Taboo Topics (Heavily moderated)

[Barabba]

The problem with that argument, as I understand it, is that what someone else is comfortable with shouldn't be grounds for imposing those norms, potentially harmfully, on others.

But doesn't the same hold true for people who want a restroom that they identify with? They want to impose their norms on people who don't think the same way as they do.

My more eloquent rationalization is that bathrooms are separated by sex, not by gender, and that it is important to keep these concepts separate. That's not to say the idea of separate facilities isn't flawed, but for the moment I believe it has its uses and that it is in most people's best interest to maintain the current norms.

I agree. Similar to how the church and state (the emotional and the functional) are separate, so too should gender and sex be separate things. I know that simile sounds weird and dumb, but whatever.

[YCobb]

The problem with that argument, as I understand it, is that what someone else is comfortable with shouldn't be grounds for imposing those norms, potentially harmfully, on others.

But doesn't the same hold true for people who want a restroom that they identify with? They want to impose their norms on people who don't think the same way as they do.

Ehhh, this is pretty shady territory and sounds a lot like common arguments against gay marriage and similar things. The difference is that in the second case, no freedoms are restricted. It's one thing to discomfort people, it's another thing to restrict them to using only a facility that effectively denies an important and very sensitive aspect of their person.

My more eloquent rationalization is that bathrooms are separated by sex, not by gender, and that it is important to keep these concepts separate. That's not to say the idea of separate facilities isn't flawed, but for the moment I believe it has its uses and that it is in most people's best interest to maintain the current norms.

I agree. Similar to how the church and state (the emotional and the functional) are separate, so too should gender and sex be separate things. I know that simile sounds weird and dumb, but whatever.

Gender and sex are separate things. Technical terms. It's not so much about them being different as it is about which criteria is used for bathrooms. Personally, I believe this is mostly because the people who would cause trouble are likely to do it based on sex rather than by gender - a transwoman is less likely to encounter trouble in a men's bathroom than she would in a female bathroom, because people's judgements are more commonly based on sex than on gender.
Of course, this is a very touchy subject for a lot of people and I certainly don't claim to be an expert of any kind.

[Kamak]

I see the issue as being two-fold.

The comfort of cis-individuals needs to be considered, because any discomfort or feeling of harassment is going to hurt the concept on a fundamental level. If women feel creeped on by "guys" coming into the bathroom and sitting in the stall next to them, that's a problem, and it's not even necessarily a matter of "ew trans* people", it can be an issue of "I'm alone in this bathroom with a stranger that makes me feel unsafe." and that's a feeling that shouldn't happen, and is partly the reason for separated bathrooms to begin with.

Additionally, a woman stepping into a man's bathroom or vice versa is also a way to out someone as trans* or at least make people feel "justified" in that something is wrong with them, like maybe they're a creep and deserve to be given undue attention. There could be a lot of hate crimes based on this kind of thing, and I could see people, after an incident happens, conforming out of fear to the socially acceptable bathroom because they don't want to be hurt.

And about the only way to prevent or "catch" that kind of stuff is to have cameras in bathrooms, and I'm sure a lot of people would be against that.

About the "best" solution is adding a third option for people to use like the gender neutral family bathrooms. It's not ideal, as Cori pointed out, because they're more private bathrooms which means they're not made for high volume, but a single stall bathroom also prevents a lot of this discomfort, and largely spares the individual from undue attention.

There's still a bit of an issue of being isolated from other people in the bathroom, but personally, I'd rather feel safe than shit in a room full of people who may want to cause harm to me.

[YCobb]

Man, why couldn't I figure out how to phrase any of that? What Kamak said is exactly what I was trying to articulate in some parts of my post.

One thing I'd still like to add is that opening up bathrooms to trans* members of the opposite sex also allows for anyone to use bathrooms of the opposite sex - I'm certain that numerous dangerous men would claim to be trans* and abuse the chance to enter female bathrooms.
((Call me misandrist, but I don't think the issue would be quite as pressing in the other direction.))

A third set of bathrooms for anyone who feels uncomfortable would be open to even worse abuse, I fear. There are a lot of people who are horribly transphobic who do terrible things to trans* people, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if they used the presence of publicly labeled trans* places to make that abuse easier to perpetrate.

In short, I'm in favor of all the ideas to solve the problem, but by nature every single one of them is dangerous to implement. This is why I think it's easier to divide bathrooms by sex rather than gender. It opens up less new avenues for abuse, and makes a person's gender identity totally irrelevant while giving transsexual people a much more final justification for whichever bathroom is appropriate, while also minimizing abuse of the system.

[Reyo]

EIDT:

women identifying themselves as men

I don't think you meant it, but your wording leaves a lot of room for someone to take extreme offense.

???

How should I have worded it? Should I have just referred to them as men?

"I can't help but feel, with this wave of "feminism", that the idea was proposed 90% because men should be allowed to go into the men's restroom, and only 10% because we should accommodate for perceived gender."

That doesn't help make the point, it's just a confusing statement. Men are already allowed in the mens room. I have to express that they're physically women, wanting to go into the mens room.

[Syobon]

Bathrooms should be unisex and we as a society need to move away from the downright harmful taboos around sexuality as well as stop assuming everyone is a pervert.

[TheStranger]

Bathrooms should be unisex and we as a society need to move away from the downright harmful taboos around sexuality as well as stop assuming everyone is a pervert.

A lot of people are perverts though and I dont think its a good idea to have unisex bathrooms until there's been som MASSIVE changes in how women are treated.

[YCobb]

EIDT:

women identifying themselves as men

I don't think you meant it, but your wording leaves a lot of room for someone to take extreme offense.

???

How should I have worded it? Should I have just referred to them as men?

"I can't help but feel, with this wave of "feminism", that the idea was proposed 90% because men should be allowed to go into the men's restroom, and only 10% because we should accommodate for perceived gender."

That doesn't help make the point, it's just a confusing statement. Men are already allowed in the mens room. I have to express that they're physically women, wanting to go into the mens room.

Ideally the term would be transmen. Any combination of the words female, identifying, and man would have worked too.

It's because women/men are terms for gender, not for sex. The way you worded it invalidates that the male is a woman, making it seem as though you see them as a man in denial. I'm sure you didn't mean it, but proper terminology is important in situations like this to avoid stepping on people's toes. The distinction between sex and gender is of utmost importance in these sorts of discussions.

Edit: actually, now that I look again at the context you said it in, I'm beginning to wonder if that wasn't a goal. Why the implication of feminism, especially in sarcastic quotes?

Saying it's mostly people who are biologically female but are men and then implicating feminism in such a seemingly negative fashion kind of reeks of not accepting their identities. Implying that it's just jealous feminists is immature and absurd, too. It's about individual people wanting to use the bathrooms that they feel are appropriate for their identity.

[Reyo]

While I agree with what you said about the differences between gender, and sex, I still can't help but think that any offense that could be taken would have to be construed from shenanigans involving the wording. While it's technically true, it doesn't really add anything to the discussion, nor does it really subtract from the opposition's arguments. I'm not saying that this is you doing it, I can see you're merely trying to notice where there could be a hot button topic, but I just can't help but feel that it'd be pointless to get offended over something like that.

I didn't say "women's restroom" because I'm insensitive to the fact that "woman = gender" and "female = sex" I said it like that because that's how society does the restrooms. We don't really say "female's restroom."

Also the sarcastic quotes around feminism is because whenever it's brought up, another conversation is sparked over how "feminism" is actually about bringing the sexes to equal grounds, and not shaming men. So now there's feminism, and "feeeeminism". It was simply to refer to the kind of feminism where you have angry womyn fighting the patriarchy.

[YCobb]

You can't really participate in this discussion without word choice being important. It's like talking science to someone but using momentum, velocity, and inertia interchangeably. If you refer to women, you're talking about gender. If you refer to females, you're talking about sex. It's what the terms mean.

You're treating the 'second conversation' as inevitable, yet you're the only one bringing it up. Is it really so inevitable?
Separate ideals contained within feminism aren't relevant to this discussion. What is relevant is whether or not trans* persons should use bathrooms corresponding to their sex or to their gender. this is related to feminism, but not nearly enough to warrant criticism of general feminism. I don't understand why you would implicate feminism in the way that you did except that you wanted an excuse to criticize it.

[Madican]

Isn't there a more practical problem to this sort of thing? As in urinals. Even if someone identifies as male, if they don't have the biological equipment then they can't make use of them. It's not as easy as just getting rid of urinals either because they are more efficient than stalls in use of water, space taken up, and time needed to use it. I'd even venture to say that the stereotype of women's restrooms always having a line but never the men's can be traced to the urinals in the men's restroom.

The same issue arises when saying that all bathrooms should be unisex. As long as there's urinals then there's less space for stalls. But if there's all stalls then the number of people able to use the restroom is less, which leads to congestion in the traffic. It's not a simple binary problem.

[Cori]

With rape culture and objectification of women being a huge problem in the USA, unisex bathrooms are completely out of the question.

[YCobb]

I wouldn't even limit that to the US. For all the flak we get, we still tend to be more progressive than most countries. At the very least, I'm pretty sure that all of the best known western cultures (English, American, German, French, etc) are better in terms of equality than others.

It's a huge problem everywhere in the world.

[Reyo]

You can't really participate in this discussion without word choice being important. It's like talking science to someone but using momentum, velocity, and inertia interchangeably. If you refer to women, you're talking about gender. If you refer to females, you're talking about sex. It's what the terms mean.

You're treating the 'second conversation' as inevitable, yet you're the only one bringing it up. Is it really so inevitable?
Separate ideals contained within feminism aren't relevant to this discussion. What is relevant is whether or not trans* persons should use bathrooms corresponding to their sex or to their gender. this is related to feminism, but not nearly enough to warrant criticism of general feminism. I don't understand why you would implicate feminism in the way that you did except that you wanted an excuse to criticize it.

Except that it's more comparable to using standard vs metric when discussing science. While it's true they're different, either side would know what the other means just from context. Besides which, at this point it sounds like you're now trying to defend your stance on telling me that what I said was wrong more than actually discussing the main topic. I'd step down for that, but not because I decided to use a word based on what would be easiest to understand in passing conversation.

EDIT: And I included feminism because it exists, and very much would be involved. I feel you're looking into more of my posts than you should.

[YCobb]

No, it is nothing like using metric instead of imperial. Metric and imperial still measure the same properties, while sex and gender are separate concepts. Gender is how a person identifies and behaves (such as masculine and feminine) while sex is a person's biological and physical condition.

What you said was wrong because it invalidated trans* identities - it's a matter of "a woman saying she isn't a woman" vs "a female identifying as a man."