Over the last couple weeks, my gym refurbished the saunas. They’re located at the back of each of the locker rooms, between the lockers and the showers. Since the company they contracted the work out to has drastically un-diverse hiring practices (aka no women), when they fixed up the one in the women’s locker room, they swapped the signs and posted somebody outside to tell all the guys to use the women’s locker room, and vice verse. I imagine there was some distress when the women found that they only had three stalls available, instead of their usual six.
Seriously ace, I want to know: why haven’t you expressed any concerns about little BOYS being molested by pervs in the mens’ room? If this hasn’t been a problem before, why is it a problem now?
Uh, no offense, but you could have put a warning that there’s some NSFW stuff on that page.
I know! All these pervs just running around restrooms with their dicks hanging out waiting to molest little kids everywhere apparently, and yet the one place where everyone agrees they are allowed to be (men in the men’s room) is not even a problem.
Everyone seems so concerned about the woman’s room, but that has closed doors, but what about the men’s room, the urinals don’t have enclosed spaces, if lucky a short divider, if not a common trough where everyone gathers around to pee. Wow what if a woman sees that, all those victimized men :eek:, No the place for a woman is in the women’s room 
:rolleyes:
Why is nobody worried about women like these in the women’s bathrooms?
(And yes-the first one should actually be referred to as male but I am trying to make a point here)
Infinitely. :dubious:
And… now I no longer feel safe :eek:
:rolleyes:
I think I feel “safest” by staying the hell out of the USA what with all the nasty creepers y’all have down there that need laws to keep them on the straight and narrow. 
As Kaio said very eloquently
I guess, as has been mentioned a few times now, the sole purpose of laws like these is to harass and marginalize individuals that do not conform to some reactionary sexual identity paradigm. They have nothing whatsoever to do with the safety of our precious womens and chill’en.
Keep in mind, it’s only a certain part of the political corpus that is utterly convinced that all men are sexual deviants who would engage in all kinds of perversions around the clock if not for the stern moral disapproval of the state keeping them on the straight and narrow.
Considering how often members of that party get caught cheating on their wives and having sex with underage boys, it certainly seems to be true at least in their case.
Agreed.
It really does seem that the only way these people can suppress their urges is to legislate against them. That, or get on their knees and pray them away. Sadly, it becomes both offensive and ridiculous when they assume everyone else is just like them and we all need secular laws (and religious laws) to keep us in line.
This showed up on my Facebook feed today:
On Restrooms, Gender, and Fear
- a much more realistic view.
That is an utterly useless and vague answer, and is as bad as no answer.
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What kids? All kids? Any kids? A certain percentage? Since you can find some kid somewhere who could be upset about anything whatsoever, that’s not an answer.
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How do you measure “upset?” The fact that they ask mommy why a woman looks different? Or climbing the walls head-rotating-in-place?
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Why is this kid in the stall with the person peeing? Since outside the stall the kid is only going to see the transperson with their clothes on, are you implying the very existence of a clothed transperson is going to be “upsetting?”
Answer the question. If a law is to be written, which fucking toilet do I, personally, use? Two choices, pick one.
You can keep handwaving it away as vague and you don’t know and it’s up to interpretation…but it ME, personally, who will be impacted by it. This is my life, and the life of my people here you want to “debate” on a message board.
So stop dancing around the subject and tell me what you decide. Do I, a transsexual woman who is legally, socially, hormonally, etc. transitioned have to go into a men’s room looking like a cisgender woman - facing harassment, assault, beating, and even rape? - or do I go into the ladies room, which I have used thousands of times with never a single problem or incident?
Again, two choices, you only get to pick one.
Una, people like him will say you are fine in the women’s restroom, because you “pass.” It’s the ones who don’t that are a problem for some people.
As far as I’m concerned, the “what about the wimmin and chillun???” handwringing is just a smokescreen.
The people in favor of these laws just think transpeople are icky and weird and don’t want to have to deal with them, and nothing I’ve read/heard from them has convinced me that it’s anything more than that.
Una over in the debate thread you used the phrase “use the bathroom they present as”. Which is pretty much what I was saying with use… “whichever bathroom is the least disruptive and upsetting”. It’s the same idea. dressed like a woman then use the woman’s bathroom. Dressed like a guy then use the guy’s restroom.
It’s not rocket science. 
My concern is very young kids. Not upsetting them or confusing them. The world is already scary enough for them already. Keep the bathrooms safe for everybody to use.
Crime at roadside restrooms has been a problem for as long as I can remember. The highway dept has closed the restrooms in my state’s interstate rest stops a couple times because of sex hookups and drugs. This was about 10 years ago. Don’t know if they reopened them or not.
Please don’t stone me to death; but I have this mental picture of someone singing in a deep bass “Una told the gov’nor, let my people go!”
I do believe some people are truly afraid of men pretending to be transgendered to gain access to women. Dismissing their fears by claiming it’s a smokescreen will just make them dig in their heels harder because they will get the feeling that you are marginalizing them.
However, I also don’t believe it is in society’s best interest to make policy based solely on fear, and I fully support Charlotte’s attempt to create a safe bathroom experience for everyone.
:smack:
:rolleyes:
I don’t know how much clearer I can possibly explain my position.
If you aren’t aware of crime at roadside park bathrooms then you haven’t been watching your local news. Going back even 25 years the cops were making drug busts at Interstate rest stops twenty miles from my house. Prostitutes were working those areas and undercover cops were catching people getting bj’s in the restrooms. They announced arrests several times on my local news. They even closed the Interstate rest stop bathrooms several times and reopened them later. This was long before the transgender issue became common in society. That adds yet another concern for bathroom security.
Heck a US Senator got caught in a bathroom glory hole. So yes security in bathrooms is a concern. Don’t try and pretend it’s not a problem.
Explain again how these bathroom laws are going to help? Your “argument” is basically the opposite of the law.
At various points in this thread you’ve suggested that your concern is:
-kids getting freaked out by (somehow) seeing the genitalia of transgendered people in the bathroom with them
-little girls being preyed on by child molesters masquerading as transgendered women
-illicit drug sales in public bathrooms
-acts of prostitution in public bathrooms
There are already laws on the books that deal harshly with all but the first of those. New laws that force people to use bathrooms corresponding to their birth certificate only serve to make life shittier for transgendered people.
Very young kids are often upset or confused by ordinary life. Those are teachable moments: when they happen, your job as a parent is not to shield them, but rather to reassure them that what’s happening, even if it’s new to their realm of experience, is harmless and nothing to be worried about. That’s true whether it’s a doctor touching your son’s penis for legitimate medical reasons, or your daughter seeing a person in the women’s bathroom who looks a little different from the women she’s seen so far in her life - regardless of whether that person is immensely fat, or one-legged, or dresses in conventionally male clothing, or looks like she has unusually broad shoulders and a bad case of five-o’clock shadow.
Moreover, there are very young kids out there who themselves have gender identity issues; preventing them from using the bathroom they most identify with them is going to make them very upset.
[QUOTE=aceplace57]
Una over in the debate thread you used the phrase “use the bathroom they present as”. Which is pretty much what I was saying with use… “whichever bathroom is the least disruptive and upsetting”. It’s the same idea. dressed like a woman then use the woman’s bathroom. Dressed like a guy then use the guy’s restroom.
[/QUOTE]
Then why do you support laws that force people dressed as and presenting as men to use the womens restroom? Why do you support laws that make it 100% stone-iron-clad which bathroom people have to use, no matter what they look like or how disruptive that would be?
So then why have you been arguing against this for the entire thread!? Do you not even read the things people are saying to you? (Rhetorical question, I already know the answer.) This is exactly the opposite of the laws you claim to support and IS HOW IT IS RIGHT NOW!
So, forcing transgender people to use the restroom of their birth is supposed to stop drug trafficking and prostitution now? Explain how.
Can’t you just admit that your only view on this is that transgender people are icky and you want them to go away, and stop pretending that there is any validity behind your reasons for supporting these laws?
OK, that’s a reasonable response.
That’s the guideline I recommend gender-binary transgender people follow, and it was the guideline I followed when I was in that grey area where I was out some of the time, but not others.
The problem is, we have people who are going to present androgynously, even those who are not transgender in the least. A woman with a short haircut who’s wearing women’s jeans and a generic flannel top might be questioned in either bathroom. But more so if they don’t “pass” as well as a non-transgender woman. Why should we be concerned, worried about, or terrified of being arrested if some fainting goat of a person decides someone doesn’t fit the gender binary well enough to their liking?
The scary things in this world are billions living in poverty, the Patriot Act, anthropogenic global climate change, racial injustice, gender injustice, and Trump. Transgender women are not scary, and I don’t care for an implication, even unintentional, otherwise. The same argument was used by anti-SSM people: “if two women are kissing, it will confuse the children.” “You can’t let men hug each other; what if children imitate that?” Yeah, the horror, people hugging.
Children need to be asking questions, they need to be learning about the world around them. Yuppie helicopter parenting, trying to treat children like precious Victorian dolls, to be protected from all things which might potentially upset them, is not going to produce a generation of kids who can be involved in their world and think critically about problems. Growing up and learning requires you experience things.
And I’ve said it a hundred times before…the kids get it, you know? When I talk to kids as part of the counseling effort for integrating transgender children (as early as kindergarten), or during outreach at schools, the kids get it. And the kids don’t really care. “Oh, so they look like a boy but they’re really a girl. Does that mean they can still play football?”
I’m not sure how this applies to my post.