Who determines the number of genders- and how?

[shuttlt]

We can test your risk assessment claims.

There are a number of businesses and localities which have declared their restrooms open to people by their declared gender.

If you are correct and such a policy represents a meaningfully increased risk of bathroom assault, we should see an uptick of restroom assaults in places with this policy.

Given how passionate about the issue people on both sides are, one would expect cases that prove the danger of inclusive policy to be pulled from local headlines and trumpeted in blogs and thinkpieces, not hard at all to find.

Now personally, the only legal incidents I've seen that pertain directly to trans bathroom access are a few cases of men entering women's bathrooms and causing trouble specifically to protest AGAINST trans access and a case or two or cis women who didn't look feminine enough being harassed as suspected biological males. Neither support your risk assessment. But I may have missed some. It's a bit too fresh an issue to have a clear statistical analysis, but surely if a real widespread danger exists, there should be at least a handful of relevant cases you could cite.

Well, I think the self declared route is likely a lot better than unisex. However:

1. Is anybody gathering these stats? I have no idea where to look.

2. Are most public toilets in these states like this now? Or is this a self selected sample of low risk businesses.

 

[Cavemonster]

Well, I think the self declared route is likely a lot better than unisex. However:

1. Is anybody gathering these stats? I have no idea where to look.

I don't need statistics, just dig up a few individual cases. As I said in my previous post, opposition to trans people in bathrooms is very strong. I would be shocked if there were a case somewhere which could even vaguely speak to this issue and isn't seized on by, say Fox news or Breitbart or some conservative blog.

 

[d4m10n]

Found a bathroom that works for all genders jist now . . .

Turns out the one weird trick is a lockable door.

ETA: A few scholarly thoughts on point.

 

[shuttlt]

I don't need statistics, just dig up a few individual cases. As I said in my previous post, opposition to trans people in bathrooms is very strong. I would be shocked if there were a case somewhere which could even vaguely speak to this issue and isn't seized on by, say Fox news or Breitbart or some conservative blog.

I can certainly find cases of people being attacked, spied on, etc in public toilets. Its certainly not common, but it clearly happens. None of them say what the policy is for the particular toilet or state.

 

[Cavemonster]

I can certainly find cases of people being attacked, spied on, etc in public toilets. Its certainly not common, but it clearly happens. None of them say what the policy is for the particular toilet or state.

Do your research then. You're the one making a claim of a great danger that trans people need to make their comfort and safety subservient to. If you're not willing to do a little quick googling to support your claim, I'm starting to doubt it's the sincere reason for your stated position,

 

[JoeMorgue]

You know I'm gonna make the radical suggestion that "How bathrooms" isn't the lynch pin upon society is gonna rise and fall.

 

[shuttlt]

Do your research then. You're the one making a claim of a great danger that trans people need to make their comfort and safety subservient to. If you're not willing to do a little quick googling to support your claim, I'm starting to doubt it's the sincere reason for your stated position,

If a large percentage of toilets have this policy, then untoward things are certainly happening in them, since untoward things happen in toilets every once in a while. Or are you arguing that nobody every had a bad experience in a toilet? We presumably aren't arguing that toilets with such rules offer special protection from molestation, that toilets with more conservative rules somehow lack? It could be that there are insufficient such toilets. This comes down to stats, not anecdotes from Breitbart.

I'm not wildly bothered by this. I'd be more concerned if toilets were going gender neutral in large numbers. Typically in these kinds of debates neither side (the folk with money to pay for data to be collected, not us) is actually interested in producing robust stats, since they win or lose their case on emotional/moral/partisan grounds, so I really don't expect to find any.

 

[shuttlt]

You know I'm gonna make the radical suggestion that "How bathrooms" isn't the lynch pin upon society is gonna rise and fall.

No, but most social change in any direction happens by inches. Either you defend/fight for those inches, even though they are only inches, or you defend/fight for nothing.

For what its worth, my view would be that anybody who has been diagnosed with gender disphoria should be allowed to use what ever restroom they want. I don't think they should be expected to show a doctors note to every restroom attendant.

Is it super expensive to get diagnosed in the USA? In the UK I suspect it would just be time consuming.

 

[Stout]

The sexual assault by a "man in a dress" id really a secondary concern here. The big one is all the embarrassments that come along with owning a vagina and having to expose those embarrassments in front of someone who doesn't own one.

Read all that mumsnet stuff, that's what most of it's about.

 

[cullennz]

The sexual assault by a "man in a dress" id really a secondary concern here. The big one is all the embarrassments that come along with owning a vagina and having to expose those embarrassments in front of someone who doesn't own one.

Read all that mumsnet stuff, that's what most of it's about.

Pretty much

At the end of the day it's an argument about which people's discomfort trumps the others.

 

[pharphis]

Yes that is how the law works.



No more so then letting gay men and women into the bathroom with straight men and women.

"We can't include this group because X percent of them might be rapist" wasn't valid for gay people, it's not valid for trans people, it's not valid for refugees. Hell it's not valid for straight men despite popular opinions to the contrary.

You really think an unlocked bathroom door with a stick figure on it is what's stopping rapist now? That's there's actually rapists and molesters and peeping toms going "I really want to assault somebody... as soon as I have an excuse to be in the bathroom with them?"

This is turning into the old joke about the kid who wants to run away from home but can't because his mommy won't let him cross the street.

I struggle to imagine rapists in general doing the raping in a toilet. Isn't most rape involving binge drinking and drug abuse (or in prison)?

Now if we're going to talk about general harassment or predation then what you said also covers that. It's hard to believe anyone makes this argument seriously, and yet I routinely see it from what I struggle to categorize as anything other than paranoia mixed with misandry

 

[pharphis]

I would think men are more at risk of having women in the men's room than the reverse since men mostly use urinals. Therefore, they're out in the open. If you're in the women's room, you have to go peeping over, under or maybe through the door (you know the doors with way-too-large-of-a-crack). Very suspicious.

I bet if you looked into it you would see that men are more likely to be assaulted by women than the reverse, in bathrooms, since women are so much more likely to jump into the men's room due to long lineups (especially at bars and where drinking will lead to this kind of behavior anyway). Couple that with the idea that sexual assault of men is a non-issue and that "men are always asking for it" and you have a recipe for worse outcomes.

That's just a guess, though.
That said, I still think the concern is completely silly from either side.

 

[shuttlt]

I struggle to imagine rapists in general doing the raping in a toilet. Isn't most rape involving binge drinking and drug abuse (or in prison)?

Now if we're going to talk about general harassment or predation then what you said also covers that. It's hard to believe anyone makes this argument seriously, and yet I routinely see it from what I struggle to categorize as anything other than paranoia mixed with misandry

Most rape is obviously committed by people who the victim knows, yet some people are still attacked by a stranger and dragged into the bushes. That is obviously at the less common/most extreme end of a spectrum of things strangers can do.

Equally, the fear of such things is clearly not uncommon even if one disagrees with how rational it is. Whose discomfort trumps whose. Do we go for some utilitarian calculus? Or are some types of discomfort more important than others?

 

[shuttlt]

I would think men are more at risk of having women in the men's room than the reverse since men mostly use urinals. Therefore, they're out in the open. If you're in the women's room, you have to go peeping over, under or maybe through the door (you know the doors with way-too-large-of-a-crack). Very suspicious.

I bet if you looked into it you would see that men are more likely to be assaulted by women than the reverse, in bathrooms, since women are so much more likely to jump into the men's room due to long lineups (especially at bars and where drinking will lead to this kind of behavior anyway). Couple that with the idea that sexual assault of men is a non-issue and that "men are always asking for it" and you have a recipe for worse outcomes.

That's just a guess, though.
That said, I still think the concern is completely silly from either side.

Could well be. From that, one might try and make the case that women shouldn't make such a big deal about a bit of minor sexual assault/voyerism/intimidation.... but that doesn't seem to be the way society as a whole views things these days. I think one has to sympathetic if many women react in keeping with the dominant societal narrative. If some of them self identify as being in mortal fear of this, I'm not sure that one can just dismiss it out of hand.

 

[Mycroft]

I'm sure it is very small.

Vanishingly small. As in not a real concern.

I don't follow. Its dumb to let self identified trans women in? Or its dumb to think that if all you need to enter is to self identify as a woman, means any man has permission to enter? In a unisex toilet, clearly all men have permission to enter.

I think it's stupid to suggest that allowing trans-women to use the women's room will open the door to predatory male rapists to also use the women's room as a pretext to identify targets and attack them.

Trans-women dress as women. This "self-identification" is how they live their lives and not just what they're thinking in their head as they enter the bathroom. No man is going to dress as a woman so he can assault women in the bathroom, people who do that try not to draw attention to themselves.

Not quite sure what you mean. I could, if inclined, spend a bunch of time in the gents without arousing too much suspicion. I could presumably do the same in a unisex toilet.

You could, presumably, spend a fair amount of time sitting on a toilet in a stall without drawing much attention, but standing around checking out the people coming and going? No. That's stupid.

It is clearly the case that at least some women have been attacked in single sex toilets. There are very few unisex toilets out there, so I don't see how evidence could exist.

That's not clearly the case at all.

What are the statistics for women being attacked in women's bathrooms, and how many of those attacks are by trans-women? If you can't answer that, then you're just making up crap.

To take a different tack.... a pedophile might perhaps get banned from going within a mile of the local scout groups camping ground. That's not because disregarding the ban is going to be an issue for somebody who wants to rape a child, but with the ban all you have to do is catch him hanging around the camping ground and its back to jail for him without waiting for him to attack anybody. By the same token, if a man is spending time hanging out in the women's toilets, you don't have to wait for him to attack somebody. These rules aren't there because people with I'll intent respect them, so much as because they mean you don't have to wait for them to do something terrible.

Again, how many trans-women rape cis-women in public bathrooms? I'm guessing the number is pretty close to zero, making your fear-mongering stupid.

Since we haven't gone unisex, or self identified yet with toilets who knows? It will be an interesting experience.

The default is and always has been "self-identified". Trans-women use the women's room.

 

[Rolfe]

I can't imagine a more pointless waste of time than continuing to post in this thread, but I rashly came back to see what people were saying.

I think it is a fair description of exactly how Rolfe classified trans people in her first post. See

[Ponderingturtle snips half my post]

The only motives she ascribes for being trans are sexual fetish.

So let's just look at the rest of the post.

Young children who happen to like clothes and/or toys deemed more appropriate for the opposite sex are now being fast-tracked into a life of permanent medicalisation, disfiguring surgery and serious medical consequences resulting from the use of powerful hormones to try to mimic the endocrinology of the opposite sex. As one masculine-presenting woman who was old enough to avoid being railroaded recently said, "I screamed and screamed that I was a boy, but I didn't want to be a boy, I wanted the things that boys had. The short hair and the skateboard and the jeans and the Power Rangers t-shirt." Girls like her are now being encouraged to have mastectomies and take testosterone.

It's the most horrendously sexist thing imaginable. You're a girl and you like blue and short hair and Meccanno, or you're a boy and you like pink glitter and Barbie dolls, you must have been born in the wrong body, never mind, we'll change it for you and we'll make you feel so special and brave for being an amazing trans-kid!

And don't get me started on rapid-onset gender dysphoria, which has replaced anorexia nervosa as the destructive social contagion among adolescent girls who hate their bodies. At least with anorexia nervosa nobody "affirmed" the skeletal waif in her belief that she was grossly obese. Girls with ROGD are being hailed as brave and special and offered testosterone as young as thirteen. You might as well give an anorectic girl a calorie-controlled diet sheet and schedule her for gastric band surgery.

So no, all this gender stuff isn't harmless, it's destroying lives right now. It will blow over the way the recovered memories of Satanic abuse thing blew over, but in the mean time some kids are being seriously damaged. I hate to think what the lawsuits are going to look like by the time these adolescents reach middle-age and the consequences of the hormones they've been given really start to bite.

I'm pretty sure I posted this link already. Gender dysphoria is not one thing. This is an extremely important point and I really don't think anyone can have an informed conversation about this issue unless they are familiar with the material presented in this article.

The three (main) presentations are homosexual trans-sexualism (HSTS), which presents at a very early age, before puberty, and which affects both sexes, rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) which almost exclusively affects adolescent girls and is largely a social contagion, and autogynaephilia (AGP) which is a paraphilia only affecting men and which manifests at or after puberty, never before.

In western societies AGP is the predominant group. While by no means all AGP men are aggressive, entitled, predatory creeps, there is a subset who are and this group is disproportionately represented in the ranks of the trans activists. Not only are they determined to colonise and occupy women's protected spaces in order to validate their paraphilia, they are instrumental in the current vogue for "affirming" youngsters presenting with the other two categories of gender dysphoria and encouraging them into a life of cross-sex hormones and surgery.

In eastern societies HSTS is very much the predominant presentation, mainly due to the fact that being homosexual there is anything from frowned upon to illegal and attracting the death penalty, whereas being trans-sexual is pretty well accepted. Very large numbers of homosexual men therefore choose or are forced to transition in order to be able to express their sexuality in an acceptable manner.

Anyone claiming "you're saying the only reason for being trans is a sexual perversion" is either being utterly disingenuous or can't read.

The current situation is extremely complex with different groups affected in different ways. However the really problematic ingredient is the behaviour of the subset of AGP men who make up the majority of the "trans activist" demographic, their demands to be recognised as women without any qualification and to occupy women's protected spaces, and their political activism promoting affirmation and fast-tracking to hormones and surgery as the only acceptable way to manage the other two groups.

Objecting to the behaviour and agenda of the militant trans activist demographic is by no means the same as declaring that all trans people are in that demographic. Of course they aren't. There are a fair few trans people firmly aligned with team radical feminist in their opposition to the militant group. One of the most entertaining commentaries on all this is Miranda Yardley's blog. I thoroughly recommend having a read at it, as well as Lily Maynard's blog (she is the mother of a teenage girl who had ROGD but got over it) and the 4th wave now blog.

ETA: See this very interesting and thoughtful twitter thread from a trans woman who explains all this better than I can.

https://twitter.com/seven_hex/status/985219754540625921

Or just carry on arguing about semantics, talking past each other, and labelling people you disagree with "transphobes" so you can avoid actually addressing any of the points raised. I don't really care.

 

[Ron_Tomkins]

From now on you shall refer to me as Kloinkingerg, and if you don't, you're a sexist who's offending me and you should be ashamed.

 

[ponderingturtle]

How many occurances of cis-women being assaulted by trans-women in bathrooms have their been?

And how does it compare to the number of trans women assaulted for using the bathroom by cis people?

 

[Joe Random]

From now on you shall refer to me as Kloinkingerg, and if you don't, you're a sexist who's offending me and you should be ashamed.

It's a couple of years old, but on the subject of preferred pronouns : https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...tq-pronoun-gender-roster-policy-a7339866.html

A student has requested that his university call him "His Majesty" to protest against a new policy that respects students’ pronouns of choice, including “they” and “ze”.

The University of Michigan’s new campus policy is to allow students to choose their own personal pronoun which must be respected by other campus members, including professors.

 

[ponderingturtle]

The sexual assault by a "man in a dress" id really a secondary concern here. The big one is all the embarrassments that come along with owning a vagina and having to expose those embarrassments in front of someone who doesn't own one.

Read all that mumsnet stuff, that's what most of it's about.

So they are of course cool with trans guys. No reason to feel uncomfortable around men like that.