I don’t know how prevalent it is, and I’m not going to make it my life’s mission to determine that, but this 2001 article in the Guardian gives a sense of how it may be difficult to even gauge how prevalent it is:
There’s something I hadn’t even thought of. A guy pulls this scam, and while in the locker room he sizes up various women and ends up fixating on one of them and stalking them. At which point you may be able to call the cops, depending on what he does. But no woman I know wants to get into that position to begin with.
There are also, of course, the Peeping Toms, and I cited a couple recent examples upthread.
So how many people will come up with the idea to exploit this loophole on their own? Hard to say. But you can bet that among those who do, there will be some who publicize it on sleazy sites like 4chan.
And without trans protection, they have a “free pass” by pretending to be a birth-female transman.
Either way, lying pervs can lie and perv. Either way, men can enter the women’s locker room through deception. Your concerns only serve to harm trans people, and do nothing whatsoever to protect people from lying pervs.
You might as well try to pass a law against transvestitism – men wearing women’s clothing – because that could enable a man to visit a woman’s bathroom by stealth.
Yes, sure, some bad people are going to do bad things.
You sure you want to ban all guns, because some people commit murder with them? You sure you want to ban all diaper-changing stations, because some pedophiles get off on looking at baby genitals?
At this point, discriminating against good, decent, law-abiding transgendered persons, because bad guys might masquerade as them, is a rotten solution, especially, as noted a dozen times already, bad guys can already use bathrooms for pervy purposes.
I’m not sure why you responded with this. I didn’t say anything about “ruining” anything. And I wasn’t talking about perverts, I was talking about normal people using the restroom of their choice. I was simply explaining that it’s no longer possible to know which gender someone is just by looking at them - even if they are NOT transgender - and therefore no way to socially enforce gendered restrooms. And I wasn’t complaining about that, just pointing it out.
But that was because they were shunned and even violently attacked for daring to be themselves!
Now that we accept transgender people, we must accept them too. They are emboldened and coming out of the closet. You see them all the time on the news now. I’ve seen reports about non-binary people (who say they have no gender) and cisgender women who dress and look like men just this week in the news.
And I think that’s awesome. I support them. I’m saying we should support them just as we have done so with transgender people.
It’s already happening. It only takes one person to desegregate for all of us. Just as one black person in a whites-only restroom makes it no longer a whites-only restroom, one person whose gender is opposite, or who we can’t tell, or who we just can’t find a reason to care about their gender, is all it takes to make a men’s or women’s room no longer a men’s or women’s room.
Just be prepared to live up to the same sweeping declarations you make for transgender people when those people come along and say “what about me?”
Okay. Do you think there’s a goddamn chance in hell of this solution happening? If so, you’ve pushed things back: what incredibly creepy metric are you going to use to separate the men from the boys in this case?
If you recognize that your solution is completely unrealistic, that we live in a world where it’ll never happen, then the next question is this: failing to achieve your ridiculous solution, what should we do?
I have also answered that repeatedly: redesign with a warren of individual changing and shower stalls, like at a department store. Ask Amtrak, or the micro-house people, to help design them
So the solution to this nonexistent problem is to force all businesses and nonprofits and government institutions to redesign all locker rooms at all facilities with locker rooms?
Let me ask the question again: do you think this solution has a chance in hell of going forward?
I remember in 2010 the people who told me how completely different same-sex marriage was from mixed-race marriage, and how it’d never be accepted in the way that mixed race marriage is, because reasons.
That’s what I’m reminded of here.
You say “something’s got to give.” Well, sure. We have four solutions on the table:
Unisex bathrooms, whose only problem is that virtually nobody wants them. It’s a little difficult to enact a change that has no constituency.
Some sort of check to see whether boys have entered puberty, before they’re allowed to choose a bathroom, whose only problem is–oh, c’mon, only problem? There’s like five hundred problems, each more Piers Anthony than the last.
Remodel every locker room in the nation, at a likely cost in the billions of dollars.
Everyone mind their own goddamned business and not perv on other people.
One of these solutions is doable. One of these solutions is the one that we’re going to go for. Sure, it’s not perfect: there will always be busybodies, and there will always be pervs. But none of the other solutions are remotely feasible.
I remember in whatever year you want to pick how stupid it was that anyone thought that whether or not gay people could marry had any effect on them and their own relationships… This is not like that.
Where in the hell do all of you people live, where the restrooms are dark, dangerous places filled with peeping toms, flashers, perverts, and transgenders being attacked by anti-transgenders?