For 99 out of 100 people, it is clear who should use the P room and who should use the NP room. For the 1 out of 100 where there might be a question, only about 1 out of every 1000 of those is an issue that needs pointed out to management. Of those, maybe another 1 in 1000 will receive a response from said management that makes that person leave the business without having successfully used the restroom.
Or stated another way, exactly like mens and womens restrooms have worked for many years. Certainly nothing in need of the Charlotte ordinance which prompted the NC law.
My only question was, since Charlotte would regulate mens and womens restrooms, would the same lawregulate penis and non-penis restrooms, as it would not be gender discrimination to make that distinction (according to our brave new definitions)?
The part that I don’t get is when someone says we need this law because “I don’t want some pervert to follow my little girl into the women’s bathroom”. Even if I go along with those absurd unspoken assumptions, how does it help the situation to insist that this hypothetical “pervert” should follow your little BOY into the MEN’s bathroom instead? How is that better?
Here’s another point to consider. The idea that half of humans are male and half are female is a myth. The fact is that there are dozens of variations which have nothing to do with a person’s choice or preference. For example, about 1 person in 10,000 is born with XY chromosomes but develops as a female. The baby is born with a vagina rather than a penis and everyone says “It’s a girl!” but 13 years later the child doesn’t menstruate and turns out not to have a uterus. People like this grow up confused, struggling with serious problems about their own identity and sexual orientation. And the last thing they need on top of these problems (that they never asked for) is to have self-appointed bathroom cops demanding to see some ID. That’s just one example. Then there’s people born with XXY or XYY chromosomes, or hermaphrodites, or males with undescended genitalia who are misidentified as girls, or babies who are given gender reassignment surgery at birth because they didn’t quite fit the doctor’s idea of what a boy or a girl should look like. And I haven’t even started talking about gay or trans yet.
OK, so you’re just dodging the question and seem to be saying that if someone is a small enough minority it’s fine to be an asshole to them. I don’t agree with that contention at all, and neither does the law. Your ‘proposal’ is patently absurd and would alienate even more people than the current laws do. You can’t explain how it would function in basic situations or be enforced beyond ‘a random person would be allowed to bar people he doesn’t like the look of from using any bathroom’, which is not a good thing.
They haven’t worked for trans people and for people who look unconventional for many years. Using public restrooms ranges from embarassing to dangerous for trans people, it’s not something they can do casually in many places. Women who look butch have been thrown out of women’s bathrooms by the police, though it’s trans people that are more likely to be beaten to death… Ordinances like the Charlotte one are intended to help make sure that trans people are treated as humanss with basic human dignity, so that they don’t have to choose between using depends or risking death when they go out in public. Obviously you decline to research this since it makes your worldview look much nastier, like in the other thread where you denied that anyone wants to physically assault trans people, but it’s true.
Basically all these “reasonable solutions” are bullshittery. Just other ways to say “we want to intimidate transgender people because we think they’re freaks/predators/insane, but aren’t brave enough to come out on an internet message board and say it.” There’s not even any point I can see in discussing it. Either let us fucking pee in peace, or be honest about your real motives.
Holy cow. I went to (an admittedly quite progressive small liberal-arts) college in the early 1980s, and we had coed bathrooms with coed showers, with those multiple showerheads on a big central pipe.
If someone else was in the shower when you arrived, you asked whether they minded showering with someone of your gender (if you yourself didn’t care), or what gender they were (if you did care), and based on the answer you got, you either politely waited for them to finish or hopped on in with them.
I recognize that that approach was probably quite relaxed even for the women’s-libbing birth-controlling pre-AIDS-awareness college life of the immediate post-1970s. Nonetheless, it is startling to me to see how regressive current attitudes about “unisex” anything have become.
The fact that portraying a unisex bathroom in a law firm could still be considered an exotic fiction 15 years after I used real-life unisex bathrooms in college, and that the mere notion of sharing a gendered restroom with someone of your own gender who just happens to have different plumbing can still send so many people into the screaming meemies more than 15 years after THAT, is actually rather depressing. Yay progress. :rolleyes:
I haven’t read the whole thread, but every private home bathroom i have ever used was unisex. And no one freaks out that the last person in it might have had different plumbing.
Wow. So, moving towards unisex bathrooms is “we want to intimidate transgender people because we think they’re freaks/predators/insane, but aren’t brave enough to come out on an internet message board and say it.”:dubious:
The very unisex bathrooms currently in use in many places.
But obviously, even those of us who say "I care not a whit about transgendered individuals using whatever bathroom they feel most comfortable with. Perfectly OK by me. " are “wanting to intimidate transgender people because we think they’re freaks/predators/insane.”:rolleyes:
One of the arguments for all this nonsense was “won’t somebody think of the children!!”: that Tiny Tim might see something odd, or get sexually abused (since sexual abuse only happens with opposite genders).
It will be a much better world where Tim can pee in peace, with his mind at ease…after of course letting a stranger check his genitals, because someone thought he looked like a woman rather than a young male.
Single-user bathrooms are quite a different proposition, though. What China Guy’s linked article meant by “unisex” was a bathroom with stalls, designed for multiple simultaneous users, but not segregated by gender.
Ultimately, single-user bathrooms are probably the future. As I noted, anxiety about bathroom privacy seems to have only increased over the years, independently of any issues involving transgender people.
I saw so many unisex bathrooms become plots on sitcoms that I was disappointed that the only ones at my college were single occupancy. Oh, and while you had coed dorms, men and women were on different floors, and you could not room withe opposite sex unless you were married.
And due to some past bullshit, the women’s floors had doors with locks, which worked with their room key. But I’m pretty sure everything else was just how it was traditionally handled.
ASIDE / ADD’L INFO: While I myself do not have a terminology problem with regards to penis and vagina, or with male and female, that is not true for all gender-variant people, and in particular for a goodly quantity of transgender individuals.
Una Persson can probably confirm and explain this better and from a less exterior & slanted perspective, but within transgender /genderqueer support groups I’ve run into several people who say, in essence, “I was assigned female at birth, but I am a man, therefore this body part right here, this is not a vagina because men don’t have vaginas” and so forth. Hence a proposed bathroom segregation policy of “penis people over here, non-penis people over there”, in addition to all ELSE that’s wrong with that, woudl run afoul of many transfolk’s personal defintion of their own morphological parts.
In what other ways may a private home be different from a sports arena, a stadium, a gymnasium, a restaurant, or a movie theater? You honestly think there is no difference between a private home bathroom or shower and a communal shower with barely no stalls or curtains at a gym?
You comfortable with a man feeling he’s a she in a communal school or gym shower with girls or women? There is a bit of a physical difference in terms of strength and aggression between men and women. It’s not all make believe.
Can’t speak for puzzlegal, but I’m perfectly comfortable with a woman using facilities intended for women.
Once more, with feeling: this is not about “a man feeling he’s a she.” That you continue to approach the discussion in those terms is sheer bullheadedness.
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Actually I wasn’t intending to include unisex bathrooms in my condemnation. I mean all the rhetoric by conservatives and Republicans to criminalize or intimidate us which is always couched in “this is just a reasonable solution to…”
