I would certainly evaluate and consider their position. I’m not anti poly-marriage – I’m very open to it. I’m just not 100% convinced, mostly because I haven’t heard from poly folks how it affects them. I became 100% about gay marriage when I spoke to gay people. But considering the differing histories of gay couplehood and polygamy, and the association between polygamy and spousal abuse, child marriage/abuse, and similar negative factors, with no such negative factors for gay couplehood, it might be reasonable and consistent to support one but not the other. I’m not convinced these negative factors are intrinsically tied and inseparable from polygamy, but I’m not convinced they aren’t, so I’d have to hear from these folks and research more about it.
On the transgender and gendered bathroom issue, I think your point is trivial and mostly unimportant. If, in the future, most people don’t prefer to use gendered bathrooms, then we should definitely consider changing the convention of society of having gendered bathrooms (which some societies have already changed in part).
But in this society, I think your concerns are trivial and not worth worrying about, at this time, at least. It’s reasonable and consistent, even when very occasionally bathroom users might not be able to tell a person’s gender, to continue with gendered bathrooms if that’s what almost everyone prefers and they cause no harm. Even 50 years ago, very occasionally someone might use a bathroom whose appearance does not conform to traditional gender appearances. Some small number of people have always appeared androgynous, whether deliberately or not, and some will continue to in the future. If gendered bathrooms could survive this possibility in the past, why can’t they survive it now?
In my opinion, lance, you’ve failed to demonstrate more than a tiny trivial problem that will affect more than almost no one, and more than almost none of the time.
Nonetheless, he slurs a good point. Didn’t the OP just get done saying that he had realized the futility of debating with lance, the Neverending Questioner?
I think this thread is a waste of time. he didn’t bring up those subjects because he wanted to talk about them-he brought them up to troll. He wanted to hijack the thread, and pretty much succeeded.
I for one am very happy to see this thread, and suggest that any time in the future that lance tries to crap up a thread with his questions on these subjects, folks redirect him to this thread created just for this purpose.
Whether he uses this thread, or whether he decides to keep JAQing elsewhere, is the messageboard equivalent to figuring out whether he’s housetrained.
Apropos of the topic, Cecil is now going to be exploring the question of why not allow polygamy since we have SSM, with a column that will run in about 3 weeks I think.
The whole idea of separate bathrooms is not one of the 10 Commandments. It’s solely about the fact that for whatever reason a lot of people feel uncomfortable with people of other genders using the same bathrooms as them. There’s nothing else to it. So the standard you need to be applying to transgender bathrooms is the same one: does it make people uncomfortable or not?
Now here you have two sides, because the transgender people are uncomfortable using the bathrooms for those of their physical gender. But then, the number of cis people who are uncomfortable with trans people using their bathrooms is likely a lot higher than the number of trans people altogether. So it would seem that they should trump.
Basically it’s unclear to me why trans people using the bathrooms that align with their gender identity is some sort of great right when the entire issue is really about nothing more than people’s discomfort.
But the sense I’m getting is that it’s a combination of two things. 1) SJW are looking for a new cause now that they’ve won on gay marriage (and if they win on bathrooms, they’ll just find some other Great Cause to rally around), and 2) while for cis people it’s purely about discomfort with opposite gendered people using their bathrooms, transgender people are less secure in their gender identity and are looking to reinforce this by acting as much as possible in ways which definitively assign them to their mental gender, and bathrooms are a black-and-white delineator.
All that said, I personally don’t think the whole thing is a big deal one way or the other, especially considering that the number of transgender people is extremely small to begin with. But I can’t speak for anyone else in this regard.
Cis people are often more uncomfortable with trans people being in the bathroom of their birth sex than in the bathroom of their gender identity. I’d be more weirded out by having a transwoman in the bathroom with me than by having a transman in the bathroom with me; I’d be much more comfortable with a transwoman following my daughter into the bathroom than with a transman following her in. I think a lot of cis people haven’t thought this through, fully.
Trans people aren’t just made uncomfortable by the bathroom they don’t prefer; it can be dangerous to them. Anti-trans violence is a real thing.
It’s about far more than comfort – it’s about harm and safety. Transgender people have been harmed, physically and otherwise, for using the bathroom (either bathroom, depending on the instance!). Transgender people on this board (and elsewhere, obviously) have explicitly talked about their experiences with this, in being threatened and/or assaulted for using the bathroom, and in having extreme terror at the prospect of using public bathrooms.
Feelings of discomfort should be entirely trumped by actual harm and safety. I don’t care if some people don’t want to use the bathroom around black people or Jews – the potential harm of such a policy for black people and Jews, which has actually occurred in the past, is clear, and easily trumps the discomfort of these bigots. Similarly, I don’t care about the potential discomfort of people who don’t want to use the bathroom around trans people – not allowing trans people to use the bathroom clearly harms them. The safety and dignity of trans people trumps any discomfort of bigots.
But I haven’t seen any evidence of harm for gendered bathrooms, which is why I’m not concerned at this time that gendered bathrooms are or might be discriminatory, as long as trans people are allowed to use the bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity safely.
IOW, you’re saving people from themselves. People say they’re uncomfortable with X but you’ve decided that they’re really more comfortable with X so you’re in favor of forcing it on them.
I tend to be very skeptical of this attitude.
ISTM that most of the bathroom-related violence directed at trans people is at trans people attempting to use the one which corresponds to their gender identity. So that’s not an argument in favor of them using those bathrooms; the opposite, if anything.
[This also applies to iiandyiii’s post, which seems to be making the same point.]
Do you have any evidence of this, or is this just a guess? From my limited experience talking to trans people (and broader experiencing reading from and about trans people), they might be assaulted/threatened no matter which bathroom they choose.
Do you see any reason why we should treat discomfort with using the bathroom around trans people as any more legitimate than discomfort with using the bathroom around gay people, or black people, or Jews?
Mostly a guess, but I looked at Wiki on anti-trans violence and they mention specifically “when attempting to use a restroom of their gender identity”.
Yes.
Discomfort around black people or Jews is just a subset of discomfort with Black or Jewish people generally, which is not accepted by society. Discomfort around trans people is a subset of discomfort with people of the opposite gender, which is accepted by society.
[Gays are a more complex issue, since - to the extent that this is an issue - it deals with issues of sexual attraction. But as a practical matter it’s not like there can be another pair of bathrooms for gays, so having them use the same ones as heteros is the only practical choice.]
Would your opinion change if it turns out I am right, and trans people are sometimes subject to violence no matter which bathroom they use? Hopefully Una Persson will chime in on this.
I don’t believe this is true – I believe that discomfort around trans people is mostly due to bigotry. Such bigotry may be due to ignorance – and with education the feelings might go away – but it’s still bigotry.
Do you believe that, say, a man who would be violent towards a transman (or transwoman) for using the men’s room would be just as likely to be violent towards a cis woman for using the men’s room? I certainly don’t – I think someone who assaults a transwoman in the bathroom does so because of anti-trans beliefs, not anti-woman beliefs, and is far, far less likely to assault a cis woman than a trans person.