It’s a tough issue. On one hand, you feel that a person has a right to identify with whatever gender they are most comfortable with. On the other hand, you feel students who are anatomical females might feel uncomfortable changing clothes in the presence of an anatomical male.
Is a third dressing room for situations such as this an acceptable option, or does it dilute the transgendered students ability to identify with his chosen gender? Do female students have rights to privacy with respect to their bodies and avoid being in the presence of a student with a male body?
These are just a few of the questions a Missouri town is facing this school year.
In this particular case, the student dropped gym class. This is sad and not really fair to the innocent victim of mother nature’s gender assignment. There has to be a workable alternative.
What’s an answer that fits for everyone involved here?
By high school, I promise you that every girl has known for years how to change without exposing themselves. It’s something you figure out around the first time you get your period. And schools haven’t requires showers at gym for decades.
This shouldn’t be an issue. But if it is, the people who are squeeked out can change in the bathroom stall.
Probably not. But I can still see how someone may consider “there’s a penis in the girls’ dressing room” as a valid complaint.
Gender and sexuality, in this day and age, are fluid and situational. The issue boils down to deciding what the definitions of “male” and “female” are, not for society in general, but for the more specific case of dressing rooms.
If it comes down to genitalia (which is probably the most common understanding), I propose that the signage on public changing rooms, in schools, gyms, etc, are changed from pictographs of people in skirts and pants, to (recognizable but tasteful) depictions of male and female genitalia.
Problem, for all practical purposes, solved.
Ideally, we could just collectively get over ourselves and all get in one big room together. But that is probably still some way down the road.
That misses the point entirely. The female students wish to have a school bathroom and locker room that’s entirely free from students who are, at least by what was common understanding for most of their lives, male. This is an entirely reasonable thing to wish for; it’s what many generations of female students had all over this country and as far I know numerous other countries, without harming anyone. Telling those female students that they no longer have the right which everyone simply took for granted until recently is not a mutually agreeable solution to the problem, not even if you point out that they can change in a stall.
Is the issue that girls don’t want to be seen naked by someone with male anatomy? Or is it that the girls would be uncomfortable seeing male anatomy in their locker room? Or is it both?
I would assume that it’s not a matter of merely of not wanting to be seen naked, but of not wanting any man or boy nearby when in a state of full or partial undress, or using the toilet or showering. Which seems to me, as I said, a reasonable thing to want.
At least the world is moving forward. In my day and age, a teenager with male anatomy embracing a female gender identity in public, to the point of using the girls’ changing room, and not expecting to get beaten up, would pretty much have been a non-starter. Or at least simply everyone’s funny story of the week.
Even so, I imagine that it takes a strong person to that even today. I certainly admire the kid’s bravery.
Or, to put it in a way that also neatly encapsulates the problem under discussion:
I would think that in that case the more relevant question would be the sexuality of the other students in the locker room, not their anatomy. A gay male in the woman’s locker room won’t be ogling the women showering, but a lesbian might. Of course, sexuality doesn’t have any outward signs, so many people are doubtless already sharing changing rooms with people who might be inclined to ogle them.
And the ability to change without exposing oneself is relevant not only to the cisgendered people in the locker room, but also to the transgendered. If Mary introduces herself as a girl, and changes discreetly, is anyone even going to know that she happens to have a penis? Certainly there are details about my anatomy that I never felt a need to share with my classmates.
Here’s a related issue. Should a biological boy who identifies as a girl be allowed to compete in girl’s athletics? Wouldn’t that be an unfair advantage? Just because he identifies as a girl doesn’t negate his higher muscle mass, height and weight.
Are you suggesting that the transgender student is given an unfair advantage over the other anatomical males in the school, in the competition to see naked girls?
If so, hey, I’m with you. That was certainly my understanding of what high school was all about.
So I couldn’t help but wonder when I read about this - if the kid had the surgery to whack off his/her penis and turn it into a pseudo-vagina, would it be cool with everyone then?
Meh. Do they have a right to be shielded from lesbians?
When I say “it’s not an issue”, I mean that high school girls generally don’t expose themselves in the locker room, nor do they tend to do a lot of recreational looking. I remember lots of shimmying into clothes under towels.
So they have a theoretical problem with a penis, but frankly if they can’t point to something more than “I can’t see it and it doesn’t affect me, but goddammit I know there is a penis”, I’m not particularly inclined to design the system around them. If knowing a penis is kind of nearby freaks them out so much, they have alternatives.
How many of them are there? Transgender people are broken. I know it is suddenly not politically correct to say that, but having the wrong genitals for your sexuality is a flaw. Why does society have to cater to them? I know it isn’t fair that they are “handi-capable” in that way, but it is how it is.
Society doesn’t cater to people who have unstoppable urges to kill people all the time. It isn’t their fault they have an urge to murder people. Being someone who dresses in the “wrong” clothes isn’t as bad an offense but people dislike them just like they dislike serial killers.
Maybe using serial killers is a bad example. My point is, why does society have to cater to this particular disability? (being transgender)
There are so many people it doesn’t cater to because of whatever flaw they have, why this one? It doesn’t cater to people who have the flaw of always wanting to commit petty theft. It doesn’t cater to people who have the flaw of hating to shower. It doesn’t cater to people who have the flaw of enjoying illegal drugs. And so on and so forth.
More importantly, what are we going to do about the LGB folks who are getting an eyeful of their unsuspecting peers? The key is not gender, it’s attraction.
The answer is that everybody deserves a bit of privacy in which to change. I always hated changing in those locker rooms, and most of the others did too.
Well, that does go to what was briefly touched upon earlier, which is what IS the rationale for the M/F segregated dressing rooms/showers/toilets/etc. today? What was it when it was created? What should it be moving on? If biological sex and gender identity are to be unbundled, which should be the one used for these sorts of decisions? Or should there even be one?
As mentioned, most girls by then have learned to change without exposing themselves and in general for both girls and boys most schools are rearranging their locker/shower rooms so exposure is minimized, maybe this last trend has to be ramped up. But it’s also an interesting learning experience for the young ladies in the sense of finding themselves being the ones affected by the cishet normative not being quite so normative any more.
My suspicion, perhaps unfounded, was that the early schools when they started segregating bathrooms wanted their charges to remain celibate. If teenage boys and girls get to check each other out naked, maybe they become sexually active sooner. It certainly sounds plausible.
Today, our society is in the simultaneous position of accepting that our teenagers are having sex, and making it incredibly illegal for them to be doing so, with laws that make the sex illegal, and that make taking naked pictures of their own bodies double-super illegal. Also, a vocal minority is clamoring for demanding that all teenagers remain celibate until 18 or even marriage, yet the members of that minority almost certainly had plenty of sex when *they *were teenagers. (but they felt super guilty after or something)