I can’t work out every school’s budget for them or examine their floor plans. We made space in public restrooms for accessible stalls for disabled people after the law said it was required, so something can be worked out.
Maybe they can cut math class. A staggering number of adults of my acquaintance, even college graduates, cannot even add fractions, so clearly they have retained nothing beyond elementary school anyway. This will free up classrooms for people to change, do aerobics, etc.
Far more people die from sedentary lifestyles than from not knowing trigonometry.
Why should we give different accommodations to someone that doesn’t need it, or (in this case) want it? She’s transgendered, not handicapped.
What she seems to be saying is ‘I’m a girl. It’s not my fault I have a penis. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to go and change with the other girls?’
I can kind of understand the other girls not wanting her in there, but maybe they just need to get over that and learn to accept her as a girl with an unusual body. I dunno, I’ve never been a teenage girl so can’t really speak from experience as to how their minds work.
Like I said though, there’s not an easy answer. Certainly, any possible solution will end up offending someone.
oh man Americans are strange. That’s certainly not how it works in Europe. In any case, you can arrange your gyms as you wish, but at least it seems to me that furthering a culture of body paranoia is not particular healthy.
And as for the kid. He (she or whatever) just has to come to terms with the fact that he’s not a special snowflake that gets to have the world arranged to his convenience.
I never had to remove my underwear because we didn’t normally take showers after gym class, so it wasn’t necessary. (For one thing, there was no time before the next class to shower and dry off.) I just had to change from trousers to shorts and back to trousers. So the underwear never had to come off.
Why do trans people “need” paid-for hormone treatments, various surgeries/amputations, and other medical interventions and treatments if it’s just another healthy way of being?
Locker rooms are sorted by anatomy, so there is an obvious rational answer to your hypothetical question. Yes, it’s nobody’s “fault” this kid has a penis. So what? Changing in privacy is not some sort of horrible unfair punishment. If the kid wants to fit in with the girls, why call them bigots and deliberately behave in an antagonistic and provocative manner? Students might be willing to accept that this is a “girl with an unusual body” if there wasn’t a dick being shoved in their faces by someone who calls them lying bigots and claims that “having” to use a private changing room is “dehumanizing.”
Second, I agree: SHE’s not a special snowflake that gets to have the world arranged to HER convenience. Just because she’s uncomfortable having a trans girl in the changing room with her doesn’t mean she gets to kick the trans girl out, any more than if she were uncomfortable having a black or fat or disabled girl in the changing room with her would mean she’d get to have the world arranged to her convenience.
Absent safety concerns, the cis girl upset over this situation needs to get over her special snowflake status. I appreciate your point!
Well she isn’t a girl and that’s the facts. I identify as rich, unfortunately I don’t get to hang out in expensive golf clubs like all the other rich guys, because I don’t have any money. It’s almost like I don’t get to change to world and everybody in it to match my preference. Why would she even insist on the matter when she knows it makes the girls uncomfortable? Seems rather self-centered.
And that’s the real problem. If people don’t get/deny/don’t understand/don’t care about the science, our arguments don’t make sense. I can totally see where people are coming from. Except, science.
Studies have identified multiple structural and functional differences in the brains of transgender people that relate to the gender they identify with.
Twin studies have shown there is a genetic factor. Basically, “brain gender” is real.
A century of experimental treatments has shown that when people can live as their identified gender, they are MUCH more likely to life happy, productive lives. We’ve learned conclusively that forcing people to live as a gender they don’t identify with has devastating consequences. It doesn’t work.
I’m sure that soon the idea that transgender people are just deviant deviants who can be fixed by forcing them to be normal will go the way of the dinosaur, just like it did with homosexuality.
But someone always has be on the wrong side of history.
That’s the words and arrogance of a person who is certain that God and the teleological truth is on her side.
Girl. Merriam-Webster + Cambridge: “Noun 1) a female child.”, Wiki: “A girl is a female human” And female is defined as having two x-chromosomes and producing egg-cells. Notice how it doesn’t say: 2) a guy who plucked her eyebrows and shaved her legs. The person can be described as a guy-who-identify-as-a-girl, or a trans-girl. A girl it is not. It’s just a matter of definition.
Otherwise you’re using another definition of the word than do Merriam-Webster, Cambridge, Oxford and Wiki.
Now, I’m perfectly happy with calling the person a girl and refer to him as her. But when it comes to demands that the rest of the world has to be rearranged and everybody else in it have to change how they think and feel, well then it’s something else.
God can go hang himself. (Oh, wait, he already did.)
Using a fifth-grade dictionary to settle an argument is not going to be adequate to the issues we face here.
(What does that dictionary have to say about people who have XXY chromosomes? They aren’t male and they aren’t female? They aren’t people at all? There really are such people. So much for that dictionary.)
The comparisons to eras past, when white kids didn’t want black kids in the same locker room are the most cogent. We seem to have to fight the same fights, over and over again, as the comforting old boundaries of past centuries are shown to be inadequate.
They gay rights struggle showed that you can’t just shove people into cookie-cutter categories. People are individual, and need to have individual rights which society can respect. The opposition is Procrustean; it’s time to put them to bed.
Grin! I knew you were here, but, like, can’t I think of you as “Billy Bob Procrustus,” the great-great-(to the 120th power) grandkid of the bandit Theseus slew?
Well, here’s an age-old conundrum. Should one be Professor X, or Magneto? What is the most effective way to change the world? Politeness and non-aggression, and seeking a common understanding? Or assertively standing up for yourself and fighting for what is yours, politeness be damned? Both strategies have the potential to backfire.
Hey, don’t look at me, I don’t the answer. But would you be more willing to make accommodations for a gentler and more peace-loving trans person? And does it make any sense to decide what a person’s rights are based on how polite and likable they are?
That is, of course, assuming that the kid is actually being confrontational to a degree that can be seen as unreasonable. Who knows how the situation actually looks like on the ground.
BTW, I don’t think she actually shoved a dick in anyone’s face. Although, that would be an interesting twist to the story.
As I’ve already explained twice, the question of whether girls in the locker room will see each other naked is not relevant to the discussion. Girls have good reason to not want boys in their locker rooms, regardless of whether or not they get completely naked. Is it that difficult to understand.
Because the overwhelming majority of people are sexually attracted to the opposite gender. Because male sexuality always produces more aggressive and threatening behavior than female sexuality. Because dealing with issues of puberty and emerging sexuality during the teenage years is already scary and difficult enough, without bringing the opposite gender into the locker room. Because high school girls put up with boys and their boorish behavior plenty already.
Girls at this school in Missouri want only what the vast majority of women and girls in this country and others take for granted, and a quite reasonable thing to want. Attacking them for being “prudish” and “conditioned to fear sex” is ridiculous.
No one is saying that they should let boys into their dressing room. They’re saying that they should let a girl, who happens to have a penis, into their dressing room.
How do you know who’s on the right side of history?
How do you know which side history is on?
Can history change sides?
How far into the future can your crystal ball see?
