As I understand the North Caroline issue, LGBT want to be able to choose their own bathrooms but NC prohibits this. Personally, I would feel a bit uncomfortable if someone with a vagina came into a bathroom while I was peeing. Hell, I even have trouble with the troughs that are in men’s rooms at Fenway Park.
But my question (and this may be a GQ) is … What provisions are made for perverts. If transgenders can use any bathroom why couldn’t some pervert just declare himself to be gay and hang out in the ladies’ bathroom?
If your purpose for visiting the restroom is to engage in perversions, that’s still a crime regardless of what your gender is or which restroom you’re in.
Do you think people in bathrooms are hoping you’ll look at and evaluate their genitals? Not on anyone’s agenda, except for the aforementioned creeps and pervs whose behavior is already quite illegal. Transmen use stalls in the overwhelming majority of cases, so you haven’t noticed all those scary man-vaginas in the past. And you won’t notice them in the future. Why would you want to? Why on earth would you deliberately scope out another guy’s junk?
Also, to quote a noted local wag, “Transgender and gay are not the same.” (Wish I could remember who said that…)
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The real question is not how you would feel if someone with a vagina came into the bathroom while you were peeing, it’s how you would feel if someone with a penis who looks like Caitlyn Jenner, or any other transgender woman, came into the bathroom while you were peeing.
If you support the penis/vagina distinction (and now I’m picturing restrooms with those symbols on the door), then I have to believe that you have no problem with someone with long hair, a dress and high heels, who is fully presenting as a woman, using the penis room. And that you are confident that such an individual would be perfectly safe using any public penis room in the state of North Carolina.
As would most people with vaginas, so don’t fret too much about finding too many women standing next to you there. Are you afraid a vagina-possessing transgendered man will follow you into a stall or something? Otherwise, I don’t see how you’ll even know.
Is this really a problem? And if so, wouldn’t a better fix be making sure people don’t “hang out” in bathrooms, rather than making sure they don’t take their genitals into the wrong room?
So explain what you see happening in the scenario where your five year old daughter and her Gran are in the ladies room and in marches, what appears for all intents and purposes, to be a man.
So, like, how does Gran know that person is packing a vagina? Does she ask to see?
No? Then what’s to stop any man from going into that bathroom behind your five year old? And how will anyone notice something is amiss, if you’re forcing transgendered men to pee in the ladies room?
If you’re not checking for vaginas, you’re giving free access to any man who wants to walk right in! And just claim they’re really trans! What’s anybody gonna do about it?
Don’t want to have an awkward conversation about trans with your kid? How is letting a man pee in the ladies room NOT going to raise the exact same conversation?
It’s like those promoting this aren’t even smart enough to think it through, I swear!
One time at a church fish fry, I went to the crowded men’s room to discover a woman standing inside waiting for her little boy to finish using the stall so she could clean him up and get him out. The rest of us just stood at the urinal and did our business as usual. She didn’t see anything and none of us wound up emotionally scarred. Nobody got bent out of shape. What’s all the fuss about? The women aren’t going to stand next to you at the urinal and they won’t occupy the same stall. Just like the men aren’t going to be getting into a stall that a woman is using.
“She had to pee. Yes, she peed differently than you do. No, don’t try it, you’ll probably just make a mess. And it’s rude to stare at or talk about other people in the rest room.”
Exactly. We should punish bad behavior, not simply existing or being the wrong gender in the “wrong” place.
I’ll use the bathroom if a male janitor is in there, no problem for me. I simply don’t care who is in there as long as they’re not acting innappropriately.
Pretending to be a woman to peek at women in the shower or bathroom is already a crime, so this law does not address that problem (which only exists in '80s sex comedies anyway).
Making a transgendered person use the bathroom of their birth sex solves no problem that currently exists, but creates problems on both sides. You wouldn’t want a transgendered woman in the men’s room and she certainly doesn’t want to be there.
How the hell would you know if the person in the next stall has a penis or not? I guess you could look under the door and see if they pee standing up. Short of that, are you going to install a genital inspection station outside the bathroom?
Some people are more shy or private than others, that’s fine and there’s nothing wrong with that. If you’re not comfortable using the communal trough, you just have to wait for the stall. All the women have to wait for stalls, so it’s really just a convenience for men that either don’t care or are willing to forgo a bit of privacy to get in and out faster.
Putting aside the gay is not transgender issue others pointed out, why does it matter what the genitals of a pervert are? As a man, unless someone is actively trying to look at my penis, why should I care what’s in their pants. In fact, even if they are, why should I care what’s in their pants? They’re being a pervert and they deserve to be prosecuted.
Hell, since you mentioned Fenway above, I’ve been to sporting events and large concerts where there’s massive lines. I’ve seen plenty of women in the much shorter men’s line go in and use the men’s stall. No one cared and no one did anything, and if someone HAD tried to do something perverted, they’d likely have gotten the crap kicked out of them.
And it seems to me much the same, if not even harder for perverts in women’s rooms. In a men’s room, someone can maybe discreetly glance their eyes to the next urinal. Since everyone in the women’s room is using a stall, any perverted behavior is blatantly obvious.
There’s a bit more concern involving changing areas because, unless there’s changing stalls, it’s likely a potential pervert will see people in some form of undress. But, again, why would I be any more concerned that a woman might come in and watch me undress than I might be for a gay man looking? I’m not. And what’s a gay man in a men’s room or man pretending to be trans in a women’s room going to do? Is he going to blatantly stare? That’s creepy even if the person isn’t a pervert (maybe a perfectly normal person just happens to see a weird growth or scar or something). Yes, I like my privacy when I naked because it’s nature to feel a little on guard, but I could care less if men or women see me because I’m not ashamed of my body and everyone’s seen it all before or can easily see the same stuff on someone else in a quick google search. Besides, this is best fixed not by banning people but, just like with bathrooms, provide stalls for those who are uncomfortable with anyone seeing anything, pervert or no, and then it’s obvious when someone is being perverted to those people.
And if it’s just that, I think it’s not only almost non-existent, but easily fixed without banning people. But it seems more than anything to just assume that a man in the presence of a female somehow can’t control his sexual urges, which is even more bizarre by the fact that, putting aside a few rare fetishes, there’s nothing sexual about urinating or defecating. And if someone is REALLY that worried about men being unable to control themselves around women, are they also concerned about any time a man is potentially alone around a woman or women?
By the way, if you’re peeking under stalls to see if the person next door has the right equipment, you’re the one with the problem that should be reported immediately.
For people who are afraid of perverts, or of people who are the wrong gender in their bathroom, laws like this make it WORSE.
If people who have transitioned to a feminine presentation but have an M on their birth certificate have to use the men’s room, and absolutely nobody disobeys this law, you’ll have people who appear to be men (and actually are men, cis men) and people who appear to be women (and actually are women, trans women), both in the room. A similar situation will exist in the women’s room. So now all bathrooms have both men and women in them. So, along comes the hypothetical person you’re worried about who is going to break the law and invade one of the rooms when they belong in the other - and this law has made it impossible to even notice them. How did this law actually help guard against this supposed risk?