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”?[/quote]
No that’s not my meaning. Transmen who can pass as men are still entitled to use women’s restrooms (I mean, why wouldn’t they be entitled? They are females). But this doesn’t mean they won’t cause the occupants to be confused or anxious with their presence if they look like men. A transmen who is self-aware and empathetic understands this reaction and will do their best to mitigate against it. Instead of taking it personal and getting angry or offended, they would act in a non-threatening manner that communicates “sorry to cause alarm, I’m a transman who just needed to take care of some business right quick, bye”.
The effort to make a gotcha ya out of what I’m saying has been noted, though.
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.
Have you explained why sex-segregation bad, gender-segregation good? If so, I must have missed it.
Women and men don’t “need” different toilets to accommodate biological differences.
Perhaps there are not enough facilities to accommodate the need at certain venues, and that lack is most strongly felt by women, but that doesn’t mean that men and women’s biology necessitates different bathrooms. People of all gender use the same bathrooms all the time. “Plumbing differences” is not a reason for gendered bathrooms.
I pointed out exactly why I thought that suggestion didn’t seem workable way back in post #1772:
I mean, I’m totally willing to listen to an informed legal opinion as to why my doubts about the potential discriminatory nature of such a policy could or would turn out to be groundless. But so far, AFAICT, neither you nor anybody else in this thread has provided one.
Exactly my point: in real-life practical terms, people are going to be expected to calibrate their restroom decisions based on what they look like, rather than on either their genitals or their gender identity.
That is going to involve a whole raft of complications based on people’s varying expectations of gender conformity and assumptions about the relations between gender conformity and genitalia.
No, I don’t think either sex-segregation or gender-segregation is intrinsically “good” or “bad”: it all depends on the circumstances.
The point I’m making is just that you seem to have somewhat unrealistic expectations about how simple, straightforward and feasible sex-segregation policies would be to implement in practice. I think, as I’ve said, that they’d be significantly more complicated because in practice, they’d end up relying a lot more on apparent gender conformity than on fundamental biological sex.
Pretty feeble “gotcha” attempt there, RickJay. Trying to deny or disallow a group of people’s right to exist as their declared identity is not the same thing as advocating that all members of that group should be literally murdered.
It’s in no way inherently contradictory for Banquet_Bear to claim that somebody is engaging in the former but not the latter.
It would survive because this is the same model used in sports. There are women’s divisions and open divisions. This system for restrooms is also described in that Atlantic article I posted.
Your objection actually doesn’t make sense. Transmen would be using a gender neutral space. So would transwomen, Men and women would use this space. So what is making you say transmen would get more affirmation than transwomen?
Let’s be real here: You don’t seem to be all that concerned about court challenges brought on by nonbinaries whose identities are unaffirmed by binary restrooms. Or all the other gender identities who are in need of loos they call their own. If you feel it is a grave injustice for transwomen if they cant be affirmed, I’m gonna need to see some sympathy for these other groups. Cuz otherwise it looks like you’re saying all genders are equal, but some are more equal than others.
Well, gosh, disagreeing with someone’s claims of identity is not denying them existence, is it?
But, well, maybe monstro’s feelings of being accused of wanting people killed were wrong. That seems quite plausible. So are you saying that when a person feels a certain way about another person’s statements, it’s possible their reaction is erroneous?
? Why would rules about sports competition categories necessarily apply in exactly the same way to bathroom use? Again, can you cite an informed legal opinion supporting this claim?
Do you mean this article? And are you referring to this reference in it?
If so, you seem to be taking it for granted that one instance of such a policy in one building on the campus of a private institution, where apparently none of the users (in the predominantly young and liberal user population) have sought to challenge it, means that there would be no problem legally mandating such a policy everywhere. I think that might be a bit too optimistic.
For example, you’ve just heard from Odesio some reasons why he, as a man, wants to have access to a designated men’s restroom that isn’t open to women, just as women have access to a designated women’s restroom that isn’t open to men. To me, that sounds like a reasonable argument why a law mandating a unisex-and-women’s restroom combo would be considered unfair sex discrimination. Again, ISTM that an informed legal opinion is needed to suss this out convincingly: it’s not enough for you to just declare “yeah it’s fine”.
Because the trans men (and also the cis women) have the option to use either of the two restrooms, one of which excludes members of the other biological sex, while the trans women and cis men can only use one restroom, which does not exclude members of the other biological sex. I don’t see a way to argue that such a policy is not discriminatory on the basis of sex. Although, again, if you’ve got a lawyer explicitly arguing otherwise, bring 'em on.
What makes you think I’m not concerned about that? I definitely see the intrinsic unfairness of demanding that nonbinary/agender/etc. people must slot into one of only two binary gendered restroom categories, and I’m all in favor of having unisex/all-gender/etc. restrooms available.
But what we’re talking about here is your specific proposal for mandating a restroom combo with only two categories, unrestricted unisex and restricted women’s. You still haven’t made a persuasive argument why that would work; you just want other people to take your word for it that it would.
But you are saying you don’t want all spaces to be gender neutral: you want some of them to be segregated on the basis of sex. See my above point about how theoretical segregation by sex would end up in practice being segregation by gender conformity.
I don’t understand what you mean by saying that her feelings “were wrong”. Feelings are what you feel; they aren’t “wrong” in the sense that a factual assertion or assumption can be wrong. Care to explain?
If could just point something out, you said the above (bolding mine) in repsonse to monstro saying
Which is not misgendering (sex v gender is a relevant distinction) and hardly gratuitous given the discussion is about exactly that distinction and what to do about it.
You talk about speaking “respectfully” but I’d suggest the biggest respect you can show people is to treat them like grown-ups and don’t try to ignore the facts about a situation.That’s infantalising. Save the social tiptoing for social interactions.
One explanation of what you did mean would have been a lot more useful than six denials of what you didn’t.
Storytime. A few years ago, I read in the paper about a woman who was suing a Jewish school for racial discrimination. Turns out this woman was a convert to Judaism, and her conversion was done by one of the modern, liberal groups. The school was run by a more traditional sect, and although they generally allowed Jews from all groups to attend, they didn’t recognise this woman’s conversion (although they would have recognised one done by their own group). Because of this, they did not recognise her kids as Jewish, and refused to let them attend the school. So, question for you, and @Kimstu, and anyone else who wants to answer: by not recognising them as Jewish, was the school denying this woman, and her children’s existence? Why or why not?
And since no one answered before, what is the point of having separate toilets, changing rooms, prisons and sports for people with different gender identities?
It would take a short sentence to answer this question, and yet we will never get one since it requires some deep thought. Deep thought is not allowed in this discourse. Only fee-fees.
In the past month, two white women have been exposed as posers in a high profile way. Satchuel Cole and Jessica Krug.
Black women have blasted these women for claiming an identity they have no right to. And we have not been condemned for denying these women’s existence by white folks. Indeed, white folks have piled on as well because even white folks get that these women were faking the funk. Despite race being a social construct. Despite race being “no big deal”.
TRA and allies are denying women the right to do this for their own gender/sex class. TRA and allies are dictating to women what it means to be women and not caring that their concept is incompatible with what the majority believes. It would be no different than if white nationalists told black people that we must accept white people who claim to be black. Even white people who have a history of racism. And if we don’t accept them, the white nationalists will call us racist and shame us for being intolerant. This is what the whole discourse feels like to me.
Notice how as soon as BB realized he had no good response to my point that “living as a woman” for males should require actually doing something besides simply existing in a typical male form and living life no different than any other male, he changes the topic back to bathrooms (the low-hanging fruit of this discourse) and accuses me of denying transgender people’s right to exist as a group (emotional extortion). Everyone except the ideologically blind can see that I wasn’t denying transgender people’s right to exist as a group. I’m denying their right to my fucking group. If you want to be in my group, I think you should conform to my group as much as possible. People in my group do not have full beards. We remove our facial hair (I shave my chin whiskers every fucking day). We do not have testosterone. We do not have penises. We do not have XY chromosomes. If you’ve got all four of these traits and have no plans to change any of them, why the hell should I consider you a woman? You can call yourself a woman till you are blue in the face, but that doesn’t mean I’ll ever stop seeing you as anything but a dude wearing a pink scarf.
If you’ve got gender dysphoria and hate your original body and go through the effort of modifying that body so that it no longer screams “MAN!” to others, I am willing to negotiate with you on the “woman” and “female” stuff. But if it is obvious you reduce gender to the kind of jewelry you wear or a particular hairstyle, no. Because by doing this, you’re demonstrating you ain’t really a woman. You are just another male who wants to have his cake and eat it too. The only thing you’ll get from me is the pronoun you want. It’s unreasonable to demand more from me. Not when we live in a sexist, misogynistic society where people in my class are still being kicked in the teeth for the bodies we inhabit.
You’re the one thinking it could be challenged legally. So tell me how you arrive at this view? Point to the law that would be violated? Mind you, I’m talking about the United States.
Sports operate under the same principle that restrooms, locker rooms, and other public accommodations that are allowed to be sex-segregated do.
Notice that it’s a law professor that is describing this policy and the successes seen with it. If you think he wouldn’t be expert enough to know what is legally problematic. I tip my hat off to you in the hubris department. Seriously. That is phenomenal hubris for someone who hasn’t pointed to any laws to support their opinions.
It’s funny that you think @Odesio has a reasonable argument for not wanting to urinate in the presence of people he codes as women, but women are hysterical bigots for not wanting to urinate in the presence of people they code as men.
I agree that an informed legal opinion is needed to suss this out convincingly. Go head and make that informed legal opinion. “That’s sex discrimination” doesn’t cut it.
We could keep male and female single-sex accommodations and add to this unisex 3rd spaces that are either single-occupancy or multi-occupancy.
If that is not feasible due to space constraints, we could keep female accommodations and convert the men’s room into a multi-occupancy gender/sex neutral space.
The only proposal I see from your side is this one:
Keep up the theater of men and women rooms but they can’t be sex-segregated anymore (because that’s exactly what happened during Jim Crow!) Instead, everyone is entitled to use the room of their choosing based on their feelings of what they are on the inside and there will absolutely be no issues with this at all because faith.