Thursday, December 22, 2016

Re: The people mostly likely to care about who uses women’s restrooms aren’t women


Re:  The people mostly likely to care about who uses women’s restrooms aren’t women
By Danielle Paquette December 21
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/21/the-people-mostly-likely-to-care-about-who-uses-womens-restrooms-arent-women/?utm_term=.386204a64ef8#comments


Women are afraid to get on the elevator with a man they don't know.  The commenter with the bad co-ed bathroom experience is more like the real experience.  Ditto for the Time Magazine story of a entire swimming team and coaches forever afraid to use the female locker room once a man has been discovered there -- jamming a single shower instead.  Male looking men are going to be much more visible than (often invisible) trans women.
http://time.com/4324687/even-in-liberal-communities-transgender-bathroom-laws-worry-parents/ 


It doesn't matter if half the women don't care about a trans female in the ladies -- it matters if half do.  The matter is decided completely on the basis of the subjective experience of women -- just like it is when male officers frisk females with the warped idea that they are only doing their job (almost all trained it's alright I believe -- criminal law makes no such exception).
http://ontodayspage.blogspot.com/2012/08/taking-male-leo-hands-of-females-late.html

I am not barred from the female bathroom for fear of crime.  It is a matter of intimate privacy before anything else.

Surprised to seem almost universal approval comments on WaPo -- mostly resentful and snobby.  Opposite experience on Yahoo News where first 100 out of 4,000 regularly over 90% opposed, mostly vehemently and at length.  ???

Wish you guys wouldn't tear up the fabric of the world from one end when the next president of the US threatens to tear it up from the other.  The specter of Obama supporting trans female boy (cannot have the op under 18) in the high school girls locker room (!!!) may have been the last straw for a lot of Trump voters.  The reaction there (vehement and unyielding) may be much more like what to expect if they try to really push this far and wide.  DNA, DNA, DNA.


ADDENDUM
What I call the 12-16-18, male-to-females are like radically altered eight year old boys.  Near puberty their little peanut sized testes are carefully watched (testosterone is a one-way street and changes irreversible).  When they double in size the child is hit with puberty suppressing drugs.  At 16 they start female hormones.  At 18 they get the operation -- which constructs a vagina and saves some sexual nerves so they can get aroused.  

Suppressing puberty keeps the males from getting as tall or as big boned as well.  These are rare enough and they don't want to be noticed -- they want to live like women.  

The 12-16-18s are what most free use bathroom advocates imagine we will find in the ladies, I imagine.  Harmless enough if that were it.  But Bruce would never have been welcome -- and neither big boned, big muscled, facial hair (?) and deep voice Caitlyn.

FWIW, according to the book (I'm still at the beginning) When The Opposite Sex Isn't: Sexual Orientation In Male-to-Female Transgender People, Oct 15, 2008, by Sandra L. Samons, the typical M-T-F (still with male parts) is repulsed by male on male sex -- but desires men the way women do (and desires to get a vagina). 

For adults, of course, we want the female-to-males in the men's room -- where else?  But for school children it should be completely subjective.  If the high school boys cannot handle an f-t-m in the boy's room that's the way it has to be.  

I'm not looking for rights in favor or laws against right away.  I'm for letting common sense try to work it through where possible -- it's a new situation.  I fear Obama's and Bernie's and Hillary's blithe willingness to intrude boys (can't have operation until 18) into girl's high school locker rooms may have been the last straw for many a Trump turning voter (keep it up and I might go Repub).

"(A) group of 324 Swedish transsexuals for an average of more than 10 years after gender reassignment with controls and found that transsexuals had 19 times the rate of suicide ... "
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/opinion/sunday/richard-a-friedman-how-changeable-is-gender.html?_r=0  They break your heart - reports of transgenders going to sleep praying they wake up in a different body.  But you can't tear up the most delicate part of everybody else's social fabric for one out of three hundred.  (Or is it much less -- same Times article: " ... transsexualism [defined as those who want to change or do change their body] is very rare — a recent meta-analysis estimated the prevalence at about 5 per 100,000 ... " ???)

First read should probably be: Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family, Paperback – June 7, 2016
by Amy Ellis Nutt, a Pulitzer Prize winning Washington Post science writer.  The Samons book is a $50 used paperback by a therapist for therapists (why I'm going slow -- very dense).

1 comment:

Denis Drew said...

BORROWED FROM YAHOO NEWS COMMENTS (if I remember correctly)


J Sarayda Shapiro
3:01 AM CST [Edited]
My college dorm had multi-stall, coed bathrooms, and it was a real problem. One male student was expelled from the dorm for sticking a camera under stall doors and taking pictures of female students. I was brushing my teeth one day, just minding my own business, when the male student at the sink next to me suddenly grabbed my crotch. Plus, a lot of female students really didn't like walking in, and the first thing they'd see was some guy's penis exposed as he used the urinal.

So, I don't want to give men an excuse to hang around in women's restrooms. But I am totally fine with transwomen using women's restrooms, unless there is absolutely no way to distinguish them from a man. And if a transwoman is just starting her transition and still looks and dresses like a man, she'd probably feel more comfortable using the men's restroom, anyway.

The dumbest thing about this "bathroom bill" is that transMEN generally look completely male, but their original birth certificates say they are female. So, these stupid bathroom laws actually *require* some male-looking people to use women's restrooms instead of men's restrooms.

I say people who look completely like able-bodied adult men should use the men's room, which they'd probably feel more comfortable doing, anyway. (Male children and disabled men may need help from a female relative.) Anyone who is transitioning or has transitioned can use whichever bathroom they feel more comfortable in.
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J Sarayda Shapiro
3:47 AM CST
I want to clarify that the problems in my dorm happened in the early 1980s and had nothing to do with transgender issues. (No student in my dorm was transgender. I don't think the word "transgender" had even been invented yet.) The dorm had originally been single-sex and then the college decided to use it as a "coed" (both sexes) dorm. There were not enough bathrooms to provide different ones for each gender. That is why male students and female students used the same bathrooms.