It’s getting ridiculous. Now Minnesota Republicans have teamed up to propose a bill outlawing gender-neutral bathrooms. Why are Republicans so obsessed with bathrooms? I don’t know. Personally, I can’t get worked up about where someone carries out excretion, as long as they’re discreet and don’t make a mess.
A striking fourty-four Republicans have cosponsored a bill in the Minnesota House that would block businesses and other employers from providing gender-neutral restrooms or from enacting policies that allow transgender employees to use appropriate restrooms. The bill, like one introduced in the Minnesota Senate on Friday, amends the Minnesota Human Rights Act, the nation’s first nondiscrimination law barring discrimination based on gender identity.
HF 3374 and its identical counterpart HF 3395 defines “sex” as “A person’s sex is either male or female as biologically defined.” The bill does not mention people who fall outside the male-female binary such as those who are intersex, nor those whose sex designations have been legally changed under Minnesota law.
I’m a biologist, and I don’t know how to unambiguously define every person’s sex. Chromosomes? Genitals? Those can give conflicting messages. Culturally, sex is a behavior and an attitude, and that doesn’t align well with the signs labeling bathroom doors. Should I only pee in the presence of people who don’t want to have sex with me? That’s easy — 99.9999% of the human race can share a bathroom with me. And that rare 0.0001% who do would include both men and women. Shall we also prohibit gay men from using men’s rooms? (I shouldn’t say that — Republicans might think that’s a dandy idea for more oppressive legislation.)
Fortunately, this is Minnesota, where the Republicans are a minority, and I suspect that not only will it fail to get out of the legislature, but if it does, our Democratic governor will veto it.
Small government, eh?
I assume the ‘appropriate restrooms’ for transgender people are meant to be those corresponding to their original gender. Yet somehow I suspect the bill’s sponsors wouldn’t be upset at all if their bill ‘accidentally’ prohibited transgender people from using any public restroom at all. And lawmakers probably won’t value a biologist’s input on this matter any more than they did value the opinions of the medical community when they started mandating unecessary medical procedures to accompany abortions.
if i lived in MN, i’d love to get a group of people together, go to the capitol, and block access to the men’s rooms.
whenever a gop representative tries to use the toilet, i would politely but firmly inform them that they cannot use the men’s room until their “biologically defined” sex had been verified. obviously, through genetic testing, since any outward sign of “sex” can be modified. and i’d happily inform them that there are facilities available in wisconsin, while they wait for the results.
C’mon, it’s really not that complicated. If you have gender neutral bathrooms then where are ultra-conservative old white Christian Republicans going to go to pay to give someone a blowjob?
Plus there’s the assumption that transgendered people don’t ALREADY use public restrooms or that there was ever an actual problem over it in the first place…Like the ‘War on Christmas’…A thing that only exists in the conservative brain
Basically any “biological definition” you can make for sex is one that nature has already given the finger to.
@Grumpy Santa:
–
Exactly! how are you supposed to know WHO you’re ‘wide stancing’ WITH?
I am glad to hear this will likely die.
In a ‘former life’, as I call it, I was working at the university in Flagstaff, AZ. The bathroom stalls in the university library had a weird thing: the stall doors were only half the normal height, so anyone could easily peak in and see what you were doing in there. Why? I was told because some years ago someone was discovered having gay sex in the bathrooms. The response by an administrator was to freak out, and so the short stall doors are forever a legacy.
Read a comment on the thinking of Republicans in Arizona – If you don’t like local politics (or its too liberal), insist that state law trumps it, if you don’t like state law, insist that you have to use federal law, and if the fed is doing something you hate, demand “state rights”. This particular incite came up as a result of, well, a lot of the “state rights” BS, but also several idiot things they did here – 1. Geremandering so that the minority Republicans would win every time, despite the fact that, apparently, we may have a majority of liberals in the state. 2. Putting through legislation designed to “prevent” local counties/cities from raising the minimum wage in them (since that is apparently something the “state” is supposed to do (but won’t). 3. The most recent being to make it illegal for cities to institute rules that would require companies in them to provide “paid” sick leave, again, this being apparently so offensive to conservatives that it has to be made illegal, on a state level.
Then, of course, you can look to Florida – where they banned all local gun laws and ordinances, in favor of “state constitution rules only”, while also arguing that the fed is all stupid and evil, for trying to impose gun laws on the whole country, and isn’t there something they can do about that too?
I swear, the damn idiots actually want to turn the US into the distopian city state idiocy that you see in the book Snow Crash. Where every little petty fifedom has its own boarder wall, its own laws, and being the wrong *any*, especially color, can get you shot, if you don’t have a special ID, which shows you are one of the “trusted” among, “All those other people we don’t trust and think are out to get us.”
I agree, this is ridiculous. My own personal solution, which would admittedly entail construction costs, is to just convert all multi-user bathroom stalls into full fledged single user bathrooms. No more of these stupid tiny walls that don’t even go from top to bottom, get rid of urinals altogether, and privacy for anyone. They would of course be gender neutral in this case. For those large bathrooms full of said stalls, now that the stalls themselves are private bathrooms with complete walls and doors, the area outside would have the doors taken off and just be a public handwashing station. This seems ideal to me, but buildings updating to this standard would need to pay that initial price in installing those new proper walls.
The North Carolina state legislators (Republican majority) are losing their minds that Charlotte passed an anti-discrimination ordinance allowing transgender people to use the bathrooms with which they identify. They will not even wait for the regular legislative session to start as they have called a special legislative session just to address the ordinance. They anticipate a one-day session because they are united in their opposition to allowing the Charlotte ordinance to stand in the face of their bigotry.
Kagehi, there are indeed states rights, they’re outlined in the federal Constitution, that which was not claimed by the Constitution for the federal government belongs to the state. If unclaimed by a state, it devolves to the county, community and finally, the individual.
An example of state rights was when the Maryland legislature outlawed “high capacity magazines”. albeit with an arbitrary number of rounds permitted in a magazine.
The gun nuts, who previously were championing states rights, went wild and I simply asked, “Whatever happened to states rights? This is a matter rightfully between the populace of Maryland and their legislature”.
The overwhelming majority came to agree with me. A state does have the right, within boundaries established by the Constitution, both federal and state, to say what it will and will not permit within the borders of that state.
That said, it’s a major overreach to reach into a restroom, to approve what labels and architecture is used in them, beyond health and safety ordinances. Attempting to limit private property signage on bathrooms is beyond overreach and into micromanagement of private property. My corporation would likely depart that state, leaving ten thousand or so people unemployed, rather than discriminate against even one employee. There’d likely be political problems as well, as the corporation is a Fortune 200 corporation.
Still, it makes me wonder if these cheese brains ever considered other issues that they’d create. Something like when I used to take our daughters to the bathroom, mom had one, I had the other and the babies diapers got changed. Likely, that’d suddenly become unlawful, in their dyspeptic version of governance.
Why can’t they simply keep their dirty little minds between their own legs and not between my and my wife and daughters legs?
Why are Republicans so obsessed with bathrooms?
It’s part of their laser focus on the economy and national defense.
i’d love to get a group of people together, go to the capitol, and block access to the men’s rooms
You mean a peaceful “sit in”? That’d be a great tactic. Denial of service through resource exhaustion.
someone was discovered having gay sex in the bathrooms
‘Cuz straight people never do that.
(raises hand) Guilty. I have an excuse: It felt naughty.
Will they force this on churches, too? Or would that be a violation of religious freedom? Maybe not!
This past weekend, I was at a local UCC [liberal-progressive] church for a concert. I noticed that all the bathrooms have been newly designated as “all gender” — with the signs in Braille, too. The change is in keeping with this church’s all-inclusive, welcoming, and affirming beliefs, so here’s an example of gender-neutral bathrooms being an expression of religious beliefs instead of a restriction of religious beliefs. And that is a nice irony. If this church, which is not a public facility but holds events that are open to the public, were forced to abandon their gender-neutral facilities and revert to men/women only,, wouldn’t that be a restriction of their religious freedom?
In recent years, many establishments have added “family bathrooms” which are generally private rooms with complete facilities, where, for example, a parent could go with a few children and keep them safely contained while changing a baby’s diaper and assisting said children with toileting and washing. These facilities are gender neutral, so I don’t see the kerfuffle about expanding this to all facilities.
At one local college, I saw bathrooms labeled thus: “This restroom contains toilets in private stalls” [formerly the women’s room] and “This restroom contains urinals and toilets in private stalls” [formerly the men’s room – so here, the information was about the facilities and offering people a choice about what they needed for their personal use.
Of course, the issue has its roots in shame over body functions, which is silly. People can and should have access to privacy, of course, but there is nothing inherently shameful about normal bodily functions, which EVERYONE experiences.
My only concern with other people in public bathrooms is that they clean up after themselves and that they mind their own business while I take care of mine. I am always saddened by and very disappointed with the gratuitous filth that people make in public restrooms, never considering the people whose job it is to clean up after them.
Fixed that for you.
But seriously, are there any arguments against mandatory gender neutral bathrooms?
Often, health codes demand two doors between the throne and general public space, that’s why gender neutral bathrooms often have an outer door with a sink behind it, and an inner door, behind which the occupant does their business. To maximise efficiency, a common area for washing your hands and stalls for doing your business would be optimal.
I can imagine some people wanting the common area in front of the stalls to remain sort of a safe space, but my imagination isn’t reality (and PZ isn’t president of the USA), so I’d like to check.
Also, how would urinals fit in such a scenario? Very efficient if you can (and want to) pee standing up, but not gender neutral.
A few of his problems would include (1) airliners and buses arriving in Minnesota, (2) fathers changing their daughters’ diapers, and (3) businesses that are so small that they have only one bathroom.
Man, what a great birthday present: more bigots want to deny me rights as basic as shitting in the right place.
I was in Belgium and popped into the toilet in a bar and while using the urinal women wandered past to use the seated services. Bit of a shock to start with but not a problem after a moment or two.
Someone was discovered having gay sex? So who looked over or under to confirm this and why? And this does bring me to the question of banning unisex toilets. The only reason I can think of is someone doesnt want to see something and if someone doesnt want to see something and is happy with different sex toilets then the thing they dont want to see belongs in the other toilets so… are we talking ‘Porkies’ here but with modern video devices?
In many public spaces here, the gender-neutral toilets are also the wheelchair accessible toilets.
Now I finally understand the difference between big and small government:
Small government is when it fits into your vagina and uterus, big government is when it needs the whole bathroom.
chigau
Which is problematic as well, as it forces able bodied people to block the toilet for disabled people*
*same problem with incorporating the wheelchair accessible toilet into the ladies’ room or the “everybody with kids etc” toilet.
+++
Personally, I’ve come to the conclusion there should be two kinds of restrooms: One for people who sit down and one for people who stand up.
@Robnyny
That class 3 would also involve businesses small enough to have multiple restrooms, all of which are single occupant, given that gendering them is inevitably going to cause usage delays. I suspect they know this too, and just don’t care – for all the rhetoric about “supporting small businesses”, and for all the whining that comes from much less stringent requirements to include gender neutral facilities regarding the personal freedom of business owners being impinged, it’s not like there’s actually a standard to not get in the way here. That would involve consistent principles from republican politicians, and that’s not happening.
Knabb
Yep, one of the things small businesses here fought long for was to scrap the requirement to have a male, a female and a staff toilet. Now businesses can occupy places with just 10 seats or so without needing space for 3 different loos.
From a historical perspective this whole “debate” seems laughably neurotic. For the vast majority of our history there was no such thing as a gendered toilet. Heck, even private toilets are a very recent thing, definitely post-industrial for all but high aristocracy and royalty. The famous public toilets of Roman Pompeii were not only mixed-gender but open-air. This degree of prissiness would have been considered utterly pathetic by most of our ancestors.
Of course, the rationale behind these sorts of measures is nothing to do with lavatorial ettiquette or public convenience. It’s entirely about trying to enshrine an old-fashioned and discriminatory model of gender into law. Because the people proposing these laws have made that model so central to their self-image that they cannot abide even the suggestion that their world-view may be wrong. The root cause of the problem is a fear-driven bigotry that seeks to silence the voices that reveal its own inadequacy.
But if staff can use a single toilet, despite presumably being of random genders, why can’t customers as well?
Most people who clean public toilets would prefer that everyone sits to pee.
@OP
Even if they had a majority, there are probably enough Republicans from progressive areas who would vote against it. We have a family friend who’s a House Republican, and he outright told potential conservative donors they were wasting their money on him if they expected restrictions on abortions or gay rights.
Then again, I think we also have regressive Democrats in some parts of our state.
Giliell
Well, that clarifies that for me!
You know all that bullshit about protecting girls and women from predators in the women’s bathroom is bullshit when they start enacting burdensome regulations that would prevent private businesses from even setting up a gender neutral compromise.
I’m also curious what would happen if they got their way and suddenly trans men are entering women’s washrooms. Surely they won’t be batting an eye when someone who looks like Buck Angel drops in for a pee.
Dark Jaguar #10
Yes!
One little quibble though: there are now urinals that use zero water. If these reduce the overall consumption of water (taking into account cleaning, and any other factors) then they should be made available.
Tabby lavalamp #32
Making life more difficult for trans people is the main feature of bills like this, NOT a bug. This who brouhaha is a thinly veiled attempt to exclude trans people from society.
Like I said during the South Dakota debacle, there is at least an upside to this law.
“People should use the bathroom that aligns with their biological sex” is already a de facto law – if you get clocked at the “wrong” bathroom, you get beat up, maced, or have the cops called. Plenty of trans people, like me, just never use public bathrooms.
That they are trying to make this a de jure law means that they’re afraid things will change as society is becoming more accepting of trans people. They’re losing ground socially, so they’re like “Shit if they wont voluntarily maintain the status quo, we’ll force them to.”
I really don’t see why people would consider gender segregated toilets essential for the workplace and schools, when hardly anyone has a problem with sharing their toilets at home with people of all genders.
It’s also why I don’t really buy the “But what about the urinals?” concerns that always pop up when the topic of gender neutral bathrooms comes up. If urinals were so essential, more people would have them in their own homes.
Some have, but apart from that, public places have a different person-to-bathroom ratio.
“Why are Republicans so obsessed with bathrooms?”
Because they are full of shit?
Tabby Lavalamp@#32:
You know all that bullshit about protecting girls and women from predators in the women’s bathroom is bullshit
Well, if the catholic church hasn’t opposed it, it’s probably not that big a problem.
I never understood objection to urinals being included in unisex bathrooms. Would a cis-female be horrified at having one in the room she excretes in? When a cismale is using a urinal, does he object to that toilet sitting behind him in the room he’s using?
It’s not like a “pissoir” takes up a lot of floor space.
like the op, the real question is the rethuglican obsession with bathrooms. wha … why … wha …
Having lost the war on same-sex marriage, the extremely nutty wing of the dead man nailed to a tree cults are shifting their hate to transgender people.
BathroomsToilets are, I’m guessing, one of the first things that comes to their(the nutters’s) minds when trying to deal with the concept.Since an axiom of thugs is to “follow the money”, I assume their owners have hinted or instructed them to attack; plus, perhaps, “listening” to the above nutters, and/or possibly an example of the well-known “echo chamber” effect.
The mention of pissoir made me wonder how much “they” would freak out if they saw one… especially if they saw a classic French one, outdoors and exposed, being used. Sadly, those classic French outdoor pissoirs seem to be in decline…
The classic ones are not very female friendly, so replacing them, when possible, with gender-neutral arrangements is quite sensible.
And then there’s the Kansas thing about giving out a bounty for spotting people using the “wrong” restrooms.
http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2016/03/22/3762490/kansas-transgender-ransom-bathrooms/
In South Dakota it was the Republican governor who vetoed a similar bill. Seems like even some goppers can see through the shit.
Grumpy Santa @4,
As my kids would say, can you not?
Update from Washington state: There were several attempts (by Republicans, in case you wonder) to pass ‘bathroom bills’ through the state legislature in February. The House (with Democratic majority) didn’t get them to the floor in the first place, State Senate discussed one of them and defeated it with the help of a few Republicans who still retain their hearts. So now the haters are going for ballot initiatives.
They are focusing on public schools (hey, private schools can be trans friendly if they want to be!). They are careful to cover all kinds of objections – making an allowance for children under 8 or disabled people who are accompanied by ‘opposite sex’ guardians or caretakers, people entering the facilities in order to clean them, do repair work, deal with a medical emergency or natural disaster.
Their definition of sex is based on anatomy at time of one’s birth or ‘when necessary’ based on chromosomes. (Suggesting they have heard of ambiguous genitals, at least.) I wonder how they are going to enforce that? Even if they plan to rely on birth certificates – surprise: In Washington state it is possible for a trans person to get a new birth certificate with an updated gender marker without undergoing any surgical procedures.
Here is what they say about trans students:
Note how they refuse to acknowledge that anyone could really be trans, it’s just those weird people insisting on weird things. Also, since elsewhere they require that all multi-user restrooms be gender-segregated, the category of unisex bathrooms becomes only a sub-category of single stall bathrooms anyway.
They go on to cover support for any student who runs into a member of the ‘opposite sex’ in a bathroom/locker room/shower room – such a student should be allowed to sue the school and recover $2500 for each incident plus attorney’s fees from the school.
If any version of these initiatives gets on the ballot this year, we need Washington voters to be aware and be prepared to vote against it in the fall.
If it passed, what would be next? Bathroom police? Fines for using the wrong facility? More ridiculous laws from a party that’s always telling us it’s for “less government?”
@qwerty 47
The fines are actually part of several proposed bills.
A person who witnesses an Evil Bathroom Liar can sue the school for $2500 plus expenses for every event.
They desperately need to ignite another ideological fight to cover get votes despite their ineptitude on other matters.
What on earth do these people do at home? Do they sit there the whole time thinking “Ew! Someone with a *penis* peed here!” (or vice versa)?
I seriously cannot fathom what their issue is.
So every house has to have gender separated toilets?
Seems to me that sooner or later these kind of bathroom laws will lead to someone winning a big lawsuit. Because you can be sure that they’ll be used by some creep to harass a cis person who doesn’t act sufficiently masculine or feminine for the creep’s taste.
I seem to remember growing up in Germany that all (or most) public bathrooms had an attendant (why? – I don’t know). Maybe these Republican lawmakers could add that to their bill. Then they could all apply for the job they seem to dream of: Public Bathroom Attendant (why? – To inspect each person to make sure they’re the correct sex for the correct bathroom).
I think I just invented the perfect job for Republican Lawmakers.
Wait now I’m confused, PZ. When Ophelia Benson went down to road to transmisogyny, which she is now way deep into open hatred of trans people and has added a healthy dose of racism to it, you called people pointing that out any horrible name under the sun. So to be clear – you’re only not ok with cis-sexism if Republicans do it, but Ophelia can do it as she wants and you defend her? That’s confusing…
Joerg @ 54:
PZ did not spend time calling people horrible names, and I didn’t note this post or any of the others dealing with transphobia being about Ophelia Benson. It is quite possible to be against transphobia and talk about that without involving Benson.
Did you have anything relevant to say about the seemingly endless flow of legislation regarding public bathrooms?
Joerg @ # 54: … open hatred of trans people and has added a healthy dose of racism …
I’ve followed Benson at her current/original blog since she left/was hounded from FtB, and have not seen evidence of either of your claims that would hold up in the absence of Opheliaphobic lenses.
A similar bill passed in North Carolina, and in this case it looks like the governor is going to sign it.
Barf.
“PZ did not spend time calling people horrible names, and I didn’t note this post or any of the others dealing with transphobia being about Ophelia Benson.”
He called people every name under the sun, slymepitters, like Mick Nugent, what have you. And yes, I didn’t notice this post dealing with it. Apparently he doesn’t need to apologize for his atrocious behavior of defending the abomination Ophelia Benson.
“Did you have anything relevant to say about the seemingly endless flow of legislation regarding public bathrooms?”
So explain to me why you see the need to defend PZ’s horrible behavior with your precious little passive-aggressive smarminess?
@56: Then you might be a strong cis-sexist, because it’s open in your face Trump-level hatred
In our college, we had to cover over the safety window of a team meeting room, because people in that room could see women entering and leaving the lady’s room. I’m just trying to imagine acclimatizing our faculty to unisex bathrooms…
re: #54 & #58
Is this some new slymepit merit badge attempt?
@56
Like one in three of her blog posts are “ugh stupid misogynist trans people insisting women not be transphobic”
They are raising a stink about places that stink? Those republicans stink for doing this
No doubt those clowns would be happy to end the Disabilities Act if all separate bathrooms for the disabled were also labelled gender neutral.
Joerg @ # 58: … it’s open in your face Trump-level hatred.
Thanks for providing linked examples to support your case. Oh wait…
Vivec @ # 61 – a little less hyperbolic than Joerg, but still lacking a little something.
Can we accept that the Trans_™ Revolution® remains a work in progress, with a few terms still in need of definition (by discussion, not demands)?
@63
No.
And no, I don’t care to go and link her stuff. I browsed it once to see what the big deal it was, and I don’t make a habit of re-reading TERF blogs. If you’re not going to believe me because of that, fine by me.
Okay, I’m dumb and did it. Like the third post today is a post mocking NB people like me. So, you know, shitty TERF that I have nothing but mean words for.
What a Maroon @57
Yeah, been on the horn to a NC trans friend of mine about it. It’s pretty brutally awful and that’s before noting that it straight up legalizes discrimination in general against LGBT people even in cities that previously had non-discrimination ordinances or the fact that they shat that through the system in a day.
I knew this shit was going to start raining down more and more now that all the professional homophobes are shifting over to milking transphobia for their coffers, but it’s still scary as fuck to witness in real time.
Vivec @66
Jumped over to her blog since it was linked. On this day of the NC bill passing, As of this moment, there are 20 posts on the first page of her blog, 9 of them are either whining about trans people existing, mocking the notion of gender identity, or out and out supporting transphobes, including at least 2 posts in support of a bigot who wrote a defense for an infamously transmisogynist work that tried to argue that any person who claims to be trans who isn’t straight is actually just a fetishist obsessed with their own genitalia.
So yeah, TERF. No doubt. Not even an argument to be made otherwise.
That all being said?
Fuck off with that shit, Joerg. Ophelia is not a member of this blog network, hasn’t been for months. PZ Myers is no more personally responsible for the shit she spews these days than he is for Thunderf00t’s sexist ravings. Sometimes people are shitlords. That’s why they got called out back in the day and that’s why they’re no longer affiliated with this site.
Now, if you’ll excuse me I need to go curl up in a ball because this transphobic law shit is going to get so so much worse before it ever gets better.
The transphobes are also active in Canada: (the video contains transphobia and horrible rapping)
Concerned Alberta mother
#70: @Ice Swimmer
The transphobes are also losing in Canada. Still a sizeable chunk of people, but a minority nonetheless. Alberta’s Human Rights code has a bill on the coals that will explicitly add gender identity to its protections, plus the education minister is finally strong-arming the Catholics into drafting an explicitly pro-trans policy across the province.
Do we have some colourful characters hosting a “kudatah”? Sure. A few dozen people showed up to Legislature to protest… things… which included affirming trans student bathroom & changeroom access. I’m going to cover it over on New Frontier, but seriously, this does not compare to what state legislators are doing in Eagleland–mostly because the Albertan NDP are actually defending trans rights.
Vivec @ # 61: … one in three of her blog posts are “ugh stupid misogynist trans people …
I tallied up the 20 posts on Benson’s blog as of this afternoon by subject:
Jian Ghomeshi
Rushdie fatwa
Bosnia
dog
Nat’l Union of Students vs gay men
Somaliland
Smurthwaite
Guardian/young people/gender
Lambda Literary
Lambda Literary
abuse
Gender hierarchy
niceness
Brussels
Brussels
Brussels
Trump
HRC & obligatory smiles
Feminism & Muslimas
Kids’ pictures
Of these, 8 have no direct bearing on feminist issues. 6 more concern social treatment of women, but say nothing about trans_ people. That leaves 6.
Taking them from the bottom:
• “Gender hierarchy” takes a whack at the concept of “gender identity” from the feminist-theory perspective that gender is a mechanism of social control;
• Both “Lambda Literary” pieces criticize someone getting that foundation to withdraw a book called Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science from consideration for an award (apparently on grounds of transphobia, though I have not yet followed the relevant link, nor seen enough else about the book to form an opinion);
• In the post I find most problematic, Benson takes to task respondents to a Guardian survey about changing gender attitudes, making the point that what some now call “gender fluidity” existed before the present generation embraced it. This comes across as quite ageist, but not transphobic;
• Comedian Kate Smurthwaite did a performance, after multiple protests & cancellations, to benefit a refugee charity: many people reserved (free) seats under false names, leading to a mostly empty house. I don’t know enough about Smurthwaite to decide how to characterize this petty harassment;
• The (British) National Union of Students now faces a drive from its internal LGBT Campaign to dump “representatives for gay men – because they ‘don’t face oppression’ in the LGBT community” – “delegates passed a motion that blames ‘cis gay men’ for ‘misogyny, transphobia, racism and biphobia’.” The “phobia” in this case seems to come from a set of trans_ people, not against them.
I’m not sure which of those you see as (# 66) …mocking NB people like me, nor in which Joerg finds “Trump-level hatred” – but, once y’all have finished denouncing my habitual uncouthness, perhaps you could take your phobiameters back to the shop for recalibration.
That is the literal definition of TERF bullshit.
“Wahhh trans people are mean for complaining about a transphobic book”
Read the fucking post and the comments again. It’s mocking the concept of “gender fluidity” and gender identity – and therefore nonbinary people like me.
“Wahh mean trans people protested a transphobe”
The only fair point in her blog I’ve seen – save courting and cosigning commentators that mock and insult trans people over this admitted fair criticism.
So uh, yeah. TERF bullshit. Benson and her fans can literally eat shit.
But hey, if you don’t find someone fostering and encouraging a community that insults and questions the validity of trans people transphobic, good for you. Personally, I’m glad Benson’s on her own site again – her TERF bullshit is at least easier to ignore.
Vivec @ # 73 – So you say gender concepts do not entail social control mechanisms? How … interesting.
… a transphobic book
Having read the complainant’s (poorly written) link, and the commenters at B&W, I still don’t know whether or to what degree that may be right. Have you read it?
… mocking the concept of “gender fluidity” and gender identity – and therefore nonbinary people like me.
If you personalize every disagreement about social concepts, you’re going to feel under personal attack every day. As I (re-)read the post, it still seems that Benson was mocking the idea (at least as much the Guardian‘s as the respondents’) that gender-bending is something new.
“Wahh mean trans people protested a transphobe”
By particularly underhanded means, that undermined a fund-raiser for a particularly urgent cause (even if one accepts that characterization, which your ad feminems incline me to doubt).
Bring some facts to the table next time, please.
No, I say that TERFS JAQing off about me and other trans people’s gender is shitty.
Okay, then you fucking suck at reading comprehension, not my problem. And yes, I’m going to personalize transphobic views on gender identity, becuase I’m a trans person and the proliferation of transphobia actually affects me in the real world. Go figure.
Don’t give a shit about the means or the charity. If Cathy Brennan or David Duke was giving a talk that gave 100% of the funds to charity, I’d feel the same way.
Stop supporting TERFs next time please.
Either way, this is pointless. Neither of us is going to change each other’s opinions, and the TERF in question did us all a favor and quarantined her shitty views to a different site. I consider that a win.
@#75, Pierce R. Butler
If you personalize every disagreement about social concepts, you’re going to feel under personal attack every day.
That sounds an awful lot like “hate the sin, not the sinner.”
When the proverbial sin is an aspect critical to your identity, does that not constitute a personal attack?
Rhetorical question. I don’t actually want an answer from you. You might see “isn’t gender oppressive?!” as a good Question to Just Ask but for some reason you aren’t interested in the answers you get from trans folk.
And that is why I’m tired of your vacuous crap.
Vivec @ # 77: … this is pointless.
Here we agree. G’nite.
Yeah, my point is that, for the GOP, it seems to work like this:
Local – We don’t like this, so what about the state or the fed and what they say? We do like this other thing, so.. “big government”, which includes the state, needs to stay out of it.
State – We don’t like this, so what about fed or the local sheriff/city government wants? We do like this other thing, so.. “big government”, which includes the state, but.. no the damn city has no say in whether or not the law makes sense.
Fed – We don’t like this, so the state or the local sheriff/city government should have all the say on this! We do like this other thing, so.. the state and the locals should just suck it, and do what the fed tells them too, why else did we elect these people, huh, huh?!
The definition of “big government” for these people is, “Which ever government entity is scaring, interfering with, or not complying with what we want this week.”
Oh, and BTW, I mistated the case with the Arizona BS with paid leave – they didn’t pass legislation to make it illegal, just… told the cities in no uncertain terms that they would, perfectly legally, through the law, pull all state funding from any city that failed to comply. How the hell some of this stuff isn’t itself illegal, and grounds to arrest the politicians that pull it… Right at the freaking top of my list, if I was rewriting the damn constitution would be, I think, something to curtail this BS, or at least make it so they would have to actively seek to overthrow the government in conspiracy, to actually get by with stabbing the public in the back like this. But, it would take someone way better than me, I suspect, to word it into something that actually a) worked, and b) had real teeth.
Kagehi @80
“Small government” is like “family values” or “supporting the troops”. A meaningless phrase that vaguely communicates the notion of “good” and “homey” and “down to Earth” without actually being about anything else other than justifying shitty laws and actions.
Small government activists don’t actually want a small government (as we saw with Bush). They want government spying on us and us afraid of our government. They want extensive controls on people’s lives that are enforced by the weight of law. They want people’s religious freedoms or rights to speech or assembly to be destroyed. They want Orwellian Dystopia but without the commie flavoring and with crosses everywhere.
And that comes through rather pointedly whenever there is a marginalized group that’s up on the chopping block to get fucked. Because the only consistent value any of these fuckers have ever had is they want the world to reflect their small-mindedness. They want a world that’s willing to enforce by law the removal of black people, trans people, queer people, women who are not their property, other religious groups from public society so they can go on pretending that the TV box is right and that small-minded white suburban Christian cishet males really are the only people that matter.
The constitution, the rule of law, the intention of government, their own words, none of that will ever matter more than that central guiding principle. Sadly, being aware of that does not make it any easier to be the ones targeted by shitty laws like this.
CONTENT WARNING: SO MUCH TRANSPHOBIA AND TRANSPHOBIC BELIEFS. IF THAT’S TRIGGERING, PLEASE SKIP THIS POST
Pierce @72 & 75
Ugh, I’d love to just bury this and her, but I’m not going to casually allow some fuck to completely dismiss transphobia and blame it on trans people for being “sensitive” because they are still in denial that a TERF is a TERF. Not this weekend with this bullshit hanging over us.
Is it not interesting to you that when we all looked… on the day and the days after a particularly hateful law against trans people, denying their ability to shit in peace, there was literally no mention of it on that person’s blog. Nor any mention of any other instance of a trans person facing any difficulty or oppression. I mean, sure, there’s been a pretty big news story about yet another murder of a trans woman in Skid Row in LA and there was Lily Wachowski coming out and speaking about the suicides that forced outings cause, but no, for some strange, unfathomable reason, this “totally not a transphobe” found it much more pressing to happen to be covering and incensed by a collection of minor incidents in which trans people could be spun as “enemies of free speech” or “deluded” and just so happened to choose this presentation for her 9/20; 1/3; 7/20 articles we all found.
Assuming a world where she wasn’t a TERF piece of shit and not bothering to hide it, does that not strike you as odd? As a clue that she might not be as unbiased on trans issues as you claim? That that might even be affecting your own view of trans issues?
I mean, your second post on a post about the fact that trans people’s access to any public restroom has consistently been under attack and this is heating up and getting more of the force of rule of law is one in which you try and argue:
Which in addition to being smug as shit, is also somewhat of a shitty thing for a cis dude to plop on the table in front of trans people. LIke, oh, you and your “rights struggle”, can’t we agree that you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing and admit your demands are bullshit.
Like, oh noes, sorry sir, I’ll be sure to request that my sisters not be murdered at a rate higher than literally any other group of people minus maybe sex workers and that I should have the right to work and pee and participate in public life without fear of violence or lawful discrimination or arrest in a less shrill manner.
But anyways, let’s address your steaming pile of bullshit one at a time.
Galileo’s Middle Finger, the transphobic book by Alice Dreger. The one in which mean trans activists proved they were enemies of free speech by being so uppity and shrill at Lambda Literary that Dreger was dropped from consideration from an aware she had a good chance of winning and it’s all because trans people are made about a book they haven’t even read, amirite?
Ha! Stupid trans people, characterizing anything you don’t like as transphobic…
Except, no, the book really is terrible and yes, yes, I have read it. Or at least most of it before throwing it against the wall and screaming for the fifteenth time. And a lot of it is very similar to the series of articles she wrote way back when that I also read.
A lot of it is focused on this idea that trans people are anti-science because they were super mean to this guy named Bailey who wrote a book “The Man who would be Queen”, which was a “scientific book” written about trans people that refused to use people’s actual gender pronouns and was basically about denying huge swaths of trans experiences in favor selling the notions that we’re all femme gay men or butch gay women who are trying to escape homophobia because being a straight trans person is like the easiest thing in the world.
Or we are “autogynephiles” where in we are straight male fetishes who are in love with cross-dressing and vaginas so much that we find it super hot to pretend to be gay trans women because we’re just sickos trying to trick queer women into having sex with penises.
If this is sounding dehumanizing and fucked up, congratulations, you’re part of the way to understanding why trans people were a wee bit upset about both those books nearly winning Lambda Awards specifically on the “strength” of writing about “the trans experience”.
But oh, we’re not done yet, Bailey’s work was mostly a defense of a man named Zucker who ran a gender identity clinic in Toronto, the only GIC in the city that was covered by canadian healthcare for awhile, who he saw as being unfairly targeted by trans activists critiquing his fine actions supporting trans youth.
Now, Zucker may ring some alarm bells, because he’s been in the news a lot lately given that his clinic was recently shut down by mean trans people who are mean and awful and should be condemned as the anti-science zealots that they are…
Oh, wait, no, it’s because his means of “treating” trans kids was a form of intense reparative therapy wherein kids who were trans or even were expressing a non-normative gender expression or showing interests in activities that were not socially gendered for them were abused and forced into more “gender-aligning” activities so that they could be “fixed”. He then cited the fact that a number of trans kids put through this weren’t so keen on saying they were trans anymore to him for some odd reason as proof that trans kids are liars who just need a tough love approach to enforcing their “correct gender identity” and to stop being coddled by being allowed to dress how they want or play activities that are “congruent with the opposite sex”.
His work was so instrumental that it was actually extensively cited by the Family Research Council in the policy paper they’ve been shopping around to various state legislatures in order to prompt the current wave of bathroom laws. Oh hello, relevance to current issues, so nice to see you here. It’s on page 3. So you don’t have to read all that much to hit it. Basically the FRC are huuuuuuuge fans of his work.
And lest you say, okay, maybe the people Dreger was defending were awful but maybe she’s not a piece of shit, yeaaaaaah, no:
Zinnia Jones deconstruction and response to Dreger
Julia Serano’s response and deconstruction
And since reading comprehension is not your strong suit, let’s note that among Dreger’s “enlightening conclusions” surrounding trans people is the ideas of:
– If you’re a straight trans woman, then life is absolutely great, because you get to side-step homophobia, so most trans women are just femme gay boys who want the convenience of making it easier to fuck men while not facing any cultural oppression for doing so.
– That autogynephilia garbage where gay trans women (trans men and non-binary individuals are frequently as mythical or beneath commentary by transmisogynists as asexual or bisexual trans women) are really just so obsessed with women and vaginas that they’ve got this big fetish about pretending to be women in order to sleep with gay women and trick them into sleeping with men. Because apparently getting gay women to lose on their gold star or something, ARE YOU GETTING THE POINT YET ON HOW TRANSPHOBIC THIS SHIT IS YET?!?
– Oh, she’s also a gender dysphoria denialist. So that’s just icing on the shitlord cake.
But no, the real crime is that she and the man she wrote about weren’t given Lambda Awards for their sterling writing about how trans people are delusional liars and problem-free fetishists just trying to trick people for easy or super-hot sex.
Gosh, I wonder why trans people were a wee bit upset about that ascientific and incredibly offensive BULLSHIT!
Now, let us address the remainder of your smug little shitlordery.
Gosh, personalizing disagreements about the social concept of our existence… wow, could you be any more of a smug piece of shit right now?
Well, Pierce, all I’m saying is that atheists are clearly the moral equivalent of Hitler and rape babies for fun. What? Why are you so upset about this “disagreement” about “social concepts”. You’re really personalizing this.
And before you get ready to get up on your high horse, may I remind you once again of the context of how trans people are actually treated in these United States and around the globe and how laws are being passed to codify our exclusion from motherfucking toilets because of a international hate campaign based around the idea that trans women are fucking child molesters looking to prey on little white children separated away from their daddies by the bathroom sign.
But back on point, fuck you for making me go back and re-read that fucking bullshit (and don’t you even try and play the smug asshole dismissal of “oh, I didn’t force you to do anything”).
And first up, let me note that if you don’t see how this is dismissive to genderfluid individuals then you are a fucking blind man. Fuck, she calls it a “special snowflake” edition, tries to argue that being gender-fluid is the same as being a girl who occasionally likes to wear overalls and play softball, openly dismisses gender-fluid kids talking about their experiences,
Oh and let’s not forget that her literal first sentence is completely dismissing a person talking about how they experience intense dysphoria in the wrong clothes as and I’m quoting here:
Which, if you can’t see how that is dismissive or identity and transphobic, then you sir are FUCKING BLIND or so unbelievably transphobic that you also agree that we’re delusional and that our identities are as much of a joke as TERFS like fuckwit think they are.
Take your pick, Pierce, cause you’re one of those.
And our last port of call.
The Smurthwaite thing.
Fuck me running, the Smurthwaite thing. Okie dokie, Smurthwaite is one of those storm in a teapot things that make it big in the anti-SJW crowd every so often about so-and-so complete shitlord was CENSORED!!!! OMG!!!! because… student funds were used to invite a performer out, students raised concerns surrounding their support for bigoted views and the likelihood of those views being a major portion of the performance, and sometimes they also stage a protest, expressing their freedom of speech to speak out, but which we’re supposed to view as bad and “chilling” because shitting on kids having free speech is a national pasttime.
And most of the news posts about it are incredibly sympathetic to Smurthwaite, arguing against the mean old students and their inability to handle differing views, blah de blah, it’s the same old, snake people are awful shit.
Except… buried in those sympathetic reports is the reality. She wasn’t banned. She was invited to perform on student funds in order to support a very worthwhile charity. Students expressed concern about Feminist and Comedy Club money going to this because of her statements on trans people, but mostly her statements on sex workers and sex work. Some said they were intending to protest. This is perfectly normal and expected. College, free speech, this is all that working as intended.
The part everyone cries censorship about is that the organizer who invited her looked at their sold tickets, saw there were only 8 and made the calculation that this was not going to be worth the support for the charity given that far more people were upset about the invitation than actually bought tickets for it.
Snurthwaite then whined to the world about her free speech being censored because SHE WAS DENIED A VENUE TO SPEAK AT, OH NOES!!!! Don’t you know that everyone should be allowed to speak everywhere about anything they want and people have to listen to them? Gosh, I guess I should head down to church this sunday and give them all a sex-ed talk about proper dental dam usage and cry censorship when they ask me to leave or yell at me for being an asshole.
And so she characterized the protest as a “picket line” and claimed that because she’s super awesome and popular, that the organizer must be wrong about those 8 tickets sold, because clearly everyone in the world would have wanted to see her. And that there was a vast conspiracy of on and off campus trans people trying to silence her and her right to free speech. And that the real reason it was all cancelled was because of all the extra security they would need to fight back the army of angry trans people and sex workers who were so incensed by her invective words.
She also attacked them on the fact that the feminist club’s president had mentioned potentially filming the event just to make sure it wasn’t super bigoted, because, like, that’s happened a lot at a lot of colleges and in a lot of queer and feminist conferences and since that’s always a bad press shit storm and leads to massive fallings out, it’s a legitimate concern to be aware of. Said president didn’t actually want to cancel at that time and this is completely unrelated to the decision to drop it which was all about the fact that no one on campus was interested and there was considerable proportions of the club membership who were very not interested. Because this allowed her to pretend that she was censored in the name of “safe spaces” which the media has decided is one of those buzzwords that mean entitled millennial and thus was perfectly attuned to media treating this favorably to Smurthwaite.
The school blinked at that bullshit while the world media did their “tsk tsk Millennials hate free speech” copy and paste and now the school was under pressure even though it was just an internal decision by an organization that no longer wanted to endorse a person or an event not when it was going to be a sparsely attended event negatively viewed by its own club members.
So the club was now under pressure to go against the wishes of itself and their members in support of a piece of shit self-promoter who was now insisting on the “right” to perform on their campus, be paid for said right and be endorsed by the college against its own will and it’s all for a good cause. She spent over a year on this. (The original cancellation she was whining about was way back in February 2015). That is fucked, to say the least.
But at this time, the organization was fucking done with this shit. Understandably so. And her choice to hide behind a charity to do another round of whining about censorship for her own aggrandizement was seen as fucking beyond the pale.
So having bullied her way back onto their campus, the students who initially didn’t want her invited did a passive protest, now being quite done with Smurthwaite going off whining again that she was “banned” or that her low attendance numbers were proof of evil doing.
They bought up her unsold tickets, donated to the charity she was raising money for, and gave a big middle finger to Smurthwaite and her bullshit:
https://twitter.com/NotAnExitM8/status/713029150831824896
They even apologized to the seven people who actually wanted tickets to her bullshit.
Is this rude? Prolly, but after a year of being demonized and having an awful person demand the right to perform shitty offensive comedy at a place she is not wanted at, because FREEZE PEACHES? I don’t really blame fucking kids for being done with that shit. Especially after having been demonized to every hate group on the planet for well over a year.
So yeah, supporting TERFs and shitlords, demonizing trans people and kids, selling a fiction that trans people are the enemies of free speech at a time when hate crimes are increasing against them and we are being banned from the goddamn bathroom.
All of this, she is doing at least according to each of our one page of blog post lookbacks.
And here’s the thing.
Whatever.
Just that. That person is not relevant to this shit, she’s just a TERF who is happy way off on her little TERF blog and good riddance to bad rubbish. But if you’re going to come in here trying to sell that TERF shit like it was delicious skirt steak, then buddy, we got problems and I’m going to deconstruct that bullshit thoroughly.
Now back to drinking my way through this weekend because I have trans friends in NC and I’m scared for them.
Not to mention, as I said, the standard you walk by is the standard you accept. If you’re fostering a community where people casually insult and deny the experiences of trans people, and never do anything to contradict or distance yourself from them, you’re guilty of the same bullshit Trump is.
How do transgender people feel in general about the fact that transgender people who are successful at presenting themselves as their gender are being used to make the point that these bills would actually throw bathroom procedures into chaos?
Reason I ask is because it’s basically ceding ground that “obviously non-conforming” is a valid reason to bar them from restrooms that they identify with but do not present as.
I get it’s coming from a good place for a majority of transgender activists and allies, but… I dunno, it still leaves me feeling like there are some transgender people being left out with this type of argument.
I kind of feel like there’d be people left out no matter how you framed it, as long as you insist on having men and women’s restrooms.
Case in point; I ID as neither, and while I do occasionally use the bathroom for the gender I pass as, I generally prefer to stick to private one-person gender neutral ones or just wait until I get home.
throwaway @84
Hmm, well, in the long term, I would love to see the replacement of bathrooms, especially gendered single-stall bathrooms, with general population toilets with more partitioning and overall privacy, but that’ll take a while.
In the meantime, there’s a whole bunch of ugly factors that are tied up in the bathroom debate. There’s the idea that trans people are threats and thus violence against them is justified. There’s the idea of gendered spaces that invite this sort of gender policing. There’s the idea of gender policing in general and societal ignorance of how gender and “biological” sex actually work and are assigned. There’s ignorance about intersex people. There’s genitals are destiny. And so on and so forth.
As we move into a space of more frequent assaults, it will be necessary to respond back with evocative notes, but not repeat the mistakes of the gay and lesbian communities in abandoning the less “palatable” identities to make the more privileged members’ lives easier.
So, to answer your question… uh, giant shrug. I’m binary, so I’m really the wrong person to ask given that impacts non-binary individuals much more.
Oh and coda to the whole “Dreger and her crew are awful human beings” thing?
Bailey, the man she is defending, straight up assaulted some of his clients in the name of research, having sex with them in exchange for continuing “treatment”. Dreger defends this saying its no big ethical deal.
Also, Bailey is also known somewhat for his fierce bisexuality denialism, serving as the popularizer of the concept of “gay, straight, or lying”: http://www.tsroadmap.com/info/bailey-bisexual.html
This was in the 2000s.
He also heavily worked his material into that framework, arguing that his two categories of trans people were as perfect of a fit as his two ideas of male sexuality (gay or straight) which is not inaccurate in that both are complete crocks of shit.
This is the man Dreger thinks has been “hard-done by ideologically blinded zealots”. She has also been complaining on twitter that not receiving a Lambda award is the equivalent of being censored and that she cannot catch a break despite having received a full-ride writing grant for this book in particular which has allowed her to live essentially rent free for the last 6 years or so. This despite the fact that trans academics have been criticizing her biased and inaccurate ideas of the trans community for years and despite the fact that the state of sex research on trans people is a fucking joke*.
Also, on her list of awful? She’s a “trans people force cis people to transition” truther who argues that trans kids should be forced into puberties they know they want and which has been proven in studies to increase rates of suicide because a small percentage of them might secretly be cis and regret having “permanent damage” being done to their development.
Yes, she believes that dead kids and trans kids being miserable and going through painful pubescence is a small price to pay because some cis kid somewhere might be secretly being forced to transition just because they are gender non-conforming, because of how easy the whole process would be without gatekeepers forcing kids through unwanted puberties and endless double checks to make sure they are fitting their weirdo model of what trans people are like.
A model that only accepts straight binary trans people as trans people and which writes off everyone else as either creepy fetishists who are just trying to trick people into fulfilling their creepy sex fantasies or horribly sexually repressed and in denial about their love of cock or their unhealthy obsession with vaginas.
I know no one asked for more information but since I’ve actually read that fucking pile of shit, dear Bob do I have rants for days about what an unbelievably archaic piece of transphobic shit it is.
Also, unsurprising? Good ol’ Dan Savage credits the book with helping define his understanding of trans people. He of course sees nothing wrong with the sections praising reparative therapy for trans people nor the part labeling gay trans women as straight male fetishists.
I know, I was super shocked as well (/sarcasm)
*The fact that autogynephilia is taken as a given by so many in that field and so many sexologists coming to her aid even though it has been debunked for literal decades by the medical fields and despite decades of trans people coming forward with their life experiences reveals nothing except how slowly certain fields adapt to reality and how transphobic the main field gatekeeping medical access to transition has been for forever.
Cerberus @ 87:
Savage is also of the “gay, straight, or lying” school, especially where men are concerned.
Caine @88
True.
Honestly this whole kerfuffle is just serving as a nice encapsulation of who the bigots within the community are. If they “see nothing wrong with Dreger” then odds are favorite they are a complete asshole with a history of saying fucked up bigoted things.
Also, last word on the autogynophilia bullshit, but one other thing that makes me incensed about that whole “academic” construction besides its offensiveness is just how alien it is to my experiences as a trans ace person.
Like, it’s so obvious the intention is a box to make queer trans women feel ashamed for their sexual desires and view them as some sort of perverted fetish, even if they are vanilla as fuck. And like having sexual wants as a lesbian trans woman makes you no longer a woman and just some cross-dresser who’s obsessed with vaginas. And that’s so grossly fucked up.
Even more so when it becomes obvious that a lot of these “academics” are really unlicensed chasers who preface their own attraction to (especially younger) straight trans women as being an indicator of “womanhood”. Like going deeper into this mess just makes one angrier and angrier at just how fucked up the enforcement of the fucked up norms were back in the day and how it lead to the intentional silencing of a whole generation of trans folks due to medical requirements.
And ugh, the whole thing just makes me feel gross and angry, even more so to know that these are the fuckers the bigots are turning to to give their “trans women are men just trying to rape you in the bathroom” bullshit the veneer of academic respectability.