking them out does sometimes make for some “interesting” locker room situations. Usually after awhile the gay girls tend to cluster together. I know as a guy in the mens locker room it was the gay guys who loved to walk around naked strutting their stuff.
Interesting. I’ve found the complete opposite. I and the other gay guys I knew would be the quick change artists while it was straight guys that just wandered about naked. There was one that I didn’t mind doing it…damn that guy was hot. Trainer, 20 years of martial arts and very well sized in all the right places.
I always thought that WAS the reason.
This sounds like the to-do over transsexual women using the ladies’ toilet- it seemed it was invariably the men who were up in arms about it and the women for the most part just didn’t care as long as everyone was acting in accordance with public toilet norms.
It depends upon the place. At the YMCA its the old fat guys who walk around naked. Back in college, it was the gay guys.
I can see that. This was at a regular gym so probably not the same demographic.
Those two. My high school had a gay coach back when it wasn’t cool to be that and I didn’t care if he was in the locker room. He never stopped and gawked at the kids changing and while he did walk through to monitor (which was easy: Main path with perpendicular runs of lockers on each side), he didn’t do anything I would consider “Creepy.” In fact, only one student was freaked out by it, who then told his mother, who then tried to get the guy fired because he was obviously going to molest her son. I wish I was kidding, but that’s the actual rationale she used to pitch termination to the administration. :rolleyes:
Sadly, the next year he was no longer a coach, only a teacher. A few years after I left the high school, the buzz was the new coach was busted for installing cameras in the female locker room. Stupid parent. 
Actually, by that standard homosexuals and bisexuals would have to be banned from locker rooms altogether. Well, I guess there could be a two-person locker room that allows exactly one gay man and one lesbian at a time, but other than that the only way to have a locker room where there’s no possibility that anyone might be sexually attracted to anyone else in the room is to separate by sex AND ban everyone who isn’t 100% heterosexual.
So, you’re concerned weights will be lifted?
That’s a silly statement as I think you at least partially admitted in a later post. The existence of men’s and women’s, and particularly teenage boy’s and girl’s, locker rooms has everything to do with ‘sexual orientation’, as in the orientation of the vast majority of the population to engage in sexual relations with the opposite sex, which is deeply socially associated with the sexes being naked in each other’s presence.
Physical separation of dressing rooms and lavatories is an easy solution to divorce sex from other activities. It’s not universal in all societies, but close to it and certainly so in our Western society historically.
Applying the same idea where there’s open acceptance of homosexuality is more complicated. But I don’t think one should get all riled up about the term ‘double standard’. As an objective description it’s basically correct. The root reason male gym teachers aren’t allowed in girls’ locker rooms is the same as the reason a separate girl’s locker room exists at all, which is about separating sex or the implication of sex, being viewed naked by someone who might be sexually attracted, from other activities. The lesbian gym teacher is in plain fact being treated differently wrt to that original reason the girl’s locker room exists.
It’s reasonable to argue various why that differential treatment is acceptable or necessary when it comes to homosexuals, but a very weak argument to try to wave it off by claiming separate male/female locker rooms aren’t about preventing sexually oriented viewing of other people naked. That’s in fact basically why they exist.
Couldn’t you see his nose even when he had his clothes on? 