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Notes -
More right than you know.
Missing children are overwhelmingly runaways, actual abductions are overwhelmingly the parents, non-parent cases are overwhelmingly someone else known to the child, actual stranger abductions are overwhelmingly of teens.
Young children being abducted from a playground doesn't happen literally never, but it's so close to never that spending time thinking about it, and letting it drive larger policy issues, is both insane and counter-productive.
We talk about it because it's emotionally valent and easy to imagine. Not because it's important, not because it happens.
Same thing here. You can clearly imagine this situation in your mind, but it doesn't really happen. Not enough that we can actually say that trans bathroom rights make it more likely, not enough that it's worth warping public policy over.
Also, you know, the whole claim is mistaken to begin with, because: if trans people must use the bathroom of their birth gender, then Buck Angel has to use the women's room.
If your worry is that seeing male-looking people go into the women's room will make life more dangerous for women, then you should be in favor of letting trans people use the right bathrooms. Because way more male-looking people will go into trans bathrooms if you force all trans men to use them, than if you don't.
Let me stop you right there. It was never about male-looking people. It was always about males. It just so happens that being male-looking is a pretty good proxy for being male in the real world (despite what the trans lobby wants you to think).
The rationale is that many more males abuse women and girls than females do. Therefore, women and girls are safer in the presence of other females then they are in the presence of males. If you disagree with this fairly obvious statistic, what do you think women-only spaces are for?
Why do people who want to scare women with pictures of trans-identified females always go for the photoshopped ones, and not for a more realistic one that shows that Buck Angel is actually pretty tiny and nonthreatening compared to her male counterparts?
Moving away from anecdotes, I think it's important to realize that for every masculine-looking trans-identified female, there are probably three trans-identified males that are absolutely deranged, like Karen White, Darren Merager, or Michael Pentillä. Would I rather have women share a bathroom with a female porn star, or with a male serial killer and unrepentant rapist of women and young girls, you ask? Wow, what a dilemma you put in front of me! I just don't know how to choose!
No seriously, obviously it's the female porn star. If it were up to me, I'd put a hundred Buck Angels in women's bathrooms before I'd let a single Michael Pentillä in. It seems the obvious choice, if you want to optimize for women's safety rather than maximizing the euphoria of rapist serial killers. Was that really supposed to be some sort of gotcha?
That picture shows Buck next to Laverne Cox who’s quite tall and wearing heels, he’s actually the average height for a cis man in many countries at around 5’9. I personally wouldn’t use Buck Angel as the go-to trans man because he’s turned into a proto-TERF himself strangely enough, and far more physically impressive trans men absolutely exist, see Mitch Harrison who can stand next to the Rock and is 6’3 and is quite muscular.
How are you supposed to enforce sex-segregated bathrooms anyhow? Should you pepper spray anyone who you think doesn’t belong, like what happened to this tall biological female thinking they were in the presence of a biological male?
The sources I’ve looked up show no link between gender inclusive bathroom policies and crime rates, but if you have any that contradict that, feel free to share.
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Yes, but he's still the smallest of the five people, smaller even than the only other female. The point is: most transmen aren't that masculine, even not the ones hand-picked by trans-advocates, not to mention obvious women like Elliot Page.
Anyway, I didn't want to get caught up in discussing individual cases. I'll grant you that some well-passing transmen exist, but I think they're the minority. My argument more broadly is:
The average transman doesn't truly pass a man, and the average transwoman doesn't truly pass as a woman (arguably less so). So the argument that swapping transmen and transwomen is worse for women because now they suddenly share the bathroom with many more male-looking people isn't true: at best you're replacing male-looking men with male-looking women, which is sort of a wash.
But the more important argument is that regardless of visual passing, transmen are much less likely to harrass or assault women than transwomen are. That's why it's better for ciswomen to share the bathroom with transmen than with transwomen.
I don't think enumerating exceptions to the rule invalidates this argument.
I often wonder if people raising this question are disingenous. It's phrased as if the idea of sex-segregated spaces is a crazy far-out utopian idea, like universal basic income. In reality, all bathrooms in approximately the entire world worked like this throughout the entire 20th century, using the same mechanisms used to enforce most norms: through a mix of social contral and legal consequences.
Did you see the video of the Wi Spa where a male pervert enters the women-only section of the spa, so one of the women there goes to complain, and the employee at the desk can't do anything about it because in California it's illegal to kick male creeps out of women's spaces, and the only male patron who weighs in on the matter says "How can we know if the fully grown man with a penis isn't a woman?"
In the 90s, this scenario literally would not have happened. If a convicted sex offender entered a woman-only nude space with his dick out, all women present would scream at the top of their lungs for the pervert to get out. Employees would rush in to demand that the offender leave. Men would gather angrily at the door, ready to help escort the man out of the building, but careful enough not to trespass themselves. If necessary, the police would be called to take the man into custody.
Moreover, everyone knew that this is what happened to men who violated this social norm. That's why this type of crime was actually relatively rare.
No, of course. But first, I don't see how putting transwomen in women's bathrooms solves this problem, since a woman that is willing to pepperspray a masculine looking woman will obviously do the same thing to your average non-passing transwoman.
Second, I think some of this paranoia is actually fueled by genderism. In the past, if you saw a masculine-looking person entering the women's bathroom, you'd assume it was just a masculine-looking woman, because who else would someone use the woman's bathroom? Today, you can no longer assume that because males entering women's spaces is stunning and brave, actually. This puts gender nonconforming women under suspicion in a way they wouldn't be in a society that strictly enforces sex-segregated spaces.
Third and finally, let me explain how this sort of situation should be handled. If you're a woman who sees a man enter the woman's room, you first say “Excuse me sir, this is the woman's bathroom?” In 90% of the cases, he will look shocked and say “Oh, my mistake! I must have entered the wrong door” and leave. If it's actually a woman, then she'll say “Excuse me, but I am a woman!” In the case of someone like Rain Dove you can tell from her voice that she is speaking the truth, so you say “Oh, my mistake!” and that's the end of it. Now imagine you don't believe her because the "woman" is actually Karen White wearing a bad wig who couldn't pass for female in his wildest dreams.
Then you escalate the situation by finding a person responsible for the space, e.g. a security card in a public mall, the bartender, the office manager, etc.. You tell them there is a man in the woman's bathroom. They join you and ask the perpetrator to identify themselves. If they refuse, they are again asked to leave, and if they refuse, the cops are called.
All of this depends on government-issued ID to accurately label a person's biological sex. In the current world, all western countries have removed this label. This should be reverted. My (actually serious!) proposal is to list biological sex and socially desired sex separately, so we can still be polite by addressing transwomen as Ms So-and-so while separating them from women where sex matters.
I don't think there are sources that can show this. Not in the current world where:
Transwomen are a tiny majority, so even if they are significantly more likely to misbehave in bathrooms, you would need a lot of data to show that. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (actually it is, but only to a small degree, hard to get to p<0.05 that way). And that's before accounting for confounders. If a creepy male starts using the women's room and women stop going there, does that show he's not causing any problems?
You can't use crime statistics because the police is not even allowed to accurately register the biological sex of trans offenders, so while we could collect this information in a systematic way, gender activists ensure this doesn't happen (you might wonder why gender activists oppose this if they believe the results would be favorable to their cause?)
Academia is heavily politicized and genderism is one of those topics you are not allowed to objectively research. As a result, we cannot use academic sources to prove or disprove anything.
In short, I don't think you've seen compelling evidence that disproves the claim that transwomen are more dangerous to women than women (and transmen) are. I think you've seen a paper that said something like "we compared the number of reported incidents in inclusive bathrooms at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, populated entirely by highly-paid academics who value their jobs, with the numbers from the non-inclusive bathrooms at a Texas truck stop, and we didn't control for the myriad confounding variables that make that comparison meaningless, but we are going to conclude anyway that The Science™ shows inclusive bathrooms benefit women".
If you think I'm wrong, please cite the actual source you are thinking of. I'm sure I can poke one or more holes in it along the above lines.
On a meta-note: I feel a ton of this discussion about transgenderism is getting repetitive. I'm seriously considering putting together a document with the most common arguments pro and con, so instead of spending way too much time poorly reconstructing the same counterarguments, I can just say “you are using argument 69a, please see rebuttals 23a through c.”
It would save me a lot of time but I'm not sure if it would actually change anyone's mind.
Apparently something similar used to exist for creationism:
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This could be an interesting project. I find it's often hard to argue against the entire memeplex because the argumentation shifts constantly as it runs up against dead end and starts a new one until the interlocutors are exhausted.
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You trying to kill 50% of site traffic? 😩
Anyway, I doubt that would work. During the heyday of the online Atheism wars, it was common practise for both sides to compile wikis/dossiers with carefully curated links and even ready-made rebuttals for the usual objections raised by the other team.
It achieved absolutely nothing of note.
The default outcome of online argumentation is just about nothing at all, it is a minor miracle that it happens sometimes on this forum, and we usually attract more articulate, open-minded and erudite users than is the norm.
While I personally enjoy debate and discussion, including on values, it's more of a hobby rather than something I think is a net-positive return on my time and energy. If you want to convince people en-masse, you're better off doing something like optimizing for virality on social media, with all the concomitant loss of quality that entails.
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It's a crucial tactic that trans rights activists use. Many of their arguments derive from a foundational assumption that the trans person passes as the gender that they want to be (I've heard the bathroom argument turned in favor of the trans people by arguing that there's just as much danger if not more to a transgender woman being in the men's restroom than a man in the women's restroom), but much of the evidence to substantiate this assumption are photos taken using very specific angles and very specific lighting, if not photoshopped entirely. Candid, unaltered photos almost always show the trans person looking weird and out of the ordinary, if not failing to pass entirely.
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The people really concerned about "but I need to be able to use the bathroom I identify with" are the ones who, to be blunt, don't pass. Who have something that says "not biological/cis female" about them - I don't see much fuss about trans men using bathrooms and again, to be blunt, that's because a short, plump trans guy is a lot less of a threat to cis males than the other way round.
"I look insufficiently female so that I am in fear of being challenged" is behind a lot of the fuss around trans women wanting laws about bathrooms. And yeah, the creepers are going to take advantage of that. Buck Angel, to take your example, looks sufficiently male that using the men's room isn't going to stand out particularly. Now imagine someone who looks like Buck Angel in a skirt going into the women's room. That's the problem.
Or is it because the typical trans man is less interested in being a man than the typical trans woman wants to be a woman?
Of course trans men don’t want to be women- that’s the whole point- but I don’t hear about them hitting the gym To try to bodybuild or whatever. Trans women at least are wearing frilly dresses. Trans men seem to be aiming for something close to androgynous or at least desexualized.
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At least in my area of Europe, there is no fuss about anyone using men's bathrooms. Whenever there's a queue at the women's bathroom, but not the men's, cis women routinely use the men's bathroom, and I haven't heard anyone complain about it. This is not a new development, but has been going on for as long as I can think.
Men, contrary to women, don't have and don't expect reserved sex-segregated restrooms.
In the US we have them and do expect them, by and large. I certainly have never (edit: I remembered one occurrence, see below) observed women using the men's room, and it would be considered rude for one to do so.
You obviously have experienced a very different set of US restrooms than I have. I have regularly observed women using the men's room in the US and was mildly reprimanded as a child for complaining about feeling uncomfortable because of it.
That's interesting. The only time I have seen a woman use the men's room was in college, when this one girl would take a shower on our floor when she spent the night in her boyfriend's room. Multiple people complained to the RA about it, and he intervened to put a stop to it. Nobody (so far as I know) thought it was unreasonable to complain, even if they hadn't personally felt uncomfortable enough to do so. As an adult, I have never once seen a woman go into the men's room.
Taking a shower there is different.
Where I'm from (Canada) you routinely see the sort of thing JFKay talks about at crowded bars, concerts, and similar events, as long as the restroom in question allows for a reasonable amount of privacy.
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... Except for the law making it illegal in many states?
That seems like a fuss.
I seems like you're saying 'well Buck Angel can and should just casually break the law every day, it's no big deal'... Maybe if you're fighting for a law that you want lots of people to break every day, you should be fighting for a different law instead?
Listen, if people were passing bills that said 'You must have 1 year of HRT and FFS before using the women's room' in an effort specifically only to make sure trans women using the women's room mostly pass, that would still be contentious but it would at least be credible that that's what the laws are worried about and trying to fix.
That is not at all what the actual laws say, the actual laws say Buck Angel uses the women's room, and no one backing the laws in reality has any problem with that. The laws are anti-trans in concept, not just focused on a single set of outliers.
If the pro-trans lot didn't wave around Buck Angel every chance they got, I'd listen more attentively.
But since their 'sample case' isn't very convincing, I'm not bothered. I do think the illegal stuff was overdone, but on the other hand, if anyone now can predate - and yes, there are those who will take advantage - and there is no recourse because "well, it's the law and the ACLU took a court case and got a ruling", that does no favours to genuine trans people and only turns public opinion against them. That may be unfair, but it's how the world works.
I'll knock it back to you - which bathroom should the gay guy in drag use, as distinct from the trans woman dressed up like a clown, after drag queen story hour?
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What everyone wants is a law that says you cannot use a gendered bathroom if you don't pass as that gender. It's just a hard thing to define so they usually end up making it over or underinclusive on some other criteria.
I straightforwardly disagree. Maybe 'everyone' here wants that, but that's not at all how the politicians behind these laws talk about them.
But either way, I say again: you shouldn't be passing laws that criminalize hue swaths of actions you want to be legal.
If your goal really is just about the small subset of trans women who don't pass, find some narrower way to enforce that. If it's too inconvenient to be worth the effort, then it's not worth the effort.
Don't criminalize things you have no problem with just for the sake of convenience.
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No law is intended to make it illegal for TIFs to use the men's room, they're all designed to stop TIMs from using the women's room.
They have to be written in a neutral language, due to the 14th Amendment and the 1964 CRA. You know this, and I know this, and so does everyone else. I'm not sure why you're acting dumb about this issue.
???
You are agreeing with me that all of the laws apply to trans men and force them to use the women's room, but saying that's ok and good because they have to be written that way (for some reason), so it's ok that they criminalize things you don't want to be criminal?
If so, that is not how I want laws to work, you should not be criminalizing things you actively want people to do on the assumption they'll just break the law and it'll be fine. That seems entirely insane to me.
And I don't know where your confidence that Republican lawmakers have no problem with trans men is coming from. That's not what their rhetoric says, at all.
I'm not agreeing with you at all. You are both correct and missing the point.
I'm saying it's ancillary to the real point. An externality, if you will, nothing more.
For the same reason anyone has to put up with this delusional nonsense: 14A and CRA. Not just any reason.
It's ok to create laws that have externalities, yes, and to still support those laws despite the externalities, especially if you find them irrelevant.
These people are completely irrelevant when it comes to the controversies over sex segregation, in sport, in spaces, in restrooms. The problem is solely and exclusively with the men, not the women.
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How about Peeping Toms? Do they happen? Bathrooms seem like a great place to be a Peeping Tom.
I'm sure there's not very many pervs out there who get off on hearing women pee, but it's definitely not zero -- can you understand how women might not like wondering whether there's a perv jerking off in the next stall while they are trying to pee?
Do you think the sort of women who is concerned about males in the woman's room would prefer Buck Angel, or the "IT'S MA'AM' guy? Is Buck Angel prohibited from going into gender neutral bathrooms? Not sure how Buck Angel is relevant here, but under the trans-acceptance framework it seems like women are expected to put up with both Buck Angel and "IT'S MA'AM'.
First of all, your mask is slipping - your original claim was that you were worried about cis men pretending to be trans in order to access women's spaces, not about trans people themselves. But you have immediately moved your rhetoric to 'women putting up with trans people', revealing pretty much exactly what I was talking about in relation to the 'scrutiny' thing.
Second of all, I'm not sure if you're confused or what... under the trans-inclusive framework, Buck Angel and people who look like him go to the men's room. He only goes to the women's room if forced to do so by bathroom bills. That's the point.
So there are police outside bathrooms stopping people and saying "Yes, I know you look like a man but you have to use the women's room"? Or checking birth certificates? Apparently there was some such allegation, but I have to say - this is so clearly "used to be a guy" that I can see why they were allegedly asked for ID. There's an unfortunate photo doing the rounds but, um, yeah. Real Woman versus Cis Woman imagery.
This is the kind of "so stunning, brave, courageous!" puffery that annoys me. (Is the person portraying the trans girl trans or cis, because I have my doubts). Mainly I'm live-and-let-live about this; so long as you don't look too much out of place or behave weirdly, go right ahead (and hell, if you're cis male or cis female and the relevant bathroom is too crowded and you really need to go, then use the other one in an emergency).
But if you're having a cute little 'all girls together' online discussion about "so what is the etiquette about unsolicited offering tampons to another woman in the woman's bathroom" or similar, that's when you've crossed over from "I just need to use the bathroom" into "this is getting into fetish territory".
Alright, lets clarify here.
I'm saying these laws would oblige male-looking people like Buck Angel to use the women's restroom, which would normalize male-looking people going into women's restrooms, teh precise thing people are claiming these laws are intended to fix.
It sounds like you're saying this won't be a problem because you expect male-looking trans men to break the law and go to the mens room anyway. Please stop me if I am misinterpreting or misrepresenting you.
Are you saying that you want and expect the laws as written to be broken routinely, would be upset if most people the laws applied to were not breaking them most of the time, but still want the laws passed?
Because like, yeah, it's true that marijuana laws are broken all the time, and police only bother to enforce them when they want to punish some citizen for a different reason. That doesn't make them good laws, that makes them terrible affronts to our civil liberties and freedom.
Laws should not work like that.
I am reassured to know that trans people are so law-abiding and biddable, even if they really do look enough like a dude to be cast in a gay porn flick, they will obediently follow "I must use my natal sex bathroom". No, no, I realise there is no visual way to tell I am not a guy, but it's the law! Even if there are no police to enforce it, I will stick by the letter of it and not ignore it!
This line of argument is so stupid, are you surprised I'm not convinced by it? The people who would make a fuss are the likes of Sam Brinton, who get their kicks out of stealing women's luggage. Buck Angel may or may not be known to the wider public who don't view porn, and so they may or may not recognise "Hey, that's Buck Angel, trans man, trying to use the men's room! I am going to march up to him and demand he use his natal sex bathroom instead!" Also, whatever my views on Buck Angel, I'm pretty sure they're not interested in creeping on women, unlike the 'I'm trans, how dare you stop me!' cases. Oh but I forgot: if someone does that, well they were never really trans in the first place, they are No True Scotsman.
Yeah, progressive activists are so well-known for sticking to the laws and never opening their mouths. I think bathroom laws are not helpful, but I think laws enforcing "yes, this guy can use the same bathroom as women and children" aren't any better than "yes, this guy has to use the ladies' room".
My view is that nobody will know you are trans or not unless you are so obviously not the gender you are presenting as, and that's not a problem that can be solved by passing laws about gender-neutral bathrooms or 'anyone who says they're trans can use that bathroom', because there is also the problem right now of the trans activism push around 'nobody owes you feminism' or there is no one way of being female or the rest of it, which means a guy can stick on a wig and a skirt, claim to be trans, go into the women's room, and nobody can do anything about it because that's transphobia.
I would be way more sympathetic to "that will never happen" (as were the debates I got into way back when, before all the push for legal laws) except the 'slippery slope fallacy never happen cases' did happen, and the trans activism set had nothing to say about that except, in the extremes, "well that person wasn't really trans anyway". How can you be 'really' trans when there is no way to be 'really' trans that is not decried as medical gatekeeping, transphobia, enforcing the gender binary, and the rest of the political sloganeering?
Ok, so you're among the group that wants to pass a law they actively want people to break.
I thought that was an insane position no one would ever take, especially given how may libertarian-oriented sentiments we normally get when things like speech or guns or etc. come up.
But I guess that's a really common position, we want to pass a law that we want most trans people to break most of the time.
Seems insane to me. I will never agree to that being a good idea, even if I agreed with the rest of the logic behind the motivation.
Sweet Baby Ray, how much clearer can I get? I think bathroom laws are stupid, but I also think that trans people crying about bathroom laws is 90% political activity of the same sort that saw "we just only want the right to LUV, TWU WUV" get same-sex marriage passed in my country (and then prominent gays, like our current Taoiseach, are happy to appear in public with their partner but are conspicuously not getting married, doesn't he know he won't have visitation rights! if he's not married! he'll have to die alone and miserable! all the campaigning told me that and surely they didn't exaggerate just to get their way!).
The 10% of people who can't pass convincingly and so need legal bulwark about "yeah I know I look like a guy, but please let me into the women's bathroom" I'm sorry for, but there's nothing that can be done to help them until the creepers and predators are disavowed by the same campaigners who are out there convincing the world that "trans people are being literally lynched in bathrooms by the bigots right now".
If it's a stupid law, break it! Where the fuck did this worship of the literal letter of legislation come from, from people happy to go out screaming in the streets on protests about this, that and the other? I don't expect Buck Angel to go "well gee, I guess I'll have to use the ladies' room" in reality, no matter what the law says, any more than I expect them to stop being a sex worker, no matter what the law says. It'd be freakin' lovely if the trans lot were so slavishly ruled by "if the law says this, then I can't do it", because that would save the rest of us an ocean of trouble, but I don't see that happening in the world.
And if you really want my views? Trans women are not real women, trans men are not real men, biology is real, trans issues are mental health issues, but so long as you are not a screaming lunatic about it then hey, I can call you Susie and use she/her and not blink too hard if you show up in the ladies' loo. But I'm never going to believe that trans is the same as cis, and I'm not going to be brow-beaten or bullied into "if you don't think this, then it doesn't matter how you act, you are literally murdering trans people".
EDIT: Good God, I can't believe I'm having to invoke St. Thomas Aquinas here on "oooh, you want us to bweak the law!!!!" logic-chopping, but here goes: a bad law may be broken in good conscience. If the suffering trans martyr who will just die if he can't get his big hairy legs into the girlies' potty genuinely thinks the law is wrong and unjust, then he can break it:
The last word on this damn topic, and I wish the bloody bathroom law makers would think about this:
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Whenever I see a photo of "Charlotte" I can't stop laughing, because the motivation for her "transition" is so transparent. What a sick indictment of woke culture that you can have people calling for your head over some meaningless "infraction", and all you have to do is play Transition Card (+10 to cancellation resistance) and, literally overnight, you're back in the Twitterati's good graces.
Wow, 2014 was a different time.
Still—less booing of the outgroup, please.
You're right, I was in a bit of a goofy mood at the time of writing, I could've worded that better.
It really is crazy comparing 2014 Discourse (TM) to current.
I can’t imagine Scott wading into that kind of beef today. Not because he’s unwilling, but it’s so…earnest. I’m struggling to put it to words.
Maybe everyone learned something from the last ten years. Now the battle lines are drawn, the witty rejoinders are prepared, and the epistemic helplessness is learned. There’s no alpha in an earnest chat about the philosophical grounding of tribal affiliation. Which isn’t to say there’s no value—just that it’s harder to stand out in a field of cynics. No one leaves home without his umbrella and his casual disdain for Twitter randos. Delivered, of course, on the same site.
I dunno. Surely I’m overthinking the issue.
I think it is indeed because Scott is unwilling. Simply put, he doesn't write like he used to back then. Some of that is probably because he figures he said everything useful he can say. Some of that is certainly because he doesn't want to deal with the social blowback from writing posts like that. There may well be other reasons as well. But at the end of the day, Scott has long since made the switch from "insightful criticism of social justice" to "anodyne pieces about medicine and science", and the Clymer piece doesn't fit into his current MO.
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Multiheaded:
What's changed, other than the people resisting this behavior being even more marginalized than they were in 2014? The tactics haven't changed, the vain last stands on hills of civility haven't changed, and nor have the fellow travelers telling the defenders to surrender yet another hill "because it's just the nice thing to do."
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To be fair, Scott was an outlier at that time. I didn't and don't have his way with words, but I'd had similar drive to overtures of earnest engagement and disarmament, and then had them burned out of me in around 2010-2011. I hope that there's something more or deeper, and in a way I'm reminded of Chuubo's, where :
But there's reasons I can't post on rpgnet, anymore, and reasons why they never responded to my appeal, and why I only bothered to send one because one of their moderators demanded it. There's a reason I don't have discussions like those here, on a wide variety of other locations and nyms that are tots open to serious debates, fingers crossed. There's a reason Scott knows that there are things that put his practice or license or career at risk, or whatever is left of his friendships.
There's a reason Moran finished her otherwise-excellent piece about the horrors of a Bleak worldview with
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Dunno who you think I am, but this is the first comment I've made in the thread and I don't do masks.
I'm not worried about any of it -- I'm a man and don't care who goes in the men's room. I do know IRL women who are worried about who goes in the women's room though.
My guess would be that a given Peeping Tom or piss perv is extremely likely to be a non-transgender heterosexual man? Who (in the case of the Peeping Toms) are known to go through schemes much more elaborate than "walk into a washroom and claim to be trans if challenged" in the course of their fetish.
You're the one bringing up Buck Angel -- it's a different failure mode, but still pretty valid. Not all women want to 'put up with' sharing a bathroom with trans males, is this under dispute?
If the bathrooms are gender neutral, Buck Angel can go in whichever one he chooses, no?
You were also the one who brought up the idea that Buck being in the ladies room would be some sort of problem under the traditional bathroom management policies -- or that's how I took "If your worry is that seeing male-looking people go into the women's room will make life more dangerous for women" anyways. If not, what did you mean by that?
So it's totally fine if you have a different position than the one I was responding to, it just means that my comment naturally wouldn't be a coherent reply to your position since it was responding to a different one.
The position I was responding to, as I understand OP to hold it, was: If trans women are allowed in women's restrooms, that will normalize malelooking people being in women's restrooms. That will make is easier for cis men who are perverts to fake their way into women's restrooms for nefarious purposes.
My point in bringing up Buck Angel is, if that is your model of the danger at play here, then Buck Angel using the women's room is an equally large problem. That would also normalize male-looking people going into the women's restroom in exactly the same way.
So, if your position is that the problem is male-looking people in women's restroom, bathroom bills do not actually solve that problem. They probably make it worse.
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Your hectoring tone is misplaced when I explicitly said that I can get onboard with the idea of gender-neutral bathrooms. I don't find the argument in favour of sex-segregated bathrooms hard to understand even if I don't necessarily endorse it.
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You know, gun advocates frequently point out the vanishingly unlikely chance of a school shooting, compared to all the other ways kids can die, but somehow this sort of statistical analysis does not move those of you who are suddenly about cold hard numbers over emotional valience when it is convenient. Yes, stranger abductions on the playground are rare compared to parental abductions, just as stranger rapes in a dark alley are rare compared to partner violence. But we still care about those things because they happen, and without vigilance against those things, they would happen more because predators are, in fact, out there.
Yeah, I don't really care about gun control, I agree that people use school shootings for rhetorical purposes more than on logical grounds.
I think we waste too much time and energy and social capital on low-frequency high-salience events like this, enough so that we make things actively worse in total. Sure there are some common-sense things we should do, mostly just staying alert, but the scare mongering and warping of everyday life to accommodate the media-driven panics around these issues are really bad for our society and the people in it.
Hm.
Yup, that sure is a bunch of my posts from 5 years ago in which I don't personally advocate for gun control, alright.
I didn't think I needed to post examples from 5 years ago backing up my claims about my beliefs, but I guess it's nice that you went and found them anyway.
Yeah, I do think things would be a lot better if there magically weren't any/as many guns in the country.
Magic isn't on the table.
So I don't care much about gun control. I don't think arguing about it is actually going to lead to the utopian outcome that would be good.
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That quote doesn't "personally argue for gun control" either, if you read it closely. They're just describing how other people might see things, not taking any position of their own.
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I believe him. I dont think he cares about the trans issue either.
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