I have lost all capacity to be thoughtful about the man.
Anyway, just what the fuck is going on in men’s bathrooms at work? Because, I have to tell you, in the women’s bathroom, we’re making some small talk by the sink and then we each go into our own locked stall and we do our business by ourselves. If a transgender woman uses the women’s bathroom, it literally makes no difference to how I use the bathroom, since there is no womanly requirement that we stick our noses in each others’ genitals. I would have to adjust nothing about my day to accommodate her.
You could have feathers instead of pubic hair. You could have a tiny puppy grafted onto your cooter. You could be walking around with a six inch wide butt plug and I would never know.
If men wanted to use the women’s bathroom, sure, yes, it would take a little getting used to (a girl raised by Protestant Midwesterners doesn’t get over that shit over night), but I would get used to it and then soon, we’d all be either peeing together as one or we’d establish a “one person in the bathroom at a time” rule.
So, I never know what to make of this fear of a confusing bathroom experience.
Is it customary for the David Fowlers of the world to push their eyes up to the space between the stall door and the frame? Some requirement? Because, otherwise, I just don’t see how this is a problem.
Shoot, if it’s a one-seater and there’s a line for the women’s and not for the men’s? I’ve been known to use the men’s.
Is Fowler going to rally against me next?
Tiny Cat Pants 
Well, come on, I mean if we have mixed genders in the bathroom, how can he be sure his playmate is a dude when he pulls a Larry Craig?
Given the fact that 82% of the time I use a public restroom there is some woman in there with a boy who is anywhere between 4 and 9 and that boy always peeks thru the stall cracks at me I think maybe the men of the South have a peculiarly ingrained sense of nosiness.
I’ve always been of the mind set that even having gender separated bathrooms is kind dumb. I mean, when was the last time anybody saw nudity in a bathroom?
I hate having men in the bathroom with me. Really. It’s not just about nudity for me, but about protecting some degree of mystery.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that men’s bathrooms have urinals which are less private than stalls. Perhaps David Fowler doesn’t know any better, since he doesn’t use the women’s bathroom.
Or maybe–and I’m stretching here–David Fowler couldn’t come up with any other fearmongering excuse for his bigotry so he had to pull the old “your precious daughter will be using the BATHROOM with degenerates” ploy.
What I love is the part where he says the bill would lead to “awkward situations.” Heavens to mergatroid, we can’t have any AWKWARD SITUATIONS that would just be, well, awkward.
Seriously WTF?
heck, even if the men’s room you used was multiple occupancy, as long as you used a stall and closed the door i doubt anybody would give a damn.
oh, and observe basic men’s room etiquette; don’t look at the guys using the urinals, don’t keep — preferably don’t make — eye contact, and don’t make any real small talk. there’s a small but real chance nobody would even notice your gender, if you stuck to that.
i’ve got a close personal friend who happens to be tg/ts. when they walk into a public toilet, the only thing they’re interested in doing is #1 or #2. statistically, i’m almost certain to have shared a bathroom with transpeople i never knew about, because that’s all they’ll have done there and i’m not a peeping tom. what exactly else the bigots think transfolk do in bathrooms, i’d rather not try to guess.
Eh, if ZOMG unisex bathrooms!!!!!!! was good enough to sink the ERA and equality for half the population, it’s only fitting that it be dragged out again to deny equality to a smaller number.
I’d like to interrupt this discussion to point out how nice it is to see Nomen back.
That is all.
Carry on.
eh, it’ll only last until wordpress once again remembers it hates me.
i swear, if there was a single blogging service whose commenting function worked half as well as LiveJournal’s… wait, there’s LiveJournal. why did we stop using that again?
Copypasta comment. Original on link in story.
First of all, what is wrong with a trans woman (or girl in this case) using the public restroom that matches her public appearance? You would rather have someone who for all outward purposes is a woman using the mens room?
Right this very second I have a friend in Maryland who is having to leave work and run across the street (including two big parking lots) to use the family restroom at Target. She has been given special permission to leave her area because of this, but it is bad for her, and bad for her business. The District HR person who came in to tell her about this was rude, calling her ‘Sir’, and implying that she was a rapist and a child molester just because she was trans.
We are not monsters, we are no threat to anyone, and more than that…. we have the same desire for human dignity and a normal life that anyone else has. These laws aren’t about “special” protections, they are about trying to make people leave us alone so we can live our life.
I wish we could just have bathrooms divided into “urinals” and “stalls”. That way, those who like to pee standing up in a public area can do so in peace, and those who like more privacy or need to sit can do that too. And if we have a 90/10 ratio of stalls/urinals, all the queues will be solved too!
Polerin, I know it’s cliched to say, but the longer I have to be aware of folks like Fowler, the more I become convinced that it is all about projection–that HE feels like all of his impulses are so barely under control that he assumes everyone else is wandering the earth with the same barely controlled impulses and so it’s his duty, as someone who wrestles with the worst impulses of humanity, to force others to be “under control” the way he feels he needs to be.
I don’t know how or if you can explain to someone like that that most people who do things differently than he does are not showing evidence of their barely-concealed depravity leaking through, but just ordinary people living their lives in very mundane ways.
You probably can’t. But I hope that the people he regularly stands against start to see that we need to band together pretty tightly to protect ourselves from him.
It’s almost heartwarming to see another stab at a measure of equal rights under the law being opposed by The Bathroom Gambit. As mentioned above, if it’s good enough to sink the ERA, it’s good enough for this, too!
I was thinking about this in the context of Megan Berry’s upcoming attempt to make Metro’s policies non-discriminatory on gender representation and orientation, and about the basic political strategery. In other words, “How To Defuse The Bathroom Gambit.” I can’t quite figure if it’s just a critical mass of reasonable people noting that we do, in fact, have the Family Restroom option at many reputable establishments (and single parents accompanying their opposite-sexed children into a gendered restroom) with nary a blink; or if instead we should expose the gambit for what it is: a cheap political play to associate bathroom-private-intrusion into the mind of Jane Voter. And if it’s the latter, how? I’ll let you know when I figure it all out, and then how to achieve world peace.
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As a quite normal gay man, I have to admit that a huge part of the problem is that ignorant people focus on transgender to describe GLBT people.
With an estimated 9 million (about 3.8%) of Americans identifying as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender (2011). It seems that bisexuals make up 1.8% of the population, while 1.7% are gay or lesbian. Transgender adults make up 0.3% of the population.
All of the garbage used around this whole bathroom gender confusion argument, and all of the ignorance that is so pervasive amongst our heterosexual legislators is biased toward the concept of transgender which is by far the smallest percentage of people on the map.
Education of the ignorant is key.
So, your solution is to make sure everyone knows that you “quite normal” gay people don’t deserve the same kind of legal oppression as transgender people?
Yeah, fuck that shit.
Any justice that comes at the expense of the most vulnerable isn’t really justice.
They’re not dicking over gay people because they don’t like transgender people. They’re using anxiety about transgender people as cover for their hatred of gay people.
If you don’t get that, your efforts to educate might best start at home.