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In non-Trump news, I have some new data on revealed preferences. I live in a pretty leftist place, and my employer recently made a switch for about half of the non-single occupancy bathrooms on each floor to be gender neutral. What's interesting is that this has resulted in women completely abandoning those bathrooms. Shortly after the switch, I even saw a number of women about to go in the former women's rooms, realize that they're now gender neutral, and reverse course to presumably go find an actual women's room. Some female coworkers mentioned to me that they like trans people and "have trans friends", but don't like the bathroom change. I guess I like this change, because it's effectively increased the number of men's rooms, since no women want to use the former women's rooms. So make of this revealed preference data what you will.
One bad aspect of this is that they've covered over the urinals in the former men's rooms. I asked my wife if she would care if there's a urinal in a bathroom she was using, and she said that she wouldn't like it, because she doesn't want to see a guy's dick. I guess women don't know that you can't really see dicks of someone using a urinal unless you specifically look around their body to try to see it.
That is entirely reasonable, is it not? Like I don’t know how to put in a tampon.
Well, maybe. But here's how they might know:
Who uses the gender of their baby/toddler to decide what bathroom to take their baby/toddler to change in? I take both daughter and son to the men’s room, provided it has a changing table(and older daughter to use the stall in the men’s) and relegate it to my wife otherwise. We’ve never discussed how I feel about other men seeing my penis and I don’t think she cares as long as it isn’t voyeuristic- the difference between ‘meh’ and ‘I’d rather not’ isn’t worth discussing.
I do. Or rather, I don't let there only being a women's room available stop me if need to change my daughter.
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FWIW I believe your colleges and think that the preference being revealed is that they prefer not to share a bathroom with male-presenting persons, rather than that they prefer not to share with trans women.
A very similar circumstance has arisen at a venue I and my girlfriend frequent, where all the formerly segregated toilets have for the last couple of years been officially gender-neutral, with signs describing them as such—"with toilets" and "with toilets and urinals".
The preponderance of attendees at the events I frequent nevertheless continue to use the room corresponding to the gender they present as, including a handful of non-passing-but-not-for-want-of-effort trans women.
My girlfriend has nevertheless indicated that she is quite uncomfortable with this arrangement—not so much because trans women use the formerly women's toilets, but because at least a few cis men do too.
This situation, where the toilets continue to be de-jur gender-neutral despite remaining de-facto segregated (except for some boundary-testing by inconsiderate men) seems especially absurd given that there was already a perfectly serviceable single-occupancy gender-neutral toilet available anyway!
It will be interesting to see if the recent court ruling results in any rethinking of thisarrangement but if anything I suspect it will cause the organisation that runs to be even less likely to roll back the change, since as it is they can credibly claim there are no toilets reserved for women, and therefore none that trans women might (as a result of this ruling) be denied the right to use.
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Years ago my big tech employer did a terrible job at planning restrooms in a new building we moved in. They didn’t accommodate for how male skewed we are and ended with a situation where the ratio of women to fixtures was something like 5:1 and for men it was around 50:1.
Every time I needed a toilet I found myself bouncing to different floors to find an unoccupied stall.
In one corner of one floor we had layout where there was a multi occupant men’s room with a urinal and a stall, and a single occupant ladies room. To try to ease the pain on overcrowded men’s rooms the company made the single occupant women’s room into a gender neutral bathroom.
A number of women raised hell about the message that sends to women. Never mind that women virtually never have to wait for a free toilet while the men constantly do. The women’s feelings on the matter were more important, and the sign was changed back.
Some of the many times I've audibly said "Thank God I'm a guy," have been when emerging from a toilet to see my wife still in a very long line of women waiting to enter one.
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I have no idea how much money my former employer wastes on toilet queuing time for men. The endless bouncing around from floor to floor trying to find an open stall. Apparently OSHA requires a certain number of toilets for a given employee count of either sex; when it's in the double digits, it's around 20 employees/toilet, but when it's in the triple, it increases to around 40/toilet.
At least we got to read weekly educational flyers posted in the bathroom about Testing on the Toilet (alongside other flyers asking engineers to remember to flush...)
At Facebook our version of this was called The Weekly Push and typically was promoting some new dev tooling.
I miss those days, I don’t think the name would get past our censorious overlords now.
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For a time Google HQ was actually in violation of the toilet rules and had to bring in portable toilets, which is kinda funny for a company which is known for its good working environment. They couldn't even manage to stay in compliance with rules meant to take harsh factory conditions from "dystopian" to "slightly less so".
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Is it something about engineers, or just people in general? We had signs plastered everywhere in the bathrooms reminding our engineers "don't flush things down the toilet that aren't toilet paper, you know how often it breaks and that's the cause, what's wrong with you?"
In actual-hire-out-of-the-probation-office factories they don’t have signs saying remember to flush(although they do have signs saying not to spit your gum in the toilet, only use the bathroom proper for your sex, etc) or to avoid flushing things other than tp in the men’s room(although they do in the women’s- specifically due to menstrual products). So yeah, possibly engineer specific.
Oh, no, they have “stop flushing the fucking paper towels” in the factories, too. At least it’s a sign they know how to flush it, I guess.
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The flyers, from experience, are both needed and unheeded. And the floors heavier in engineering are worse about it.
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Maybe I've just worked in small-medium, high-trust (engineering, office) workplaces, but most of the signs I've seen in bathrooms are about upcoming blood drives and security policies (beware phishing). If I have seen such signs, they were at least not terribly memorable.
I work in a... medium? (Maybe 1000-ish people per location per city; no building above three or four stories) that's insanely high trust (vetted engineers) and yet...
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My tech company had the same thing. 20 men and 2 women, one loo for each. The women’s loo used to have ‘men may use in an emergency’ sign but it got taken down.
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We switched to gender neutral bathrooms a couple of years ago. They're all single-occupancy with their own sink and dryer, which is a huge improvement. Some of them have a little mark outside that means they have a urinal (as well as a toilet). The hallway has security cameras and is just a passage to the cubicles. Everyone seems pleased with them; you can actually wash your face or do makeup or get changed or change contact lenses or something in a fully private space now, with a sink and mirror.
Same situation in my workplace. Some time ago TPTB decided to turn some of the gender neutral bathrooms into gendered bathrooms because women were getting the ick from sharing single occupancy rooms with men (we love our PMC women, don't we, folks?), but there was a fairly strong outcry on account of the bathrooms being divided equally between the genders despite there not being anything close to gender parity in the building (it wasn't phrased this way of course) and naturally on account of the trans question. Fortunately this caused management to abandon the plan and I get the great single occupancy experience without the queueing mentioned in other comments. Highly recommend.
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What is the age range in question? I'm on a college campus in a very blue city twice a week and they have lots of gender neutral bathrooms that are primarily used by women/visibly queer coded people. I talked to a conventionally masculine guy friend and he said that he used one once, felt intrusive, and has never used them since.
I will say the only building I visit regularly is a recent construction and the bathrooms were clearly built to be gender neutral. There's no urinals and the walls and doors of the stalls go all the way down to the floor.
I don't know if it's the increased privacy or if you just get a different equilibrium with a younger population. Maybe there's also an effect where students use bathrooms in pulses before and after class so if you predict you're going to be in a group of 3 women and one queer coded man you're more likely to use the bathroom than if you think you'll be in there alone and anyone might come in.
Yuppies, probably all between 25 and 38. Maybe it's something different about being a kid on a college campus vs being a yuppie in a professional environment.
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... Never, ever, ever underestimate the skeeviness and boldness of a certain subset of men, if they think they can get away with their exhibitionism or voyeurism fetishes while avoiding consequences. I've read elsewhere that many women are absolutely shocked by the brazenness of a subset of men sharing unsolicited dick pics quite freely online, too.
I think there might be a significant experiential gap here.
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I feel revealing that they don't like sharing a bathroom with men doesn't have much bearing on whether they would, in a different world, share it with only the subset of men that are socially presenting as women.
You could easily imagine both categories.
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I presume this is the type of observation I will be hearing about until the day I die.
Most people seem to have no idea what a trans person is or what trans rights are. So when even the slightest personal inconvenience arises, the good folk will balk at the notion and do their best to shield themselves and their immediate environment from the thing they've been advocating for most of their lives. You could make the same observation for nigh every policy.
I think the squeamishness is less about trans people themselves and more about the physical danger of biological males in a women’s restroom or changing room. The current state of trans is that it’s basically on the say so of the male — if a man is in the women’s restroom, he is allowed to be there unless he’s very obviously and blatantly doing something creepy. He’d basically have to openly masterbate, attempt to take pictures, or attempt a rape. Until them, all he has to do is claim to be trans — no supporting documentation required— and nobody can do anything about it. In fact, it’s much more likely that the woman who objects will face punishment for “transphobia” than tge male will.
But in all seriousness - as far as I can tell, the usual arguments for sex-segregated spaces (and anti-trans policies in general) apply pretty much verbatim to race-segregated spaces. Specifically, the idea that if group X is much more likely to do [bad thing] than group Y, society should segregate the 2 groups (and in practice, just prevent group X from interacting with group Y, and have "X spaces" just be for everyone) And even though such a policy hurts the majority of group X who are totally innocent, the physical safety of group Y outweight their wounded ego.
You can just yeschad.jpg and say you want Jim Crow again (and there are probably users on the forum who would), but this does not seem to be the position of the majority of those who oppose transgender ideology (even on this forum) - so I ask, how do you explain such radically different stances on these (seemingly similar to me) issues?
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But that's what a trans person is and that's what trans rights are in practice. Anyone who is squeamish about these things is by definition transphobic. As well as being, pardon my French, hysterical and ridiculous. As if your male coworkers suddenly turn into a physical danger as soon as you have to share a porcelain bowl...
There's an entire progressive dialect invented to get past these hurdles. Followed by a ruleset that should allow any well-meaning actor, who is concerned with the rights of trans people, to get along with their day without allowing their transphobia to negatively affect trans people as they try to exist.
Unisex toilets exist all over the world. This is transphobia masquerading as misandry. It should not be allowed to stand in any case if we are holding ourselves to any egalitarian modern standard.
There have always been pervy guys. Even Japan has to have separate cars for women on their trains. And the reason that the cameras on all phones make noise when you take a picture is because of up skirting (taking pictures under the skirts of women without them knowing). It’s a very small subset, and to my knowledge probably even rarer among true-trans people. But on the other hand, restrooms and changing are very private areas where women are vulnerable. I don’t think it’s reasonable to say “this guy just said he was a woman two minutes ago for the first time, so sorry granny, he gets to be in your changing room and see you naked.” With a process that involves time and effort, I get it.
If you think your coworker is a weird pervert then you need to take that issue up with your supervisor. Not wave it around as a hypothetical at the expense of human rights for trans people.
Restrooms aren't just a place of vulnerability for women. They are also a place of vulnerability for trans people. There need to be some pretty strong material arguments made for why trans people should be barred from the bathrooms of their experienced sex that go beyond TERF'ist misandry. That is, if we want to ground our position in reality rather than phobia.
Gender dysphoria and being trans is not treated with 'two minute' levity anywhere I know of.
If no documentation of actually being diagnosed with gender disphoria is required, then they don’t need to actually bother with the time or expense. They just go in the women’s room and if challenged, claim that they’re trans. This is rarely challenged, and in fact the few times I know of women complaining were either kicked out or shamed for transphobia.
I'm not seeing the problem.
You don’t see a problem when a man who is physically bigger and stronger can — just based on saying that he’s trans — get full access to women’s intimate spaces over the objections of the women themselves? I’m perfectly fine with doing so with a real process — requiring proof of an actual diagnosis and ongoing treatment, for example. But basically letting any man who wants to to simply walk into women’s restroom or changing room and if challenged, the magic words of “im trans” mean that not only is he allowed to do this, but women are not allowed to complain about it. So basically until such a man is seen by multiple women attempting to photograph women’s bodies, or worse attempting to rape them, there’s nothing to be done. I don’t blame such women from just not going into known “inclusive” restrooms because they are not protected.
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I like gender conforming women, I do not like trannies, one interest takes precedence. It’s that simple.
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The entire question was turned into a terrifying minefield for employers. This will not be investigated and taken care of in an objective matter, the employer will just give in to the side with the scariest lobby and the most influence on its HR department at the moment (women or trans).
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The ur-example that kicked off all the trouble in Scotland, a violent rapist who suddenly decided after being convicted that in fact he was a she and that's why she had committed those rapes, it was all the dysphoria and psychic distress you see.
Jonathan/Jessica Yaniv making a nice little earner out of suing immigrant-owned/workers small businesses for transphobia because brown women didn't want to wax a feminine penis and testicles.
The Wi Spa guy (yes, guy) who casually admitted he got his gender notification changed easily but did absolutely nothing else to transition:
The ACLU brought a case the decision of which compelled the prison system to send trans prisoners to the prison of their "experienced sex" (to use your phrasing). Now, that may indeed be a good thing for the human rights of trans people. Except this grifter then took advantage of it, forced his (and I am saying "his" because if you've still got all your working male parts and can get cis women pregnant, I don't believe you are genuinely trans) removal to a female prison, and there we go, two new babies came into the world.
Those cases are out there. The defence of them, along with legitimate trans people, is what causes the trouble. Discard the liars and nutcases, then ordinary people will be more willing to give the benefit of the doubt. Men who, when faced with going to prison, suddenly discover their inner womanhood - they don't get to go to women's prisons (and it is remarkable how many, out of the small transgender prison population, are serving terms for sexual offences). Make it legally enforceable that "guy with working male genitals can too come into a female space just by saying he is now she" and then don't be surprised when people object.
Cases of criminals raping their fellow inmates is not an argument against trans rights any more than interracial rape is an argument against civil rights.
If you want to argue that being raped by penis is worse than something else, you should start by looking at men's prisons. If you want to argue rape in general is the problem, female inmates rape eachother more than male inmates.
Individual cases are irrelevant to the scope of the discussion, which is human rights for trans people. When we are talking about prison populations and criminals the discussion will get dragged into an unsavory quagmire with a lot of negative connotations that transphobic people try to associate with the concept of trans rights. This is a dishonest guilt by association tactic that's not relevant to the actual discussion of the topic. Proven by the fact that people refuse to engage in similar rhetoric regarding race.
I'm not surprised people object when they don't know what trans rights are, nor what transphobia is. The modern prison system is a crime against humanity. It places people in terrible conditions that facilitate further suffering and strife to no one's benefit. Those who choose to argue against trans rights rather than argue in favor of a better prison system betray their transphobic bias and abdicate any moral highground they may have pretended to occupy.
It's not quite clear if it was rape or was consensual with the Real Woman having penis-in-vagina reproductive sex with the two cis women inmates.
However, I do think that if you are putting a person with a functioning set of genitals that demonstrably have met their telos in reproduction into the same place as people who can get pregnant from those functioning genitals, then we're past the point of discussing "transness" and well into "let's blow up all definitions of what is a woman and what is a man and biology and sex and gender and gender roles" territory.
I've seen some attempts at using "seahorses" for "transmen who get pregnant" as an attempt to ground the new gender/sex option in current biological reality (male seahorses carry the offspring! that means males can get pregnant!) but as yet, nothing for "transwomen who knock other women up" since we don't seem to have a biological option for that one (maybe there is, amongst hermaphrodite species like earthworms, but I don't see "worm" being adopted as a popular term).
Since the very argument for "put this person into a woman's prison" is "this is a woman and not a man", then we really do need to decide "can women get women pregnant? can a woman have a penis and testicles and viable sperm?" What is a woman, after all?
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Sure, though I disagree that any rights are being violated by not letting a male go to a women's prison.
I'll have to read it, but doesn't pass the smell test given the difference in sex drives.
It's not dishonest. Trans activists were originally promising none of this situations will ever happen.
You seem to be assuming that the case for trans rights requires no justification, and any disagreement must stem from lack of knowledge. I disagree, and believe the case for "trans rights" is simply unsupportable.
Again, I completely disagree, and believe this renders the concept of "crimes against humanity" meaningless.
You have to look no further than what happened with El Salvador's crime rates to see that the benefit to the rest of society is quite obvious.
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With apologies to Conquest, everyone wants to conserve the things they know best.
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Either that, or every other guy she's seen naked has been packing so much meat that a draft horse would take one look and say "excuse me but what the fuck?"
Depends on the layout of the toilets; I've walked past men's bathrooms in public spaces where the urinals were visible with the door open and if you wanted to take a good look you could have done 😁 Bad architectural design does happen!
But then again, I also live in a town where in the middle of the day there were men pissing up against a wall in a laneway just off a main street so yeah - sometimes you can see more than you want to see.
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nailed it, the whole post was a very subtle humblebrag by OP
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In slightly related news, I got btfo'd by gender neutral changing rooms at a local pool.
Going by newspapers googled while trying to get to the bottom of this retardation, they were made to be gender neutral in 2012 after they made an internet poll(!). This was somehow fixed because I distinctly remember there having been two doors and no women in the changing room.
After reconstruction, there's only one door to the changing rooms. They naturally segregated - guys are in the back, women are in the front so it's not that bad.
Great pool though. 50m long, has a small hot water pool, there's even a sauna and for €3 you can swim as much as you want. I'll be taking advantage of that.
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I've been tempted to recommend that my company (which makes a very big deal about LGBTQ equality) just go to completely gender-neutral bathrooms all around, but I feel like it'd be stirring up far too much trouble (even if I personally would be unironically in favor of that decision, so it's not entirely a bad-faith recommendation), and I'm not ready for an early retirement.
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