Because I’m sometimes only good for a stupid driveby: ladies only - YouTube
I say we just transition to all unisex bathrooms in public places. I’ve never looked at a public bathroom as a sexual place.
See my post #118. You, and even a majority of people may not see it that way, but there’s a lot of people (men) who do.
Just a joke.
I didn’t even say it was “necessary.” It’s just a discussion. It’s interesting. Part of the discussion is whether it is necessary or whether these scenarios are plausible.
And it is not “supposed.”
It’s not a game. You said it.
I used your logic against you. You didn’t think this through and you put yourself in a contradictory position.
You don’t see? We’ve explained it.
It is no longer necessary to have the “right” genitals to use a restroom. The only other ways we can apparently decide that someone is legitimately using a restroom is that they are dressed or appear a certain way we associate with gender and they self-identify as that gender.
The first one is tricky, because the act of accomodating transgenders means we have given up the power to dictate what gender is - and that could include appearance. Who are we to say a man or woman is someone who dresses or looks a certain way either? Who are we to say “you’re not a woman because you look like a man” when we can’t even say “you’re not a woman because you aren’t female”?
And the second one, self-identification, is impossible to discern without proof, so anyone could just lie about it.
These may never be problems in the real world. Or they might. But they are interesting to me.
Which problem is fake? The abuse of these laws? How do you know it is fake?
I posted a link to a male, who appeared male, using a women’s locker room, apparently to test (or protest) a new transgender accomodation law. That was real. It may not happen often, but you can’t just walk in here and declare it “fake.” We’ll have to wait and see.
Sorry, let me be clearer:
Your cutesy word games (“You said ‘sure,’ so you must agree with me!”) are not entertaining, not enjoyable, and not indicative of discussion in good faith. I get that you enjoy it, but I find it tiresome, consescending, and rude.
Last thought, before I leave you to it: It has never been necessary to have the “right” genitals to use a restroom.
Carry on.
You danced this little rhetorical tarantella of yours to deliver this trenchant pile of wisdom?
Re
This is gibbering nonsense. No one is giving up the ability to define gender, what you are “giving up” is the ability to discriminate via those definitions. Did accommodating black people in bathrooms make people give up the ability to define what race is? All this will require adjustment and if you mince scenarios hard enough you can easily construct situations where cultural expectations will collide and people will be uncomfortable and aggravated.
One relevant example in terms of social adjustment is gays in the military. Unit cohesion was supposed to be destroyed. Predatory gays would be going after their unit buddies. Did this uptick when the rules changed. No it did not. Pearl clutching “I’m just asking questions” people were pushed to the side and the military got on with it’s business. The same will happen here.
What you described sounds like closeted gay men cruising for sex, ala Larry Craig. Unisex bathrooms won’t increase this activity. Unisex bathrooms would solve the problem described multiple times as a father and a daughter together and the burly guy following the daughter into the bathroom. In a unisex bathroom, the dad goes with the daughter in the bathroom, just as he would his young son.
It was never necessary to have the right biology. Has any bathroom in the history of mankind ever had crotch checks?
And there are plenty of ways to determine if someone is entering a bathroom for “legitimate” reasons – are they carrying a loaded gun into the restroom? Are they doing something lewd? Are they acting erratically? Are they intoxicated? Are they acting suspiciously in some other way?
Further, anyone at any time in recent decades could walk into most restrooms if they really want to. They might get yelled at, or thrown off the premises, or, in very rare cases, prosecuted, but these bad people have been doing these bad things for a long time. Changing social mores about gender won’t affect this.
That someone can lie and claim to be transgender doesn’t affect this either, since people could lie about their gender before. Men could dress as women before and enter bathrooms if they wanted to. Men could just walk in and say they were women, and probably be disbelieved as they generally would be now. Developing social mores allow for actual transgender people to use the appropriate bathroom without sanction.
What do you think can or should be done about it?
At the time I saw this thread there were 150 posts. I cannot possibly respond to all of them so I’m going to make some general points.
- Transgender people need to use the toilet facility which is congruent with their gender identity. To use the improper facility causes a tremendous amount of mental anguish which is far worse than the chance that some cisgender woman might suffer from the vapors and need a fainting couch because a transgender person has entered, peed in a private stall, washed up and fixed their makeup.
Does anyone actually think (new) transgender women want to enter what’s known as a female private space, with all its societal baggage? One of my duties as a community leader and activist is to be a chaperone for new transgender women, to take them into the cisgender spaces and get them out of the ghettoization of gay bars and seedy dives. When they first go into a women’s room they - we - are terrified of you cisgender gals! They hesitate, hold until they wet themselves, will walk 5 blocks to use a unisex bathroom at a gas station, rather than enter “your” space. They sometimes will cry at the table, so scared of breaking that social taboo but desperately needing to simply go into a stall and pee. When I walk them in, the newest ones, they are shaking like a leaf. Sometimes while I wait at the bathroom sink, they will text me that they are too afraid to leave the stall! The same happens with transgender men, although I rarely chaperone them.
Yeah, real sexual predators here.
- The abuse of transgender people who are in the wrong bathroom is well-known, it’s clear, it’s immediate, and it is horrible. Those in favor of mandating transgender persons use the bathroom which corresponds to their sex at birth really are not getting this. Transgender women who are forced to use the men’s room are subject to catcalls, verbal abuse, threats, bullying, physical abuse, and even rape. I personally know many transgender women who have suffered at least one of the above.
Transgender men who are forced to use the women’s room suffer from verbal abuse, sometimes physical abuse, and more often calls to the management and/or police which result in extended verbal intimidation from the aforementioned. Sometimes even resulting in arrest, despite their having a female birth certificate, for the cop’s favorite answer to everything, “disturbing the peace.”
Seriously - do you think I should be entering the men’s room when I look like this? Can you think of the abuse I would go through on a daily basis? I’m terrified of having to be in the men’s room, and I’ll go behind a bush before I do that. http://unaboard.coalgoddess.net/Pictures/2015_10/2015_10_21_Una_at_Bistro303.jpg
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There are ALWAYS going to be outliers of criminals who prey on women or men, and they will not be deterred by any “trans toilet terror” bathroom bill. There are also going to be outlier assholes who want to make a “protest” by abusing the system. Is an outlier here and there worth subjecting hundreds of thousands of transgender persons (estimates are 300,000 - 750,000 in the US alone) to a daily gauntlet of abuse every time we need to use the bathroom?
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Genderqueer people can actually have it worse than transgender people, in that their core gender identity is actually in flux. They are not choosing to be female or male depending upon the phase of the moon - it chooses them. And for the most part when they are “feminine” they dress the part, and vice-versa with when they are “masculine.” And they have a dual bathroom issue - some don’t really feel comfortable in either bathroom.
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At one time I was in favor of carry letters to try to “verify” transgender status should someone be questioned as a result of their bathroom choice. I still think it can be helpful for defusing a situation where the police are involved, but I’m now vehemently against the “your papers please” aspect of mandatory “registration” or proof of transgender status. Thankfully we’ve worked with enough of the local police departments that a transgender person in our metro area who does nothing other than use the facilities is almost certainly going to be quickly sent on their way with no hassle.
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As far as the cisgender population “having a right to be comfortable” in bathrooms, well shoot, in Alabama and Georgia there used to be segregated bathrooms because white folks weren’t “comfortable” with “Negroes” in their bathrooms. I guess we should have “respected” the comfort levels of white southerners and kept segregation in place…except we evolved as a society. I’ve even seen an old sign from a local country club (in the museum here) which said “no Jews allowed in these restrooms” I guess that was cool too, since it made folks “uncomfortable.”
Evolution as a society isn’t clean and neat, and it involves some discomfort from the majority. That’s always been true, and it will continue to be such IMO.
Thank you, Una.
Yes, very much. Transitioning men get the joys of a smaller bladder coupled with having to use a stall every time. Probably no one notices or cares…but it certainly feels like everyone’s watching, noticing, and judging. I haven’t spent much time chaperoning (you’re doing god’s work, Una), but yeah: shaking like a leaf is pretty accurate for a lot of transguys.
Well, I did say back in the Pit thread that if Lance started a separate discussion thread on this issue, I’d drop my half-penny of thought into it, so here it is.
In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have hang ups about what gender people choose to identify as, and it wouldn’t be seen as a deciding factor in where we can poop.
We’d have no sex/gender segregation of public toilets or changing rooms, and we would be beyond squeamishness about seeing each other’s tricky bits.
Also, the world would be free of skeeves and jerks.
(Imagine all the people living life in peace!)
Well, that would be the perfect situation. Whether we’ll ever make it that far, I don’t know, but I do think we’re gradually evolving in that direction.
For now, public toilets and changing rooms are places where people still feel vulnerable and feel a need for segregation of the sexes. Unfortunate, but them’s the brakes.
I don’t think a transgendered person should be made to carry a special permission form just to use the toilet/dressing room of the gender they identify with. I do think that governments should allow people to choose their gender identity and be registered thus (licenses, passports, etc.). Then, if any situation arises in which there is a reasonable suspicion of someone getting up to shenanigans in the wrong toilet, and people feel the need to call the authorities, that person can be asked to present valid ID to clear up the matter.
Now, I do think that demanding someone provide ID just to use a public restroom is a horrible thing. It would be a horribly humiliating experience for a transitioning person or a sexually ambiguous person to go through, and such practice would likely be abused by bigoted or overanxious people. But I think eventually people will grow beyond it and stop worrying so much about other people’s sex.
And thank you Una Persson, for providing some much-needed perspective to this “discussion”.
It *is *fake, Lance. As you well know, that article was linked to in the Pit threadby **Smapti **as an example of bigoted trolling, in response to my earlier prediction that we would soon see bigoted non-trans people walking into opposite-sex toilets just to try and prove some point. It was linked to as an example of people creating a fake problem, as was pointed out to you in that thread.
The things you bring up have no easy solution.
They do, however, *have *solutions. I believe they can eventually be found through tollerance, open-mindedness and compassion.
If I called management every time a woman walks into the men’s room at my workplace, they’d tell me to stop being an idiot and let the cleaning staff get on with their work.
Una Persson said it all, but I thought I’d add my two cents anyway, about BOTH issues: transgender, and service animals.
Service animals are not required to be certified or registered for many reasons. People rely on service animals for very real medical needs. Just as a person could not be refused their ability to interact as a member of the public (enter stores, restaurants, enter public areas, etc) based on another tool they use to mitigate their disability (a wheelchair, crutches, a cane, a mobilized chair, etc) they cannot be refused the same ability because of THIS tool they use to mitigate their disability (a service dog).
To do so violates their rights and seriously hampers their ability to live their lives as a member of the public.
Requiring service dog certification creates problems. For one, no other medical tool used in public is required to be certified before it is allowed to be used in public. No one has to prove a medical problem to store owners or other members of the public to use a cane, a wheelchair, or crutches in a store. To require such would be a violation of medical privacy. Thus, use of a service dog as a medical tool as well cannot be required to be certified, nor can the owner be required to prove a medical problem to the public in order to interact as a member of the public- to do so would as well be a violation of their medical privacy.
Secondly, ‘officially’ training a service dog is incredibly, sometimes prohibitively, expensive. To certify a service dog there would have to be regulation on the training methods as well as oversight, procedure, method, etc. This would make having a service dog prohibitively expensive for many people who are perfectly capable of training their own dog for their own specific needs.
Thirdly, if the person who had the service dog was caught in a situation where said certification was lost, misplaced, stolen, forgotten, etc. they are now prohibited from engaging as a member of the public due to their medical status. That is, say a woman is hurrying to the pharmacy to pick up a much needed prescription before it closes, but forgets she got a new wallet and her certification is still in her old wallet. Now she is prevented from entering the store with her mobility dog to get her prescription because she is not able to prove her medical condition and right to the medical tool she is using…something no other person is required to do with any other kind of medical tool.
Lastly, store owners and members of public spaces already have recourse that helps them prevent the fraudulent people trying to pass off their pets as service animals: any animal claimed to be a service animal MUST behave itself. ANY animal, whether it is a harnessed guide dog for a blind man or a chihuahua someone has and is claiming is a service dog that causes a threat toward other patrons, is uncontrollably noisy, damages personal or private property, can be asked to leave perfectly legally. The ‘harm’ that someone might pass off their very well behaved but non-service animal as a service animal is nothing compared to the ‘harm’ that someone who legitimately needs a service animal would undergo being denied use of that animal when they need it, thus it is an accepted risk.
As someone who once needed a service animal, people who ‘pass off’ pets, even well behaved ones, as service animals galls me too, but I’d rather have a thousand people do that than tell one person with a legitimate need that they cannot have or use their service dog in public.
The same thing is true for the transgender issue. You cannot prevent people from using a public restroom without creating discrimination or even impacting them medically. So, that means there are limited options: do we make people who were assigned a certain gender at birth use only those restrooms (how to we enforce that happening without violating rights, how does that solve any problem as transgender men indistinguishable from cisgender men would be in the women’s room, etc); do we ask that people use the restroom of the gender they identify as (and how do we enforce that without violating rights); or do we have a separate restroom just for transgender people (and how is that different than ‘coloreds vs whites’), or insure there is a unisex option for anyone who wants to use it?
You do if you want to use handicapped parking, though.
This is dramatically untrue. As consumer products go, medical equipment is substantially regulated and becoming more so. Even voluntary standards, like the ANSI for wheelchairs, are effectively almost mandatory, as insurers typically won’t pay for uncertified equipment and dealers won’t stock it.
Here you’re talking about the users, not the tools.
What is a recognized medical application of a service dog, for which patients can train their own?
Again, this is all a red herring about authenticating users, not dogs. If legitimate service dogs were routinely required to have their certification affixed to their work harness, there would be no more risk of leaving it behind than there would be of a driver leaving his car’s license plate at home.
You may have a bit of a point there, but I’m not sure if that meshes the same. Having access to a medical accommodation put out specifically for those with medical issues (which a handicap spot is, an accommodation specifically for those with medical issues) doesn’t quite mesh with a person with medical issues being allowed to use accommodations open generally to the public, of which they are members.
Yes, but that is not the same thing. For example, if have a specific type of wheelchair or even an artificial limb, that equipment has to meet medical regulations, yes. It has to be certified safe and functional and often has a serial number that can be tracked in a medical database. However, for a person to use that medical equipment when they are out in public, they are not required to produce said certification to prove to the store owners or other members of the public that their wheelchair or artificial limb is actually needed, and that they have a certain medical condition that requires it. Does that make sense?
A person is not and should not be forced to carry around certifications stating their need for a medical tool or outlining why they need said medical tool before they are allowed to use that medical tool in public. It is a violation of their medical privacy and is discriminatory. A person does not have to explain why they need a wheelchair to another member of the public to use a wheelchair in a grocery store. A person does not have to provide papers proving their wheelchair is regulated and certified to another member of the public in order to use their wheelchair in a grocery store. A person does not have to provide any kind of certification or proof to use any publicly open space with any other form of necessary medical equipment.
So I stand by my point though I should rephrase: no other medical tool is required to be certified or recorded as medically necessary and that certification presented to lay members of the public to grant a person access to publicly open areas. If I cannot be stopped at the door of a grocery store or restaurant and asked if I ‘really’ need that wheelchair or if it’s a ‘real’ wheelchair before I’m allowed entrance, I cannot be stopped there for any other medically necessary tool- including a service dog.
Now if I start running over people with my wheelchair then they can ask me to leave. Similarly, if my service dog starts being disruptive or growling at people, the same thing can happen.
“Here you are talking about the users, not the tools.”
What’s the difference in the scenario? I cannot be stopped going into a restaurant with a wheelchair and asked ‘why do you medically need that wheelchair’, nor can I be stopped going into a restaurant with a wheelchair and asked ‘is that wheelchair medically certified?’ It comes down to the same thing- my need for the tool is in question and I’m being stopped due to question about my medical conditions and the appropriateness of my use of that tool.
Similarly, I cannot be stopped going into a restaurant with a service dog and asked ‘why do you medically need that service dog?’ nor can I be stopped and asked ‘is that service dog medically certified?’
I CAN be asked ‘is that a service dog’ and in some places ‘what service does it provide?’ . I can also be asked ‘is that a wheelchair’ if someone is particularly obtuse, but I cannot be prevented from entering due to either. Nor am I required to explain my medical condition, need, or provide ‘papers’ for either.
“What is a recognized medical application of a service dog, for which patients can train their own?”
Well, for example, me. I had severe issues with my back and hips necessitating my walking with a cane for several years. A service dog- trained by me- not only helped by fetching items of necessity (if I dropped my keys, for example, because I could not bend nor stoop) but also via body heat which helped with pain. A single service dog took the place of a dozen different tools, and it was trained by me.
Commonly, seizure alert dogs are trained by the owners. Balance dogs are often trained by the owners. Anxiety and assistance dogs for wheelchair bound kids or those with severe autism are often owner trained. About the only medical use for a service dog that it is not feasibly possible to train at home is a guide dog for the blind.
In fact, most psychiatrists and psychologists recommend home trained service dogs for mental illness or psychological issues:
“This is all a red herring about authenticating users, not dogs.”
As explained above, no it’s not. It still comes down to the same thing- my need for the tool is in question and I’m being stopped due to question about my medical conditions and the appropriateness of my use of that tool, or being asked if that tool is ‘really’ a tool. Would someone questioning another about their wheelchair ‘is that medically certified? Do you have proof that wheelchair meets the medical guidelines?’ be about authenticating wheelchairs, and not the owner’s use of them?
“If legitimate service dogs were routinely required to have their certification affixed to their work harness, there would be no more risk of leaving it behind.”
Not every service dog needs or uses a ‘work harness’. Some use regular leashes. In fact, the only dogs required to use a harness in order to perform their tasks are guide dogs and balance dogs. And things happen. If that work harness is destroyed, say in a fire; or stolen, or somehow disappears, should someone who needs that service dog be confined to their house and denied the ability to interact as a member of the public until it can be replaced?
And how is this any different than saying ‘if legitimate oxygen backpack users were routinely required to have their certification affixed to their pack, there would be no more risk of leaving it behind’ and suggesting that validates people stopping others and asking them ‘is that a legitimate medical tool? How do we know you’re not just huffing NO in a public place?’
That’s a bit of an exaggerated comparison, I’ll admit, but the point remains- they can’t make it JUST service dogs that require those that rely on them to carry around papers to present to the public before they are ‘allowed’ to be used in open public accommodations where the public should reasonably expect to go unhindered, when no other medical equipment used in such public requires the same.
I hope that made better sense.