Furthermore, we weren’t fucking talking about restrooms. Stop trying to dodge.
We were talking about “living as a woman” to establish bonafides for a transwoman. I think most ciswomen have an idea of what this means, and the idea is 100% incompatible with the concept that you seem to have in your head. Living with a penis, a beard, a testosterone is not “living as a woman” to most ciswomen. It might be going by feminine pronouns, wearing feminine clothing, taking HRT, and getting some plastic surgery… In other words, it’s doing something besides just fucking existing.
Neither. It’s pretty clear that Alex is transgender and Alma is genetically XX. But I think Alex is being disrespectful to the ciswomen in the bathroom since his full beard is a genetically XY, testosterone-enabled male beard and not the sparse, light facial hair found on genetically XX people. Visually, I think someone like Alex looks like a man in a dress and Alma looks like a woman with facial hair. But I can deduce from a variety of clues that Alex is likely transgender and not a man who pulled on a dress to sneak a peek in the bathroom.
Hirsute ciswomen have always existed, but they’ve always be a super tiny minority of womanhood. For biological reasons, obviously. I just can’t see women like Alma ever being a frequent occurrence. Not just because beards are coded as masculine, but because beards are damn-near impossible for ciswomen to grow. So even if she wasn’t obviously female, her presence in a women’s space would not be a threat to the safety and security of the space. She’s a “one-off” that 99.9% of women will never encounter.
If we encourage bearded males to use the women’s restroom, then bearded males in women’s spaces will be normalized. And maybe this wouldn’t be a bad thing if it weren’t for the existence of predatory men who also have beards, but we know predatory men with beards are plentiful and would love to come into women’s spaces with impunity. So a woman who goes into a restroom will have to decide if the bearded male hovering by the sinks is a fellow woman or a predator looking for prey. They won’t have to do that with Alma because Alma is an obvious woman. But they will have to do that with a male who thinks their pink scarf is enough to mark them as a woman. And they will have to hide their fear because if the bearded male with the pink scarf sees any sign of negativity, their gender affirmation will be denied them and the sky will come crashing down.
IS she challenged every time she enters a bathroom? I imagine maybe sometimes, but then it’s her choice not to shave. We’d have to ask her, I suppose.
Why bother to have gender-identity-specific bathrooms? What’s the point? And what do you do about the emerging genders that aren’t “identify as man” and “identify as woman”?
I’d like to know this too. It’s like having bathrooms for introverts and extroverts (one has total privacy, and a social convention of no conversation, the other features double stalls and comfy chairs so you can have a chat while/after going about your business). If you’re gonna reduce the sexes to personality traits, why have separate bathrooms, changing rooms, prisons? Why bother to track the gender pay gap or representation of women in parliament? This is where I see gender ideology ultimately heading, and I don’t like it at all.
…do you really not see the irony of accusing me of being in an echo chamber?
You and a handful of other posters have been posting multiple times a day in this thread, seven days a week, for months. You keep repeating the same talking points over and over again, you all agree with each other, and the only time it stops being an echo chamber is when one of the many people that disagrees with you tags into the thread to have their say. And it is always only one or two posters at a time that come in to disagree with you, because arguing with a group of people in an echo chamber is exhausting.
“Just allowing them to exist” would be one of the things that trangender people would want you to allow them to do. But you can’t even give them that.
Are you suggesting I want to kill transgender people?
Because I don’t know what else you could possibly mean.
Since you can’t seem to comprehend anything that isn’t a three-word slogan, I’ll spell it out for you as pithily as possible: I want transgender people to have the same rights that I have and nothing more. I don’t want dude-looking males demanding access to women’s spaces, and I’m sick of men like you telling me I should let them in.
No. No I am not suggesting you want to kill transgender people. Not at all. That was not my suggestion. I did not suggest that. No way in fucking hell did I suggest that.
I’m gonna walk away from the thread now. Time for someone else to tag in for a few days.
Well, here’s what the majority opinion that RBG concurred with in Harris said about a transgender woman who identifies as a woman and uses “she/her” pronouns:
And here’s what you just said about a transgender woman who identifies as a woman and uses “she/her” pronouns:
ISTM it’s sheer wishful thinking on your part to imagine that RBG would be supporting you in deliberately misgendering transgender individuals and implying that their transgender identity is a delusion or a lie.
I don’t think you can make a persuasive case that you’re actually “in support of trans rights” in any meaningful way, when you insist on deliberately and gratuitously using transphobic rhetoric such as misgendering.
Yes, we could have mutually respectful discussions about how laws and policies should take into account differences between transgender and cisgender people, and how protections on the basis of sex should be reconciled with protections on the basis of gender identity. Contrary to your reiterated groundless assertions, I’m not in fact demanding that everybody of good will must automatically agree with all my positions on all these issues.
But we can’t have respectful discussions if you refuse to speak respectfully about transgender individuals.
I’m going to the same article I posted before. Look at the photo at the top.
Why, pray tell, are women’s restroom lines at public events almost always three times as long as men’s lines? Is it because we can’t just pull out of our urethras and pee into a urinal trough and then be done licketysplit? Could it be because at any given moment, a certain percentage of women are dealing with periods that require extra time is spent on pads, cups, tampons, and other bloody stuff?
Women can’t use urinals to do their businesses; they need toilets in a way most men don’t because they have different needs. In the vast majority of cases, transmen have the same needs that women have. So yes because of this biological reality, it makes sense that toilets reserved for people with this reality would be availability to them.
It turns out that one major factor, in addition to stall-vs-urinal efficiency, may be men’s greater irresponsibility about washing their hands after using the restroom:
In fact, anecdotal evidence suggests that the heightened consciousness levels about handwashing in the current pandemic may be lengthening the lines for the men’s room:
Here is an article from a transman about men’s restrooms. Gives a little insight why the women’s restroom might frequently be a preferred option for transmen, particularly ones that doesn’t pass and/or desire more hygienic accommodations.
There are tools that enable transmasculine people to pee standing up prior to having lower surgery, some of which are realistic enough for undetected use at public urinals. I’ve tried a few with varying success. They come in handy for camping, and one time when a fellow trans guy and I were drunkenly hanging out on the steps of some Wall Street building after last call, I used one to pee on a statue. But Occu-pee Wall Street aside, I generally prefer not to have to carry equipment on me all day.
So it’s stall life for me, which can really stink sometimes. I mean, literally. The vast majority of cisgender men only ever use the stall to take a dump. I spend so much of my time outside occupied restroom stalls that I’ve considered penning an essay series entitled, “Waiting for the Cis Men to Stop Pooping: The Life and Times of a Trans Man.”
Besides the wait times and my nerves about using the Wiz Palace alongside my friends, there is also the issue of safety. I’m well aware that my use of the stall and risk of not being read as male puts me in danger of getting harassed by a fellow restroom-goer, or even reported by one to nearby authorities.
It might. But somewhat confusingly, your quoted excerpt omitted all the author’s subsequent explanation of why he doesn’t in fact prefer to use the women’s restroom:
Here’s some more helpful perspective on restroom regulations from that transgender man’s article:
This transmen was respectful of women’s spaces by being self-aware enough to understand that by changing his phenotype into a more masculine one, he was inciting fear in the women’s restroom. So he took that as a sign that using the men’s room was the best path forward. He didn’t just stay in the ladies and demand these bitches just suck it up, and he also didn’t immediately start using the men’s room with pre-conceived expectations of acceptance either. He wanted until he could blend in with the user population.
A lot of transmen do not pass as men. Either because they don’t take T or because T isn’t enough to masculinize their appearance. This population probably won’t be as motivated to use the men’s room as transmen who can pass, and I don’t see this as an issue at all.
So here’s a wild and crazy suggestion that has been rejected multiple times in this thread for no good reason.
Why not turn the men’s room into gender neutral territory while letting females have female-exclusive space? Seems like a fair compromise between women’s rights and gender affirmation rights. So why again is it rejected?
what you meant was that women’s restrooms should be available not to transgender men in general, but specifically to transgender men who can “blend in with the user population” in women’s restrooms because they “do not pass as men”?
We keep on coming back to the same problem that all these supposedly straightfoward proposed rules about designating men’s and women’s spaces based on simple biological sex criteria seem to have. Namely, in order to work successfully when implemented in real life, they rely heavily on unquantifiable and subjective perceptions of gender conformity, rather than on biological sex per se.
I really don’t want women in the men’s room. If there’s something wrong with the women’s room or there’s an unreasonably long line, sure, I’m not so unreasonable that I won’t make an exception due to circumstances. But I’m not comfortable taking a leak in front of women.