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Notes -
For the purpose of this post I will use the following terms in the following ways:
Woman = Biological woman. Man = Biological man
Well it seems like we are on episode >9000 "transgender bathrooms".
There is currently a man named Sarah McBride who has been elected to congress. This person (a man), who wishes to be seen as female, has caused another member of congress named Nancy Mace (a woman) to start whining and complaining on various social media videos and news interviews about her (Nancy's) concern that Sarah will try to use the female bathrooms, lockerrooms, etc. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has said that the policy of the House is that women's restrooms/lockerrooms are for women, and men's restrooms lockerrooms are for men. There are a number of non-gender specific bathrooms around the house grounds that are open to anybody who doesn't want to abide by this.
Here is what I actually think a reasonable framing of this question is: "can men with a cross dressing fetish involve non-consenting women in their crossdress-play?" In a reasonable society I think the answer to this question should be: no, obviously.
Everybody seems intent on being dishonest towards each other when talking about this, so here is what I think is a reasonable answer to "why does anybody care? Just let everybody pee in peace!".
Bathrooms are extremely vulnerable places; they usually have one exit, you are often in there alone, and you are often doing something which makes you physically vulnerable (using the toilet). It seems completely reasonable for women to want to keep men out of these spaces.
To put some additonal context here: I think that the tide is turning pretty sharply on gender ideology within the democratic party (at least for anybody mildly near the center). I've seen several prominent-ish democrat spokespeople openly blame transgender people for the 2024 presidential loss. You also have the UK making it illegal to trans your kids, as well as a recent, prominent NYT article that was critical of transing your children (unfortunately the google index seems very intent on not showing me links to the article, but has plenty of links to people talking about it.
Why is this such an issue? Restrooms have stalls. I couldn't tell what gender was in one if I tried.
I hear that women tend to change & reveal more skin in women's locker rooms. In men's restrooms, we pretty much do their business and leave. From that perspective, the men's locker room is more 'gender neutral'.
Yes, it was a woke rallying-cry. But in 2024, it's become a tier-1 losing issue.
AOC is the democrat's weathervane. She's scarily opportunist and makes radical position changes right before a movement runs out of gas. She broke rank with the squad on Israel right before the campus protests turned ugly. She recently removed pronouns from her twitter bio. It's Joever.
As for people being naked in locker rooms, I'd be happy to see the practice die out. Trans people or not. I don't wanna be looking at random dick and balls. It's the old men who're the worst. Dude, don't spread your legs on the bench to clean your saggy balls, and what the fuck's up with being naked while having socks on !! Please No !
If it's any consolation, my wife has told me that old women are just as bad in their locker rooms. IDK what it is with old people and nudity, but it seems to apply to both genders.
What's with old people is that if you have had a serious medical issue you lose all sense of embarrassment and shame concerning your naked body because you deal with doctors and nurses looking at it, and you stop caring about how you appear when naked in front of others.
No serious medical issue needed, just reach the age for routine colonoscopies and you're there.
Heck, I'm middle aged but not quite at that age yet, and I'm pretty much 99% of the way there. The older I've gotten, the more I've realized that there's just no good reason to care about how other people perceive my body outside of a certain small subset of cases. Certainly not when they're strangers who are males in a locker room or other communal changing space. If other people dislike the sight of certain parts of my body, first of all, I empathize, but second, that's their problem, not mine. If the sight of my junk displeases them, I'm not going to lift a finger to help them solve their displeasure; I've got enough of my own to take care of, thank you.
This whole problem with being or viewing same-sex nudity in these kinds of contexts seemed pretty strange and somewhat arbitrary to me when I immigrated from Korea to America at the age of 6, and it took me some effort to adapt to it. In Korea, already by the age of 6, I was accustomed to going to public bath houses where men and boys (and, I presume women and girls as well, in their own half) of all ages would just freely walk around with everything out and minimal effort to cover anything up.
The US used to be like this, but it changed at some point during post-WW2 America. Communal showers and pools were common. When I was young (90s and 00s), we still used communal showers, but it was a dying practice. I realized in college it was a dead practice in most other parts of the US.
My great grandpa would tell me about swimming naked with other men/boys at the YMCA in the 1920s. I'm not sure why it changed in the US, but there are a bunch of "coming of age" movies made in the 70s and 80s with teens becoming adults who have anxiety about the dreaded communal showers in high schools.
Nude swimming disappeared because swimsuit technology improved; communal showers i’m pretty sure went out of style due to increasing wealth making individual stalls more affordable.
Don't think so Tim -- at my high school the girls changeroom had separate stalls, while the boys' was prison-style. (but with nicer tile-work)
Fairly sure it wouldn't have killed the school budget to build the male changeroom to the same specs -- this is just what locker rooms were supposed to be like. (for bonding or something? IDK)
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