I just don’t buy it. The OP made it clear that biology remains in effect. As long as male and female are biologically distinct, there will be a something that makes gender erasure, and therefore, “casual coed nudity” impossible.
I am not saying that humans can’t behave while in the presence of a naked person of the opposite sex, of course they can and should. But that doesn’t mean everyone can ever be 100% comfortable with it.
Respect and decency is one thing, being nonchalant is another.
Casual co-ed nudity is only a “problem” in cultures where nudity is looked upon negatively. It is definitely learned behavior, if you’ve ever raised a significant number of boys (who will gleefully streak until you socialize them out of it). Admittedly, most cultures nowadays have strong provisions against it, but that certainly wasn’t true when you examine the now extinct pagan cultures of Europe or indeed any “primitive” society. I mean, have you forgotten all that time you spent as a kid trying to find that national geographic cover with all the tribal ladies with large… grass skirts?
Now, I don’t think that gender erasure will lead to the shower scene so to speak, because the idea of “privacy” which is relatively new in history is so ingrained on us. Our environment prettymuch maximizes privacy and our culture reinforces it. Hell, it’s illegal to buck the trend.
But nudists do it without much issue, and really, if you and a few good friends go to a nude beach the awkwardness of it goes away within minutes. I wouldn’t know from experience of course… I’m too busy browsing the library for my favorite magazines
I would quibble with this. Of course casual nudity won’t be a “problem” among people who enjoy looking and to be looked at (i.e nudists, pagan societies). But the bottom line is, there are a lot of people who do not want to be seen naked, and not just for fear or prudish reasons either.
And having been a boy myself with a brother, and now raising boys myself, I disagree about them having to be socialized out of casual nudity or streaking. At a certain point you become more self conscious, and while you may not have a problem necessarily being naked with a group of guys, you would be very uncomfortable in the presence of girls. That’s normal human development.
One of my sons is 5 and he will run around the house naked without a care in the world, but if we are outside, he’s afraid to change his shirt because someone might see him. We haven’t done anything to make him feel uncomfortable, and we are actually having to socialize him that it’s ok for him to be seen without a shirt.
Agreed. As another anecdata point, I spent a year in a college dorm with co-ed multi-user bathrooms including what might be called “co-ed optional” group showers. That is, there was one large multi-showerhead shower area, no separate stalls, and people already in the shower could either request “[my gender] only till I get out, please” or say “come on in anyone, I don’t care”.
Most of us by the end of the first week or so didn’t care at all, and AFAIK nobody used the co-ed nudity situation as an opportunity to harass anybody else or even for consensual slippery fun. (Or at least the consensual slippery funsters were very discreet. Hmmm, that does suggest that there could have been harassers as well who were equally discreet. )
Sure, the nudity aversion is learned - but it’s a completely separate thing from most other kinds of gendered prejudices. Or at least I think is is - I’m still not sure what exactly the OP is proposing will happen.
Escalating the strangeness, the OP mentions losing gendered pronouns. Were we to lose gender awareness I would actually assume the pronouns would revert(?) to their strictly biological meanings; for use of the terms to go away entirely I would assume we’d have to lose our genitalia as well. Or maybe not? Boats don’t have genitalia and we still pretend they have gender…
Long and short of it I’m still not sure what’s under discussion here, exactly. And there’s a part of me that still strongly suspects that the actual discussion here is just an angry response to being told to call somebody who at one point had a penis by female pronouns.
What? I don’t generally go to nude beaches with my guy friends… And no, that’s not “normal” that’s you projecting your cultural biases, which is fine, but you have no idea what “normal” is for humans outside of culture. Your entire life experience presumably shaped by having been raised in a society that inherited a lot of its culture from either Victorian england, the puritans, or the equally sensitive catholics assuming you live anywhere in the West.
You have to look outside your culture.
You have not consciously done anything, maybe, but you have done plenty to subconsciously socialize him. It’s impossible for you not to have, socialization is constant and operates with or without intent. He also receives socialization from his environment and from society at large.
The fact that he lives most of his life segregated from neighbors and individuals he doesn’t know is actually very strange. Houses are not natural things after all.
Most public restrooms don’t have shower stalls, so you don’t have to worry about walking in on a guy showering when you go to McDonalds.
If you’re worried that a woman might see a transwoman’s penis, she’s not going to be using a public urinal in a woman’s bathroom, because women’s bathrooms typically don’t have urinals.
Your solution is to pass a law saying a transwoman has to use the men’s bathroom? Why exactly? Who are you protecting?
Yeah, yeah. You’re worried that a rapist will put on a dress claim to be transgendered and hang out in the women’s bathroom, and there won’t be a damn thing we can do about it, thanks Obama.
You wanna know why I don’t have gendered bathrooms in my house? It’s not because I know for sure that no rapist will visit my house and use the restroom. It’s that the restroom is single-use. Someone wants to pee, they go in and close the door and do their business, and they don’t have to worry about rapists or Peeping Toms because the door is closed.
The same thing can happen in public restrooms. Close the door, and no one can see you pee. Win-win for everyone, except the flashers and Peeping Toms. Bathroom stalls with doors. They exist in lots of places!
Is it mandatory that you pee in a urinal? Don’t think so. I have, in a slight emergency had to use a male restroom. People seeing me pee was the least of my worries. That place stank. You guys know women’s restrooms don’t smell like that, don’t you? It was really bad.
I’ve been to a coffee shop in San Francisco with several unisex bathrooms with a single facility each instead of two bathrooms with multiple facilities. Which is just like most homes. Problem solved.
They put the sinks outside to be shared, saving space.
The whole bathroom problem is just tradition.
We just finished a Russian novel of a thread where we decided that, unlike men, women don’t want to know about men’s sexual interests and imaginings. Now they do? Or do men not want to hear about such things either, but we’re in denial?
For the record: I have no problems respecting a TG person’s name, identity, and pronouns; viz.: My name is Mumberthax and my pronouns are they/them. Or, try this: “My name is Caitlyn and my pronouns are she/her.”.
I’ve already put up a bunch of links on radfem resources. No offense, but it’s Friday and I’m all partied out to do anything other than go to bed. I’m also drunk off my ass from doing Jagerbombs and bumping it to vintage Def Leppard tracks (yeah, I’m an old fart). Maybe I’ll expound more later, but for now, fuck it.
I don’t know about trans men being homophobic lesbians, but gender dysphoria and issues with gender identity are SELFphobia. To feel or believe that you (just for example - this works equally both ways) are a man who was born as a woman, it is necessarily because you have both of the limiting and flawed social ideas “A man is only…” and “A woman is only…”. If you did not have those two flawed and limiting ideas, you would correctly guess that “woman” automatically includes whatever characteristics you happen to have, because you are a woman. Gender identity is indeed a product of patriarchy, and of matriarchy for that matter. Gender identity is a completely irrelevant topic for everyone, except as far as to reveal it as a cruel hoax.
Abolishing gender is impossible. There are many hard-wired, born, innate differences between men and women. No amount of emperor’s-new-clothes-ing will make them go away.
As far as the topic of the subthread: Yes, urinals are a problem, in that they’re either mostly or completely bereft of dividers, but men don’t usually want other men to see their genitals, so we’re pretty… huddled, if you get my drift… even if there are only other men in the room. Also, since women generally aren’t going to use urinals, they won’t be in position to see much of anything anyway.
As far as the topic of the main thread: Some aspects of gender are innate. Otherwise, trans people wouldn’t exist. (Yes, this is what makes TERFs such angry fucks: They can’t accept the idea that any aspect of gender is innate, so trans people are walking, talking Political Incorrectness as far as they’re concerned.) But how much is innate, and which specific aspects? Aye, there’s the rub, and that will keep actual academics occupied for the foreseeable future.
Your cite actually says men’s restrooms smell worse. I wasn’t taking bacterial samples, at the time. I was using my Mom nose and that restroom flunked, big time. I believe it’s the urinals that were making the awful smell. Whoever was supposed to clean them should get fired.
This thread started about gender abolition, and it ended up with a woman taking a leak in the male shitter. I like that. Perhaps there’s some foreshadowing going on here? Make of that what you will…just remember, YOU came to that conclusion without any help from me.
Hmmm, that does suggest that there could have been harassers as well who were equally discreet. 
)