Hold on there, cowboy - my point is that there is more danger than I can possibly begin to list, and that this does not strike me as even remotely statistically significant in terms of threat. Which I believe I’ve stated a number of times. My private, noise-reducing office and the half-dozen active parole- or probation-ordered clients I have on my caseload at any given time DO pose a statistically significant risk to me. However, that risk is not great enough for me to make changes to my behavior.
TG people in bathrooms simply don’t rate. As kpsnap notes, people looking to violate others will find a way. The fight - theirs, not mine - is for legitimacy, not access. Access was already there.
Oh. Okay. If the incredibly statistically unlikely worst happened and we did see Kroc’s dick at the gym or pool I’d tell my sixteen year old daughter “That’s a penis, sweetie. Like [Brothers’]. I’m not sure why someone with a penis was in the girls’ locker room. Maybe he feels more comfortable there. But anyway, no harm done! Make sure you remember to get your wet bathing suit out of the car when we get home.”
If life has taught me nothing else, it has taught me that sixteen is no more likely than six to put wet suits and towels in the appropriate place.
I can only speak for myself and the process by which I assess the logic or illogic of any given question. Women more fearful than myself might justifiably be worried that a creep (gender unimportant) will be hiding in a remote place, waiting to rape them (e.g. parking lot or garage at night, rest area, apartment hallway, dorm, wooded area, park). This has been happening since the beginning of time. Also, your fear of someone sighting a - gulp! - penis or vagina unexpectedly strikes me as pretty funny, coming from you.
Sam, I just wanted to clarify what I said there. We’ve always had moral and ethical non-believers. I was talking about some of the memes that go around like, “Jesus said love everyone” followed with something about how religious people are hypocrites who don’t know their own religion if they make some moral judgement based on their faith. Jesus never said, “All behaviors are equally good. Everything is good. Morality is relative.” There’s nothing as uncool as an overweight, uneducated Christian conservative. We see them mocked as 'murica, or "people of Walmart. The intellectual elite love to mock them. They deserve our loyalty and our compassion. They are the working class. They send their kids to die in Afghanistan at much higher rates than the educated, intellectual elite. That kind of thing really bothers me. Extremists on the right tend to do something very similar when they characterize people as “makers or takers.” We know that some of the causes of real poverty are much more complex than that. The people who are trying to pull themselves out of it deserve our loyalty and our compassion. People may disagree about the best way to help people, but we certainly find intolerance on both political extremes.
I’m not very tolerant of intolerant people either, and I try to correct it when I see it in myself. I’m not always successful at that. We always have a harder time seeing our own faults.
thank you so much for answering all of those questions!
I was particularly interested in the sexuality question, so thank you for being so detailed on that in particular. I didn’t mean to imply that being transgender automatically meant being homosexual (although I can see how my post would make it seem that way), but I had always thought that sexuality would be one of the main drivers in the decision, so it’s very interesting to hear otherwise.
To answer your question Push, I think the long-term solution is unisex stalls. Then no one has to feel uncomfortable. But truly, in a women’s restroom, no one is seeing anything. Everyone uses a closed door stall. So how is it more theatening for women to encounter TGs washing their hands in the common area of a restroom then, say, in line waiting for a bus?
First, let me be perfectly clear: It absolutely would be possible for you to demonstrate all of those things to my satisfaction. All it would take would be a series of well-conducted studies, vetted and debated by experts in the field, the results of which lead those experts to a general consensus along the lines you described.
You see, I’m a firm believer that empirical questions should be answered empirically, and that empirical answers to empirical questions should play an important role in informing public policy.
So, if it turned out that both cis- and trans-persons were less safe, I would oppose the laws.
