Maybe the real separation should be urinals vs stalls.
I’ve used the ladies room at work when both of the men’s bathrooms were being cleaned at the same time. I had a lady friend stand outside and tell anyone that I was in there and why, most of them didn’t care and used the bathroom with me inside. I’ve also used women’s bathrooms (and seen women use the mens’s bathroom) in those single toilet kinds in gas stations.
When I worked at the gas station, I would tell people waiting to use the other gender bathroom if it was empty.
This is just bafflingly, obviously wrong. Almost every European country has a law recognizing transpeople in some way. A scant few, like Hungary, have laws explicitly banning or disallowing legal transition which wouldn’t be necessary if people didn’t try. Many more require SRS, and a good number (increasing every year) allow legal transition without SRS (but there may be other requirements like HRT).
Hell, Iran does the highest number of SRS surgeries per capita of any nation in the world. Though this is a complicated social issue and could also be viewed as a different way of normalizing homosexuality than the west as much as it recognizing transpeople. (Since homosexuality is still very much frowned upon there. It’s sort of a flipped timeline of the way events and acceptance are happening in the US, where we largely recognized the LGB before the T).
I think it’s more accurate to say that gender transition can be made without a medical or surgical component, if that’s what you were getting at. When a person announces that their gender is different from what they were assigned at birth, that announcement actually IS the transition. Most people who transition genders do not have surgery as part of the transition, and while most have a medical component in which they get hormone treatment, many people don’t have that either.
I was in a building once where I regularly used the toilet. The toilets were next to each other on a landing, a gents and a ladies. One day the gents was occupied so I went next door. Turned out the ladies wasn’t single occupancy, but had two stalls in it. Luckily I was uninterrupted.
This is as good a place as any to ask a question I’ve wondered about for a while. I’ve heard the term “pre-op” used for those who do not have surgery. Is this still used and is it an accurate description? Or is it accurate to say that those who don’t have surgery don’t consider themselves “pre-” anything? If so, is there another way to express that concept succinctly?
Thanks for your patient answers to someone who sincerely wants to know.
Speaking as a male… I have never spent one second more in a men’s room than I have to. It’s get in, pee, and get out (ideally, without inhaling).
I’ve never noticed a transgender person in the men’s foolish me. Maybe that means there aren’t many, maybe I’m just oblivious. Regardless, I hope a transgender person would want to get out of that bathroom as quickly as I do.
I truly don’t understand the bathroom debate on either side. It is a room with stalls (and urinals in the men’s ones). The purpose is to pee or poop and then move along.
The Boston area used to have some large unisex bathrooms back in the 90’s (they still might somewhere but I don’t go to nightclubs much these days). Everything worked fine.
This shouldn’t even be a political debate. It should be a plumber and builders debate. The U.S. sent people to the moon about 50 years ago but the typical bathroom stall looks like it was designed and installed by 7th graders. There is no reason for anything to have gaps that big.
On the other side, I have no idea why anyone thinks that bathroom facilities have anything to do with sexual preference, gender orientation or anything else. I lived in a coed dorm in college segregated by floor. I used to use the showers and toilets on the girls floors all the time simply because those were the closest ones. Nobody cared. Hung-over college girls wrapped waist to head in a towel in flip-flops and no makeup are exactly as sexy as you would assume.
The only problem I see with making all bathrooms unisex is that men’s bathrooms are much more efficient as anyone that has been to a large event can attest to. It takes males about 45 seconds to go in, pee and come back out. For some women, you need a calendar to measure the time needed. For some unknown reason, about half the people in the world confuse a filthy room where people shit and pee with an exclusive social club.
Builders have been building closet sized single commode restrooms for a long while.
Close the door, do your business, don’t leave a mess, and be on your way. This is Such a non-issue for any state to legislate.
Usually the terms are pre-op, post-op, and non-op, with the latter being people who don’t want to have surgery.
Note that operations are a really wonky barometer for trans stuff in general. Due to various reasons such as fear of complications, lack of coverage for trans healthcare by insurance, lack of availability of reliable surgeons, and other things a lot of transwomen can’t or won’t do full vaginoplasty (the specific term for what most think of as MTF bottom surgery), but many will still do an Orchiectomy (essentially castration) because it means they don’t have to take anti-androgenizing medication (testosterone and sometimes DHT blockers) in addition to estrogen supplements. This means that, over a lifetime, you save money on medications, but also anti-androgens like Spironolactone can have issues with electrolyte and fluid balance being diuretics.
In addition, nonbinary transfeminine people (that is, people assigned male at birth that consider themselves nonbinary but moving towards the feminine direction) frequently don’t even want vaginoplasty, but will take the orchiectomy due to medication issues.
FTM surgery is a sad topic. A lot of transmen will do top surgery (the generic umbrella term for various flavors of breast reduction and masectomy procedures) to reduce dysphoria from their breasts and not have to wear tight uncomfortable breast binders, but unlike vaginoplasty, the FTM bottom surgeries are… not known for being particularly convincing or effective. Some get hysterectomies, but since for many trasmen menstruation almost entirely ceases on testosterone a lot won’t even elect to do that since periods stop being relevant and hysterectomies can have a ton of complications. In this case, nonbinary transmasculine people tend to get roughly the same surgeries as binary transmen (top surgery and rarely hysterectomies).
This is part of why states that require “surgery” to get your birth certificate gender (or even legal gender) changed are kind of bullshit, there are such a staggering number reasons people may not want or be able to get surgery. Some of whom are otherwise completely passing and functioning as their identified gender due to HRT. In fact, it’s known that in many states the judge doesn’t really look too hard at the exact surgery you got, so some transwomen will get something simple like a tracheal shave (removing the adam’s apple) and get that surgeon to write a letter and it will work the same as a full-on vaginoplasty.
Una can speak more to this if she’s around and wants to, but I assume this topic gets even murkier when it comes to intersex people who may not even really need anything widely recognized as a trans-related surgery to reduce dysphoria.
Personally, I occasionally refer to myself as pre-op because I’m going to get bottom surgery in the near future, but referring to transpeople as “pre-op” and “post-op” is a bit reductive and nonsensical in many cases due to the ambiguity of what that actually even means. (Not to mention the state of their genitals falls squarely into “none of your business”)
To be clear, bathrooms aren’t exactly the thing on the forefront of most transpeoples mind, but instead wormed its way into a weird banner issue. You’re right, functionally they’re just to expel waste and move along, but to transpeople they serve as a little reminder every day of how people view you and whether they accept you as your gender identity. Especially for non-passing transpeople.
It’s not bathrooms that are the issue so much as the anxiety and animosity transpeople risk facing when participating in gender segregated activities in general. For instance, I’m concerned about participating in intramural sports or martial arts at my grad school because I don’t want to fucking deal with people who find out I’m trans trying to rules lawyer that a match doesn’t “really count” and there was “cheating” because I’m “really a dude”. Hell, I’ve been convinced to join a women’s choir in the fall as an alto/mezzo since my voice feminization has gone so well, and I have some anxiety around that. Bathrooms just kind of became the face of general gender segregation issues that face transpeople because, hey, everyone needs to use the bathroom and there’s some pernicious cultural anxiety regarding privacy, genitals, and rape in the background. Personally, of these things bathrooms are the least stressful since I both pass and live in the liberal part of The Peoples’ Republic Of Oregon, so I use the women’s room and nobody bats an eye since they just see another chick using the bathroom. Yeah, there’s a theoretical fear someone clocks me and freaks out, but it’s remote compared to other things like sports (even just for funsies and not real stakes).
And to be clear, I’m not suggesting nothing be gender segregated, I’m just saying that from our perspective the “bathroom” isn’t really the problem, it’s just the most visible facet of a much larger issue.
It’s fine in Spain. After all, not even cloistered nuns have gender-segregated bathrooms at home (for those who may be confused: male visitors are allowed to use the bathroom).
Last week I ran into an unexpected situation at a mall’s bathroom: a young man and woman were in the ladies’, helping a second woman with a broken femur manoeuver off the toilet and onto a wheelchair. The only reaction they got was another woman who spontaneously helped move the chair to the right spot (they’d left it too far).