Use of single-sex toilets, changing rooms and hospital wards in England, Scotland and Wales is now restricted according to a person’s birth sex, rather than the gender with which they identify.
Use of single-sex toilets, changing rooms and hospital wards in England, Scotland and Wales is now restricted according to a person’s birth sex, rather than the gender with which they identify.
just make all restrooms unisex
(First: a disclaimer. Someone will try to make a bad-faith interpretation of this as me opposing gender-neutral restrooms. I’m fine with gender-neutral restrooms, but it’s intellectually lazy to point to them as a solution to “the trans bathroom problem.”)
In what universe is it easier to convince the population to completely give up gendered multi-user restrooms than it is to simply let trans people use the restrooms of their gender, as we have been for generations?
Do you know how trans people typically choose when to switch which restroom we use? We typically do it when we start getting weird glances or comments in the restroom of our birth sex. In other words, trans people pick the path of least disruption or resistance. You switch restrooms when remaining in the old one would be more disruptive than moving to the new one. Most trans people go out of their way to cause as few waves as possible. All trans people need for this is to just be left the fuck alone. We’re handling it. Just mind your own damn business and stop legislating our lives.
Compare that to what you propose. You need to get the entire society onboard with getting rid of gendered bathrooms. You need to get parents OK with the idea of their 10 year old daughter sharing a restroom with a 300 lb 6’ tall man. (And not just bigot’s stereotypes of trans women, actual big cisgender men.) I’m sorry, but while maybe in an ideal enlightened world, that would be possible. But we just don’t live in that world.
Trans people: “Please just leave us alone and quit getting into our business.”
Enlightened centrists: “No! We’ll keep the bigoted law in place restricting your bathroom use. But no worries, soon we’ll just abolish gendered restrooms all together, and the problem will be solved!”
With allies like these, who needs enemies?
My mother: I would never use a unisex bathroom.
Me: the bathroom in your house is unisex
Mother: that’s different that’s family
Me: so you wouldn’t let the plumber or electrician use the bathroom?
Mother: confused stare
How many people use that bathroom at the same time?
Depends how badly you gotta go while your sibling is in the shower. And spouses often walk in on each other, with a knock and permission of course
I understand where this point comes from, but it always comes across as vapid to me. Obviously when people express concern about gender-neutral bathrooms, they’re talking about multi-user gender-neutral bathrooms.
So don’t have multiple people share a seat?
Seriously though, it’s not hard to have an open space with multiple stalls.
This is the solution of choice of those who don’t really respect trans identities but want to propose a reasonable-sounding but completely impractical solution they know will never be implemented. Anything to keep from just saying “trans women are women and belong in the women’s restroom.”
Trans women are apparently only women when it comes to showing their nipples.
Excuse me but, what makes genderless bathrooms impossible to implement or impractical? I do get that the bathroom issue is just superficial and going genderless wouldn’t be a real solution to the hate and bigotry, but I’ve always found gendered toilets quite stupid.
Because instead of just going with the easy solution of letting trans people use the bathroom for their gender, (which we’ve been doing for generations), you propose a solution that would require the entire society to get onboard with a complete reformation of how public restrooms work.
Instead of the simple and expedient solution that works just fine, you set up an impossible goal that will never be accepted by society.
Reality check. Most people don’t want there to only be gender neutral bathrooms. I think you know this which is why you’re setting this as a solution to this “problem.”
How about we just let trans people use the right bathrooms today, and you can go off on your gender neutral bathroom crusade if you like. But leave us out of it.
First, you’re confusing me with the other commenter. I just asked about what you said.
Second, you didn’t answered that question.
Third, gender neutral restrooms, bathrooms, toilets, latrines, outhouses… have been the norm for most of human history, gendered ones are the recent invention not the other way around.
I don’t know, honestly. Most people don’t have gendered bathrooms in their homes, do they? Also, what I do know is that ‘most people’, quote, “favor laws that require transgender individuals to use bathrooms that correspond to their sex at birth”, so I don’t think ‘most people’ arguments are of help here when it’s well known that most people will just go along with the status quo without a second thought.
Going back a couple of years the sole concept of considering trans people would be problematic and impossible to deal with. Going way further we had problems with race as “coloured” people had their own bathroom. The thing about all of this is we have the power (as demonstrated historically) to make the impossible possible.
There is no bigotry involved here, in fact it is reversed: as sex isn’t binary - its more of a spectrum. And in terms of simplicity, what’s simpler than a singular bathroom - this pointless division is what really is makes this complex.
The problem is that this isn’t the easy solution because asshats pass legislation like this. Honestly the same people that don’t want gender neutral bathrooms are the same people that don’t want trans people to use certain restrooms. Gender neutral bathrooms are not the problem you are making them out to be.
We had stupid bill like this at the state level a few years ago that was widely unpopular and repealed a year later. Most businesses labeled their restrooms as unisex to protest the bill and support the trans community.
Trans women are women (except when they’re puppies, which is shockingly often. Then they’re bitches), but gender segregated restrooms are inefficient. You can skip the whole issue and undercut the basis of that nonsense transphobia.
Because gendered restrooms are bullshit inefficiency to start with.
Ok. Then go have your crusade and leave trans people out of it. I just don’t like seeing our civil rights being made contingent on massive change to the social structure that very few people would be down with.
It’s like those yahoos who say, “we wouldn’t have all these problems with trans acceptance if we just abolished gender!”
Nobody complains anywhere I’ve seen them, including at the local queer spaces. It turns out they’re also the only solution for non-binary people, who I’m sure you care about very much.
Technically true, but that’s not why they’re saying it and that’s a slightly bigger ask than ‘think no differently in the immediate term, remove some signs’. If these people cared what you fucking wanted and responded to rational arguments this would never have been a problem in the first place, but you’re still Jere asking them to think differently/at all.
That’s what you sound like here. You’re panicking and screaming about the things your lying liar opponents say rather than trying to think strategically about what actually effects the ways they behave.
We are on the edge of god damn war with unthinking rage fueled privilege monsters and you’re still trying to batter them with your ego and ‘what I want’. No subtlety no manipulation no strategy not even ‘I want it all, surrender not an inch’. Just tantrum.
We’re not talking about having gender-neutral bathrooms. We’re talking about ONLY having gender neutral bathrooms. If you think the broad society is going to accept only having gender neutral bathrooms, you’re delusional.
IDK, my college made a bathroom unisex by just getting rid of the urinal in the men’s room but keeping the women’s room women only. Which I understand, some girls and women would be uncomfortable with the possibility of accidentally seeing a dick, and women need safe spaces from men.
So I’d rather just keep the urinals and let trans women just use the women’s bathroom. Hell you can call the men’s room a unisex bathroom if you want and let anyone in, just don’t get rid of the urinal.
But then who would we exclude?
Terfs
But aren’t they conservatives!? Those are the people the law is supposed to protect, not the people the law is supposed to bind!