No.
We’re simply agreeing with mental health professionals and the medical community instead of random guy from the internet who appears to have gotten all of his knowledge about Transgendered people from crappy porn films.
How could you ever make such a mistake when you watched Transparent? The mind boggles.
There comes a point where a discussion is no longer accomplishing anything. If I don’t see some forward motion soon I’m sending everyone to their respective corners and you can come back at it in a week or so.
I agree; and as I said, I find this particular debate boring anyway. I think I’ve expressed what I want to express, so I’m just gonna unsubscribe from the thread now.
Yeah, I don’t think anyone thinks that except you.
Let’s turn the question around because I don’t like how political the question always gets framed (my answer won’t change so don’t worry about that): “If people self-identify as male but have fully functional female genitals, should they be allowed in the men’s locker?”
If its sincerely held as gender usually is, then yes, let them in. Trans people are horribly feared and hated. Its likely they are much more scared of the other cis-people than those people are afraid of the trans-person.
To that I would add, no tests should be given at the door, no monitor should have the power to check, and no proof must be demanded from them. It may be bad to go on the honor system, but the alternatives are much worse. That emphasis will be what I will point to if you reply with “but how will you know?” or “what if they’re lying?” or any other what if’s.
The alternatives are much worse. Let’s not overreact when it comes to sex. In many aspects of life, one can go on doing dickish things until one is caught because the alternative is that everyone must explain themselves to some governing body. Conservatives have a similar argument for guns: “If the guy’s not doing anything, only being menacing and suspicious, so what? Its his right!”
To police every person going into the locker is a far worse result than letting possibly lying rapists into a locker room of their wrong gender.
But that’s not the only reason. Presumably, rapists are that way because they’re willing to break the law. Having separate lockers then is no deterrent. Rape is illegal, and no bathroom law will change that. What you are positing that fake trans people will do is already illegal behavior. We need not curtail the rights of trans people to target rapists. We already have laws against rape. That’s enough.
However, I will admit that it presents a better opportunity for them because of proximity, but that is the price we must pay in a free society. I may differ with other pro-trans people in that I believe we should take that chance, that even if we have an epidemic of fake-trans-locker-rapes, we should STILL allow trans people to go to the locker of their gender identification. The problem is with rapists who will take advantage of the law to get into close proximity with boys. We should make laws targeting them, not trans-people. In life, everything we do has a trade-off cost. You drive because its efficient, but the trade-off is you are in more danger driving around in a car. You may not have bars on your windows because you want to see the sunshine clearly, but you’re less safe because someone can break into your house through your window. The evidence doesn’t bear out any kind of trans-attacks, but I can see some rapists trying to use this law to their advantage. That’s the trade-off we should make: people might be slightly less safe, but the alternative is that trans-people have more rights than they did before. Its a trade we should make.
So I hope I have answered that above already, but if its not clear, then here it is again: I understand that there are predators that may use these laws as cover, going into the men’s room instead of the women’s, and fake crying about trans-rights when they are caught. And I understand that there may be people less willing to call out someone acting suspicious in the men’s room because of the new laws, and thereby help facilitate these women’s attack on men. That might happen. But its a preferable alternative to policing trans-people’s bathroom usage.
When cars became faster, we told manufacturers to include seat belts and air bags. When football became more dangerous, we added more padding and better helmets. We did not ban cars or football, we regulated it. It may be that we’ll need new laws with harsher punishment targeting rapists, but I’m not willing to throw all trans-people under the bus to avoid having that discussion.
We’ll live with that in a free society because its the right thing to do, not the easy thing to do. This country takes bigotry very seriously in all its forms. Never should we allow that to continue because we’re afraid that freedom might be abused by assholes. In an open society, its pretty much guaranteed that it will be abused, but how we respond to that to protect our weakest and most marginalized members should be the discussion, and the debate should never be about how we need to tell certain people to not cause trouble because we’re too afraid to help them.
Perhaps SlackerInc won’t read this, or at least won’t read this for a while. But I wanted to point out the logical inconsistency of the solution he proposes to what he sees as being The Problem–with the Problem stated in the first post quoted, and the Solution coming from the second post:
So, SlackerInc has said that the reason there must be laws preventing transgender persons from using the restroom of their choice is that anyone with a working penis is potentially a rapist or molester.
If this is true, then having one facility, “formerly the ‘men’s room’” as Slacker says, be accessible to all with working penises is NOT a solution, because if one person with a working penis is in a restroom with any other person–male or female, child or adult–then the potential for that working-penis person to commit rape or molestation exists. Or at least it exists IF Slacker’s hypothesis (that all with working penises could potentially commit rape or molestation) is true.
If that hypothesis is true, then the ONLY possible solution is that persons with working penises cannot be in a restroom in which ANY other person is present.
In other words, the only possible solution, if the hypothesis is true, is single-user restrooms for those with working penises.
Those who seek to assert that the “reason” for new laws limiting the rights of transgender persons is The Potential For Rape, logically have a responsibility to call for the outlawing and eradication of all multi-user men’s rooms.
Otherwise they need to find some other, doubtless equally-fallacious rationale for their aggression against the transgendered.
A general legal principle I try to live by is this:
Preventing actual harm to people is better than preventing imaginary harm to people.
So, same-sex marriage is a good thing, because outlawing it causes actual harm to actual people, whereas permitting it causes imaginary harm to homophobes.
Voter ID laws are bad, because having them causes actual harm to actual people, whereas the kind of voter fraud they impede is an imaginary harm done to voters.
HB2 is bad, because it causes actual harm to actual people, whereas predators who exploit loopholes in the law is an imaginary harm done to women.
Some situations are more difficult: should we raise taxes in order to better fund schools? Should we provide military support to Syrian rebels? Should we regulate greenhouse gases more stringently? In all these cases, either option results in actual harm, so we need to be very careful how we decide these cases.
But HB2 is easy. One set of laws causes actual harm; the other set causes imaginary harm.
That presumes that you define “imaginary harm” as “harm that I’ve decided to wave away”. If you respect other people’s right to decide what they feel as harm, that doesn’t hold.
For example (among many others out there) here’s a story of a bunch of girls uncomfortable with a transgender girl sharing their locker room and bathroom. Why do you get to declare that “imaginary harm”?
A good question that we’ve had to answer for many different situations throughout history.
We have to look at the underlying reasons why these girls are feeling “harm”. Are they logical? Are they meaningful? Do they have a basis in reality?
For example, if the uncomfortable girls in your example are “feeling harmed” because their parents have taught them to hate and shun those who are different… Then I don’t think they are feeling valid “harm”. One is not “harmed” by having to share the planet with a group of people they hate.
Because transitory discomfort is not the sort of harm that society is generally concerned with, especially when weighed against actual harms.
This is a pretty interesting question, though, which I’d like to turn back around on you. Do you define transitory discomfort as a real harm? For example, many students on college campuses have complained that having abortion protesters on campuses makes them feel uncomfortable. Do you think college administrators should treat that as a real harm when they’re weighing whether abortion protesters should be allowed on campus?
If a bunch of teenage girls felt uncomfortable sharing a restroom with a quadriplegic student, would you consider that a real harm that we needed to address?
In all these cases, I do not. In a diverse society, people are going to spend time around thsoe who are different from them. The mere sharing of a space with someone who is significantly different from you cannot, and must not, be treated as a real harm, or else pluralistic society collapses.
Also, I love this bit from that article, emphasis added:
If the first part is really true, the second part is a complete non sequitur.
To continue, from the quoted story:
The students are factually wrong. Medical science disagrees with them. The girls are simply perpetuating facile stereotypes that have been culturally foisted upon them by parents. They are being “harmed” by their own ignorance.
They are “harmed” as much as a bigot is harmed by being forced to share a bathroom with a black person, because they were taught that black people are dirty. That is to say… not at all.
That’s a rational position, but the point is that it’s not an “easy” matter of real harm versus imaginary harm. It’s real harm on both sides, but you’ve decided that one type of harm arises from a form of bigotry and so counts less.
Yes.
I think it should be weighed, along with other considerations. Other considerations include the positive aspects of exposure to other viewpoints as well as the rights of the protestors.
ISTR that we’ve discussed this elsewhere. I don’t believe that there are many people who are uncomfortable sharing restrooms with quadriplegics to that extent, but let’s assume there are. It would be a consideration, to be balanced against other considerations. Other considerations would include the need of quadriplegics to have some sort of restroom and to not be stigmatized, the value for those girls in getting used to dealing with quadriplegic people, and possibly other considerations. But I don’t think you would be able to dismiss them as not having suffering any harm (in that theoretical circumstance).
But we’re not talking about “the mere sharing of a space …”, and you shouldn’t try to depict it that way. As a society we accept that people are uncomfortable exposing their bodies or bodily functions to people of other genders, and that’s what’s being discussed here. In cases such as the one I’ve cited, the people have been conditioned to view the trans people as members of the other gender - whether because of general views about trans people or because they’ve known that specific person for many years as the opposite gender. Not that this means their concerns automatically trump everything else, of course, but trying to claim that it’s just about “the mere sharing of a space with someone who is significantly different from you” misrepresents the issue and is not productive for this discussion.
Two points on this. First, sexual predators are going to be predators regardless. They’ll commit those crimes anyway, whether it’s in a ladies’ room or a back alley. The whole thing is a strawman set up as justification by those I mention below.
Second, it was the NC Republican lawmakers who forced the issue and made it public, thus giving supposed predators the idea!
This is simply not so. Overly-feminine transwomen are probably over-represented in media. There are a lot of reasons for this. One is that “former bodybuilder dons dress!” is an eyecatching headline. Another is that when you see transwomen it’s often in a formal context (e.g. an interview) so they dress up, and women tend to wear dresses while dressing formally. The final reason is that transwomen often dress more feminine than they’d like to, simply because they try and stack as many “feminine” markers as possible so people don’t call them “sir”.
But overall, transwomen are women. Many of them, especially the ones that pass better, dress over all kinda of spectrums in real life. I know exactly one extremely fem fashionista transwoman, I know a few who dress feminine, or slightly tomboy-ish (meaning various degrees of makeup, maybe some jewelry, tighter clothes), and one who presents outright butch. None of these are “non-binary” or “agender”, they identify as women.
But speaking of that last point, at least younger transpeople are very, very close with the agender and non-binary community as well, and the advocacy subgroups of LGBT centers for trans, agender, non-binary, and even gender-nonconforming are often one and the same. It’s possible this is different with the older generation, but I don’t have much experience with older transpeople so I’m not sure. At least the ones I’ve met were much more binary than younger ones.
And finally, this is a place where transwomen cannot win. If they stack feminine markers they’re “adhering to rigid gender roles” or “in ladyface”. Or, sometimes, get patronizingly told “just because you want to dress a certain way or like certain things doesn’t mean you’re a woman”. If they present more neutral or masculine, or even have a more masculine profession like being in STEM, they either get called “sir” or (if they pass anyway), get called out for “not being feminine enough” and thus “are you sure you’re REALLY a chick?” I know Una even mentioned once that some trans counselors used to refuse to write letters for (formerly) hormones or surgery if the transwoman didn’t present overtly feminine.
Transmen have problems too, but since they generally pass better, (Testosterone works REALLY well), it’s more along the lines of normal “you’re wearing makeup/a dress? What are you, some sort of queer?” things that dudes get. (To which some of the transmen I know say, jokingly “well, yes, I’m quite queer actually” :p)
Would you have said the same thing if, say, biracial people demanded access to whites-only restrooms in the Jim Crow South? Racial desegregation “isn’t in the cards right now?”
I’m not saying gender segregation of restrooms is some kind of injustice comparable to racial segregation. All I’m saying is you can’t just walk into this debate and make a similar comparison. It’s more complicated than that. As long the gender segregation exists, you’re going to have to make logical compromises that don’t fit the standard civil rights model. You have to work a little harder than that. That’s all.
So stop doing it.
So why do we have gender-segregated restrooms in the first place?
Is the harm that people would feel by sharing a restroom with people of the opposite gender real, or imaginary?
Huh? I’m not. Others are. I’m pointing it out.