Transgender bathrooms?

[Buster's Uncle]

Interesting way of putting it, in this context.

I gather that the women-need-more-bathroom problem is more than urinals taking less space than booths.  Women spend more time there; their hygienic needs are more complex, they spend more time at the mirror, and --brace yourselves boys-- they talk to each other in there.

[vonbach]

They should be ashamed of themselves. They are throwing other peoples children on the altar of political correctness
so they can signal how self righteous they are. Children will be harmed because of this.  It is child abuse.

[Buster's Uncle]

Women?

[vonbach]

This sort of thing is why the left is hated so much. If you're going to mess up children in your
"social engineering" experiments please use your own and not everyone else's.

[Buster's Uncle]

Cool it, von.  I have zero patience for that blaming the liberals crap.

[Lorizael]

Genuinely not sure how gender-neutral bathrooms would mess up children, unless you're suggesting a child might be scarred by watching their parent harass a transgendered person trying to use the bathroom.

[Buster's Uncle]

I'll should admit that I've never known any trans people, and that I'd say this issue combines a facility everyone is a little uncomfortable about -at least most all the men- with a class of people most are uncomfortable about, to say the least...

[vonbach]

Genuinely not sure how gender-neutral bathrooms would mess up children,

If you don't understand it I'm not sure there is any way to explain it to you.
You're talking  about giving teenage boys free access to female students bathrooms.

[Lorizael]

I'll should admit that I've never known any trans people, and that I'd say this issue combines a facility everyone is a little uncomfortable about -at least most all the men- with a class of people most are uncomfortable about, to say the least...

I've known two trans people (that I'm aware of). One was kind of a prick, and the other is a pretty cool dude. So you know, kinda like regular people.

[Buster's Uncle]

Oh, I'm not surprised to hear it - I'm just no more immune to fear of otherness than anyone else, and haven't had first-hand opportunity to work past that in this case...

[Lorizael]

Genuinely not sure how gender-neutral bathrooms would mess up children,

If you don't understand it I'm not sure there is any way to explain it to you.
You're talking  about giving teenage boys free access to female students bathrooms.

I get that. When I was in middle and high school, I hated going to the bathroom or locker room. Other teenage boys were awful to me. So I can understand the desire to prevent teenage boys from being terrible, but I don't see why we should stop at barring them from female bathrooms.

[Buster's Uncle]

Preventing teenage boys from being terrible would be an even trickier job than changing the cultural standards for bathroom access - which isn't happening anytime soon, y'know...

[Elok]

Re: assault, the library stacks would be pretty well tailor-made for the same thing.  Any occasionally/irregularly visited area would be ideal.  I can't speak for your school, but some bathrooms would be more of a risk than others: rooms that don't have a steady influx of people, have a widely varied pool of users, are in shady areas or have users who might be substance-addled, etc.  I don't think we really need to worry about the occasional trans user--I've only met a couple of trans people, but they all seemed pretty meek, not hulking thugs in dresses or whatever people are afraid of.  Possibly this will change as they gain acceptance stop being constantly afraid of getting beat up.  However, I think gender-separate bathrooms in general make sense.

I make it sound like I'm some sort of bathroom-rape expert, so I guess I should emphasize that this is just my personal uninformed speculation talking here.  While I'm disclaiming, I do feel that TG should be thought of as a mental illness; however, I also believe that the correct response to mental illness is not to call them freaks and throw things at them.  Until we have the means to help them stabilize into whatever is the correct biological gender (I realize this can be ambiguous in cases like mosaics/merged twins), it's better to go with it.  If we as a society can deal with Down's and autism, we can deal with guys who want to be called Jessica.

[Buster's Uncle]

I understand that, leaving aside the gender identity issues, trans people DO have a high incidence of mental illness.  Make of that what you will.

[Elok]

You are simply incorrect. I won't try to argue this point with you, but I will provide a link to a guy who knows a lot more about the subject than either you or me. If you ever feel the need to challenge your beliefs, you can read it.

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/gender-its-complicated/

This article, too. http://www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943

Having read both, I'm deeply skeptical.  The argument seems to go: there is a process for developing physical sex in humans.  At least 99% of the time, the process works consistently and produces a clear male or female.  If one excludes minor deviations, such as a male with a urethral opening on the bottom of the penis, the figure jumps by an order of magnitude, to 99.9 or thereabouts (or so I gather; it's sometimes unclear, but it gives the ballpark of one in 4500).  The rest of the time the gender development process, like every other process in human biology, shows its potential to go deeply awry, and people are born with genitals so ambiguous it's impossible to say with confidence which sex they are.  There are also intriguing but ultimately inconsequential oddities such as women getting "infected" with cells from an opposite-sex fetus, or people having some of the internal plumbing but never noticing.

The articles' conclusion from this is that human sex is non-binary--because of that less than .01 percent.  This is like arguing that human beings should not be defined as bipedal on account of people born with third legs, or missing legs.  It is effectively false for the overwhelming majority.   Groups are not defined by statistical outliers.