#WeJustNeedToPee is awesome

[Anakin McFly]

http://www.advocate.com/politics/transg ... ee-selfies

I also love the comment elsewhere that said that if the laws pass, what's to stop a straight cis guy from going to the women's bathrooms and claiming that he's a trans man?

[aels]

A colleague and I were talking about how fucking stupid that idea is the other day. If a cishet dude wants to attack or perv on women, they can just... go into a women's bathroom. Or attack a woman in literally any other place on earth because it turns out that women are pretty much everywhere. *inspiring music* The power to attack women was inside you all along!

[Anakin McFly]

If a cishet dude wants to attack or perv on women, they can just... go into a women's bathroom.

Yeah, it's not like a potential rapist thinks, "I really want to attack a woman in a bathroom, but oh no, the law says only women are allowed in there, so I guess I can't do that today. "

What's particularly ironic is that if no one had made a fuss about this in the first place, all those potential perverts wouldn't be getting ideas. Also, bathrooms are incredibly unsexy places. And in the women's bathrooms, everyone's in a stall, which makes it one of the worst places to effectively perv on anyone.

It's not as though there aren't already laws against sexual assault regardless of gender (or at least there should be). Even if some cishet dude decides to go into the women's bathroom, pee in a stall and get out, it doesn't hurt anyone; maybe it was nearer than the men's and he really really had to go. And if that guy decides to also look over the cubicle walls to peek at naked women, or to actually rape someone, then it's still a crime, and the same if he were a cis lesbian. And if people are just concerned about said dude hiding in a stall and jerking off at the idea that he's in a female bathroom surrounded by half-dressed women trying to pee, then while that's kind of creepy, it still doesn't actively hurt any woman, and you can't even be certain that cis lesbians aren't doing the same.

[phe_de]

I've been saying it for years: The best way to deal with the issue is to introduce restrooms not separated by gender, but by function.
Stools behind one door, urinals behind the other. And each urinal with a dispenser of one-way urinellas, so people without penis can use them too.

[Anakin McFly]

Or just unisex stalls, really; there isn't even a reason that restrooms should be separated in the first place, as long as everyone gets the privacy and security they need. Which is not dependent upon only going to pee around people who had similar genitalia at birth. (which is an even more stupid variant of the law - bathroom designation is based on sex assigned at birth, regardless of any future biological developments, so even if you had a mildly intersex guy who appeared completely female at birth, and had that put on his birth cert, but then grew up to be a normative straight cis man, he'd still be forced to use the female restrooms under that law.)

A part of me hopes that the law does pass just so I can see the kind of ridiculous shenanigans that would ensue. I'd love to see how people react to extremely macho trans men invading the female restrooms as required by law.There might be a lot of butch lesbians who get mistaken for intruding male perverts and arrested, especially since one state is offering $2500 (?) as a reward for anyone who reports trans people in the 'wrong' bathrooms. That should be fun.

(I remember there was some incident at I think the TERF-governed MichFest in which women complained about a trans woman sexually harassing them in the bathrooms and waving their dick about. Turns out it was a trans man. WELL THEN.)

I can definitely understand the fear of sexual harassment if straight men wander into the female restrooms. But these laws will basically make that mandatory in a few confirmed cases, for the sake of possibly preventing uncertain ambiguous cases, and people's time and effort would be better spent on preventing that sexual harassment and figuring out ways to keep everybody safe.

A comment elsewhere: "This amendment puts cis women at greater risk as well. We all know women will use the men's washroom if there is too long a lineup for them to wait at a busy event or night cluc etc. Men will start to question any and all women to find out if Trans or not. What would it be like to come out of a stall and then find men blocking the exit until they satisfy their curiosity."

There's that too.

[OpiateOfTheMasses]

Or just have more open plan unisex toilets and encourage people to be less hung about things. I've been in a couple of bars in Europe which have unisex toilets with urinals along one wall and cubicles along the other and men and women come in and use whichever they want to. The first time I came across this I was a bit drunk and it did surprise me when a woman I knew walked passed me when I was having a piss, but it really wasn't a big deal.

[Pope Bucky]

I was at a club in a Vegas casino. I went to the men's room and the urinals were along a chest high wall. The other side of the wall was a section of the women's room, I think the sinks or the walkway in. I stood there, taking my piss, and making and responding to quick comments from the ladies.