And yes, when there are people who can shut their hearts and say “better them than me” or "well you shouldn’t have gone in there looking like that ", I find that sad. What other word would you use?
If someone is born male/identify female goes into a women’s room, do you think they’re going to be all manly-man? No, they’re not. So if a man goes into the ladies room for purposes of perving, he can and should be arrested. And how are we going to know? Well, the manly-man part is a tipoff.
Maybe you missed the various points along this thread where it was pointed out that even before HB2, assaulting someone in a bathroom was a crime. This law is unnecessary and, as @DonnaL points out, only puts transgender people at risk.
I believe in our system…laws get made sometimes by the will of the people sometimes by the will of our Congress and Senate, and our judicial system is there to sort out things and provide the checks and balances. Also we have the states and we have the federal, more checks and balances. Sometimes people want to change things thinking it will improve a situation and it backfires and sometimes it moves a society forward. Bottom line is we all are entitled to our opinions. And most of the time change happens slowly over time and evolves and the messiness of that process is part of the evolution and it absolutely has an intellectual component…if not our entire social structure would be governed solely by emotions. When people are led by their emotions they tend to look for symbolic solutions over complex and substantive solutions but ultimately and historically the end is a result of both emotional and intellectual discourse and a slowing down of decisions that will impact people and I think this is a good thing.
What many people seem to be missing here is that many trans people use the bathroom that matches the gender they pass as. They (like many of us) want to quickly use the bathroom and then go about the rest of their day. So a trans woman who doesn’t pass may use the men’s room simply to avoid being hassled and a trans man may use the women’s room for the same reason. I know this because my brother is trans and he doesn’t completely pass right now, so he uses the women’s restroom. My point is simply that if it is legal for trans people to use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender then there will not be some new flood of trans women who don’t pass in the women’s room. They already face a lot of persecution in society and many of them aren’t going to put themselves in a dangerous situation by using a bathroom that they don’t appear to belong in.
Also side note: transgender is not a verb or a noun, it’s an adjective. I know most (hopefully all?) of you are not trying to use the wrong terminology, but “transgendered person” or “a transgender” is not correct. It might not seem like a big deal, but using accurate vocabulary is important in discussing such a hot button issue.
If there’s a man in the women’s locker room at your gym staring at women, you can certainly report him. The gym will probably cancel his membership and call the police. You could always do that, and you will always be able to do that.
I think people like @momofthreeboys have a tricky choice. You can have a transgender woman who looks very female and is very modest changing quickly and privately in a corner in the women’s locker room. Or you can have a transgender man who looks very male in her place. I would think women would prefer the individual who is practically indistinguishable from a woman when clothed vs the individual who is practically indistinguishable from a man.
I’m interested to hear her opinion on it. Are both cases unacceptable? Is there a reasonable accommodation you’d find acceptable?
Viewed from abroad, this seems so utterly contrived to be unbelievable. Are people really that “bathroom insecure” these days? I also love the idea of people being appointed to check the birth certificates of bathroom users. Imagine the potential lawsuit if a masculine looking woman (or feminine looking man) was challenged and asked to prove their birth status!
@donnal:
What you write about women’s locker rooms is true, the idea that a transgender woman would be flashing her private parts is ludicrous, if momofthree boys only knew a transgender woman she would know just how awkward it is for them and that they would be the opposite of an exhibitionist in a place like that. I think my concerns about with kids was a combination of things, teenagers (male and female) can be a pretty nasty bunch, and I would be afraid for the transgender student being harmed by the others. My other thought was based on a specific case, there was a lawsuit out in Illinois I think, with a teen transgender girl, and to be honest she gave me the impression of being someone who might very well let it all hang out in the locker room, just to make a point, and that is what I was thinking of. That age is a weird one, and it is the one place where I have some conflict with issues like locker rooms, not because I necessarily think that a transgender student shouldn’t use a locker room, but rather that I worry for the student more, because our society still has a lot of idiotic hangups with our bodies, and teenagers are vicious about it, think about the way kids who have acne are treated, kids who have trouble with their weight, girls who might still be awkward with their bodies, the like, and that is where I was coming from.
"And note that there is also no answer (in fact, no has ever answered this on this thread) of exactly how real perverts are separated from the good people. " That is interesting, because using your logic, we should never let our kids be part of a scout troop, never be alone with a coach, a Catholic Priest, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, there have been plenty of kids who have been molested by perverts in those areas, and since we can never know who a pervert is, why is this different than with transgender women, if that is what you are saying. The answer is we don’t, even as shaken as people have been like with the priest abuse scandal, or recent cases where coaches have been accused, or Dennis Hastert, the past Speaker of the House, does that mean we don’t let our kids near any members of the house (well, okay, maybe for other reasons, given how stupid politicians are these days…:).
And the answer is it is why we have laws to deter crime whereas we are very, very careful about laws ‘preventing crime’. The problem is specifically that in supposedly preventing an ill, you are automatically treating good members of the group as suspect, as perverts. Besides the obvious problem with this specific case, that the argument about men using the rest room to molest women under the guise of being transgender has been proven false by the many long years of experience with other laws protecting transgender folk from using restrooms in other places, there is absolutely zero evidence that transgender women are more likely to molest other women. Heck, given the number of transgender women likely to use the restrooms, you might as well argue that women can’t use women’s rooms, since assuming 10% of the population if either lesbian or bisexual, don’t they pose a threat to the other women, of gawking at them or maybe molesting them? Btw, there is a lot more evidence supporting that, while most sexual predators are men, there are women who have been convicted of sexually assaulting women and girls, so how do you tell the perverts from the good people among the female population who are oriented in some ways towards women? And I think that is telling of something, you would argue you can’t do that, because you can’t tell who is a gay woman…but what if a woman is really butch, do you exclude her from the locker room, on the chance she may be a pervert? Oh, but the number of incidents of such things are small, few women have every been convicted of sexual assault in a locker room or bathroom…well, guess what, there have been a lot more cases of women being convicted of such behavior than transgender women, so on the basis of transgender women being perverts, you are out of luck, if we are going to ban transgender women from women’s rooms because of the likelyhood of them being perverts, you would have to ban all women, since in most cases you can’t tell who the perverts are…and interestingly, if they ever did try such a ban, it likely would be aimed at butch women who people assume would be gay, the same way with laws like this, the only transgender people to be questioned would likely be the transgender women who get flagged as being transgender, a transgender woman who is totally stealth won’t have that problem.
As far as your story about the store banning children under 18, children have a special place in our society , one where they are one group it is perfectly legal to discriminate against. For example, we don’t let children drink until they are 21, in large part because studies have shown that kids under 21 are far more likely to drink and drive than kids 21 and older, plus they were worried about kids who are 18 passing booze on to underage kids…yet there are plenty of kids who are 18 who would be responsible, there are kids 16 who could drink responsibly (I am talking having a glass of wine with dinner, for example, and wouldn’t abuse it), but the law allows that. Likewise, if you are a young male under 25, you pay top insurance rates, no matter how good a driver you are, because statistically there is evidence to show that. Yet there are statistical studies that show, for a variety of reasons, that drivers from certain ethnic groups are more likely to have accidents, get tickets, etc (and before someone accuse me of racism, it isn’t racism, the differences are not about the racial group, when traced it has to do with things like being a recent immigrant, where the person lives (immigrants tend to live in more built up, citified areas), yet no laws could ever be passed like that, and rightfully so, because it hurts those who happen to be that (for the record, I also think that it is ridiculous that young men are stigmatized when it comes to insurance, if they are worried about accidents, then the first time the kid has an accident or gets a ticket, nail them, and do the same thing for girls). And tell me something, @awcntdb , if you tried passing a rule based on the fact that shoplifting was caused by young black and hispanic adults mostly, so you banned them from the store, do you think that would pass muster? You could cite a lot of stats, that in certain areas most criminal activity is the result of certain minority groups, that would seemingly make your case, and you would be branded a racist uphill and down dale and every court would throw it out for illegal discrimination.
Yes, it’s completely ridiculous that in this day and age it’s an issue but there is a vocal minority who are bigots and just love to find new ways to discriminate against LBGTQ people - especially now that they have lost so many times in court. They are hoping one of their discriminatory laws will some how stick.
More importantly, even using your example, what statistics would you cite to keep transgender women out of women’s rest rooms? If you cite a statistic like “80% of sexual assaults are committed by men”, you would lose, because those aren’t relevant here. The law is based, not on people’s perceptions, but on facts, so if you want to argue that allowing transgender women into women’s rooms would let male perverts into them, where are your statistics akin to '90% of shoplifting were teens under 18"? After all, there is now a long chain of places with such laws, can you cite even one shred of proof of allowing trans women in restrooms will allow in the male perverts? Can you cite even one instance? As others have pointed out, places, including big cities where such things would be more likely to happen, have such laws, and there hasn’t been one incidence. And more importantly, even let’s say there were a couple of incidences of this, would that meet a legal standard for harm? For this law to be legal based on the notion of male perverts in locker rooms, you would have to show a strong correlation, not “well, in 2002 in De Moines Iowa a supposed transgender woman committed assault in the rest room of an Arby’s” (which is fictitious folks), and the supporters of the law can’t, they are basing that on a supposition of harm, which only works when they are doing something new. Bathroom laws have existed a long time, and to this date no one, not the screaming idiots on talk radio, not on here, not on religious reich websites, not Ted Cruz, no one offered even one verifiable case of this…so how is this law rational then? All I hear are people’s fears, but fear is not a basis for law.
This law is preventing a crime which doesn’t exist, it would be like passing a law in congress making it illegal for denizens of other worlds to live in the US, because they want to take over, since there isn’t any proof of aliens migrating to our world, or even aliens, it would be a BS law.
As far as personal agency goes, where do you draw the line? After all, to some people seeing anyone else naked, other than your spouse or family, is a sin, do do we ban common locker rooms? I can remember junior high school gym, where kids were self conscious and hated to use the showers, does their discomfort mean banning communal showers? Jim Crow was based on all kinds of fears and discomfort of whites being around blacks, does their ‘personal agency’ mean that Jim Crow was legal or should be tolerated? The term they used in the civil rights era was “the right to free association” to defend Jim Crow, so the law should be based on people’s personal biases and feelings? Agency is “I don’t like something, I am uncomfortable with it”, which has its place, in their own private space,but in the law, and society (which follows the law) that isn’t enough. We had that with interracial marriage, we had it with integration, we had it with same sex marriage, and people’s private fears and ‘personal agency’ take a back seat to that.
Personally I’ve seen moms with boys that are not very young maybe 8 or so in the girl’s locker room, but generally they get dirty looks from the members. I would have never brought any boys older than kindergarten age into the locker room with me. There were a few times when I impatiently stood outside the men’s locker room waiting and waiting for the boys when they were young to shower and change and occasionally I sent one of the male gym members in to hussle them along when they dawdled. Until the law says we’re free to walk around in public naked I shouldn’t have to see it in a public changing room if i don’t want to. It’s not about being clothed, it’s about being unclothed. If the laws change I will have to change. The transgender issue is just illustrative, the heart of the issue is much deeper. If laws get passed because of the transgender issues it will be applied to all.
People have pointed out that it is unlikely that you will see people walking around naked even with these new laws. I’m not sure why “I don’t want to” should govern how we set up our social contracts. Is that really the operative concept here? It doesn’t seem to have worked too well in the past.
musicprnt is really much more erudite on this subject than I am.
@momofthreeboys:
Consider yourself lucky, I wonder if the woman who give women dirty looks because they have their sons in the women’s locker room even think of the consequence of that, how many of those boys going into men’s rooms and locker rooms can end up abused. It is also pretty sad that a grown woman would be freaked out that an 8 year old boy is in the locker room, as if he is a grown man who is going to rape them or lust after them. So those woman never saw the genitals on their own boys?
As far as ‘nakedness’ in public goes, that is a kind of out there argument We aren’t talking about in public here, we are talking a changing area, which is not ‘walking around naked’, we are talking a facility where it is designed to be naked. I am so tired of the slippery slope arguments, I heard it with same sex marriage with a ton of GOP idiots saying “this will lead to marrying a dog or a child”, it is such an idiotic argument that is so patently false it isn’t worth debating.
What public nudity, also, has to do with your personal beliefs, @momofthreeboys, I don’t know. Once upon a time a woman showing her ankles was considered indecently attired and in fact it was illegal in the early movies to show ankles in movies. Bathing wear at beaches in the early part of the 20th century for women covered from shoulders to ankles, anything else was considered ‘indecent’. These days on beaches, women wear bikinis that couldn’t be used as dental floss, and men wear tight speedos that leave little to the imagination, how come you aren’t uncomfortable with that? Those concepts have changed over time, and to the people in the early 20th century that woman on the beach in a bikini should be put in the hoosegow for indecent exposure. Given how exposed young women and men are on the beach these days, do you stay away from beaches or try to campaign that young women go back to wearing one piece full coverage suits, and men not wear speedos and thongs?
What that points out is that law has been based on personal ideas of things like nudity,rather than harm. I am sure Anthony Comstock and the religious types up in arms about women exposing their ankles, made a big stink that this would lead to rape and public licentiousness, and those passing the laws might have bought into that, but the reality is over time personal ick factors have given way to concepts of harm and such. The law changed over time and the thing is, as bathing suits got skimpier and those uncomfortable with it complained, no one could find a legal justification to ban such things other than people not liking it. There is still a strong reaction in this society that somehow nudity=sex, sexual reaction, there is still that puritanical notion (that we make fun of in Muslims) that somehow seeing the genitals of the opposite sex means lust and with women, sexual assault and rape (it is telling that most of this has to do with women and men; for example, no one seems to be making a point why a trans male shouldn’t use a men’s room, or thinking if nudity=sex, how come there aren’t problems with homosexual sex assault routinely happening, because those projecting that don’t even thing of gay people). Women freaking out at little boys being in the women’s room, 8 years old, assumes similar things, that somehow they are men when a boy that age is innocent, and the mom would likely keep him from doing anything untoward in the first place.
More importantly, public law on nakedness doesn’t discriminate , it is illegal for men or women to go around naked (though the law has finally started catching up on one part of that, men can go shirtless, women can’t, and courts are increasingly ruling on that one). So what you do in a locker room is illegal for men or women or anyone in public, it is nakedness that is illegal in public, not nakedness between the sexes or genitals, so the analogy doesn’t apply.
It is funny, there are nude beaches out there (in large part, thanks to the federal government, most public nude beaches are at federal recreation areas), and there are a lot of people saying how it is disgusting, how it shouldn’t be allowed, claiming it will lead to all kinds of things, I hear the GOP has tried to introduce laws making nude beaches illegal on federal areas but has been shot down, interestingly often by libertarian republicans opposing the religious morons). I don’t advocate people go around nude in public per se, but in context I don’t understand the hoo ha. Having been to nude beaches, all I can tell you is that from everything I have seen, it doesn’t lead to sexual assaults on women, it doesn’t lead to rape, while I believe there have been some attempts at sexual assault it is about the same rare or less than in the general public (there have been problems with inappropriate behavior, people thinking it is okay to have sex in public, and they find out soon enough it is against the law and they end up on the sex offender registry…). The reason it isn’t a big deal is that the people who go to nude beaches simply prefer going in the nude, and people who go there to gawk and the like soon find themselves the subject of more than a few dirty looks and such, and if they persist the rangers and lifeguards will make them leave,.If someone goes to a locker room, they are going there for a purpose, to change, and like with the nude beach if a a transgender women goes in there, it is to change, and if in the unlikely case that somehow others saw her genitals, likely she would be embarassed and would quickly cover it, unlike the gay men in one post (and for the last time, don’t compare gay men to transgender women, gay men stand or fall on their own behavior, a transgender woman is not a gay male) who were cruising each other, appropriate or not, transgender women don’t go into locker rooms to expose themselves to others, they go there to change, period.
You keep stating this as a certainty, but laws protecting trans people have been in effect for years in states and cities around the country, without this ever happening, at all. It’s so annoying that I keep having to repeat this, but I suppose I’ll have to, as long as people keep making these dire predictions while ignoring the fact that such laws already exist without any adverse consequences.
No, when people are led by emotions, they buy into solutions to problems which – again – DO NOT EXIST. Even the NC governor admits that there are zero cases of transgender people causing problems in bathrooms. Zero.
You may have the opinion that trans people are dangerous, but please at least acknowledge that your opinion has no basis whatsoever in reality.
@donnal-
Forget it, this argument is the same idiotic argument about slippery slope that has been used by any changes that happen, people find justification in their own beliefs/feelings by citing potential harm. The Catholic League for decency back in the 20’s and 30’s said that movies were going to destroy morality and lead to sex in the streets, rape, etc, because in movies young women were seen kissing, being with men they weren’t married to and so forth. There were battles over the bikini going to ruin society, and with gay rights we keep hearing from the bigots and the various religions that this will destroy society, that if we ‘legalize’ gays it will lead to men being with men because, after all, a man can please another man sexually better than a woman, it will lead to ‘legalized rape’, and we saw that with the fight to allow same sex marriage, how it would lead to increases in divorce (?!), it would lead to the end of civilization would ruin kids, would destroy the ‘moral fabric’ of society, would lead to legal pedophilia and bestiality (I heard one Catholic Bishop rant about this, and I laughed…the church used to allow 9 year old girls to be married to well off noblemen well into the 18th and 19th centuries, did they think they were going to be chaste?), and of course what people found out no such thing has happened, and what opponents arguments turned out to be what everyone else was saying, their personal bias, usually based on religious belief, that had no basis in fact. Slippery slope arguments in general turn out to be bogus, remember when they said that if Vietnam went communist, the rest of the world would? Vietnam fell, and while it changed history, it didn’t change much else, especially for the rest of the world…
The real problem, Donna, is that people think the law is somehow an instrument of morality or expressing the social beliefs of a majority (and too often, it was…just look at the Griswold decision in the early 1960’s, where Connecticut thanks to the Catholic Bishops, had laws banning the sale of any kind of birth control…), where the law has moved away from that and into preventing quantifiable harm. We have thrown out blue laws, especially on drinking on Sunday, that were based on religious belief alone, we have thrown out other anachronisms based on bias, like Jim Crowe laws, if something cannot be shown by logical argument, it needs to fail as law, but sadly people still think “If I don’t like something, and others like me don’t, it shouldn’t be law”. It is kind of tragic that people can buy a bs argument in supporting the transgender bathroom law (or the ban thereof) and cannot see that that is no different than Muslim countries requiring women to wear a Burkkha and subjecting them to whippings and stonings if they are found with a man not a relative or her husband, they would tell you they are protecting women, when in reality what they are doing is forcing women to be what they want her to be, rather than protecting her, they are treating her like a criminal (which in the Muslim world, translates into “men cannot control themselves, so women should be hidden away”). The transgender bathroom bill translates into “a transgender women might not have had surgery yet, and anything with a penis is a man and therefore is out to lust at women, gawk at them and want to assault them”, the argument about men in the restroom is nothing more than a veiled attempt to justify that opponents see transgender women as men in a dress, especially if they have not had SRS, and claims of uncomfortableness is based in the same notion, that anyone with a penis is a man and is going to gawk, carry on, etc, which is ridiculous. When I hear women tell me that an 8 year old boy in a locker room would make them feel violated, it is sad, that 8 year old is in there to protect him, and also given that his mother or older sister is likely there, not likely to do anything or get smacked in the head sigh. They would rather a boy go to a men’s room, where there is the chance they will be molested or raped, rather than face their own fears, and that is sad IMO.
Is this where we are headed? Two recent articles about “bathroom police”:
http://www.sheknows.com/living/articles/1120615/target-bathroom
Both, by the way, happened to women who were biologically born female and identify as female. The self-appointed police were just “making sure” they were in the “right place.”
And even in areas where it is actually legal for women to go topless such as NY, personal biases and supposed cluelessness about actual laws on this topic among many LEOs meant women continued to be arrested for going topless years after it had actually been legalized:
Thus, personal biases and prejudices can be so powerful in individual LEOs and the larger public that they act on treating legal behaviors as if they are illegal years…sometimes even decades after they became legal. And the end result is one reason why such LEO actions result in legal settlements as the LEO organizations and local/regional governments which employ them cannot defend such LEO acts when they are actually arresting someone for legally protected behavior.
And then there are stories like this, about a trans boy in Georgia:
http://www.projectq.us/atlanta/trans_students_attacked_as_perverts_in_north_georgia
But none of this is really about hostility to trans people, right?
Right, Donna. Just a difference of opinion.
@cobrat:
Exactly. True story, there was a woman at the church I belonged to, who was married to an Asian guy, they were married in the early 70’s. They were living in Georgia at the time, and they were denied a marriage license, even though Loving had been settled years before, and the clerk cited the state law. Personal Bias and prejudice have often been the hallmark of law, it was known to the founders when they wrote the constitution, it is why we have the checks and balances we do (Adams, one of the key influences on the constitution, called majority rule Mob Rule), the majority often acts out of fear and hate. If we didn’t have those protections, Catholics in the US would be a despised minority today (put it this way, I doubt the millions of Irish and Italians and other Catholics who immigrated here would have been allowed in), nor would the Jews, and we have the example of Jim Crow as to what fear and hate do, and all those biases were supported with supposed facts, that Cathlics owed allegiance only to the Pope and would turn the US into a Papist theocracy, Jews were not loyal citizens and would try and hurt non Jews, Blacks were out to rape white women and to kill whites, and none of them are different than laws like the bathroom law, they represent individual fear and displeasure being ensconced as law while claiming a legitimate reason.