Phase I: “Let’s Get Perverts Out of Our Restrooms!”
Phase II: “Why Does it Smell Like Pee Everywhere?”
America needs a modest solution to its bathroom heebee jeebies. Why not go full “Invisible Hand of the Market” here? Let’s have Pay Restrooms just like they have in Paris, France. Here are the benefits: There will be more public restrooms. They will be cleaner and more private than we are currently accustomed to. Competition will keep prices low enough that now, finally, homeless people will have somewhere decent to relieve themselves (and we can publicly make sure they have the funds to enter). Finally, if I want to use a restroom that I paid for, I can use it any way I want. That’s the American way.
Before you burst a blood vessel, remember that this is “A Modest Proposal.” And I’m not talking about those damned French Robot Toilets. Let’s put some people to work here.
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More insidious than it sounds.
It lies dormant, but needs just the tiniest little excuse of a catalyst to transform it into a frothing-at-the-mouth national ragefest.
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The real irony is that if bathroom police were actually needed, it would be to protect transgender people against assaults, which is by far a bigger problem than men dressing up as women to sneak in to bathrooms of the opposite sex.
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Like, perhaps, allowing gay marrige and looking at transgendered rights for example?
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In the restroom justice system, being trans is considered especially heinous. In public bathrooms, the dedicated detectives who investigate vague crotches are members of an elite squad known as the Victims of Trans People Unit. These are their stories.
Dun Dun.
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We don’t pose any new threats (aside from two whole states where if you murder us you won’t necessarily get off because of ‘trans panic’ and where we have some very perfunctory employment rights). After fighting for our rights for as long as the rest of the LGBT community, we’re just now starting to get some small amount of acceptance. That’s what’s new. That and the bigots ‘lost’ on gay rights and every occasion is a ‘good’ occasion for beating up on trans people (literally and figuratively).
(I’m not sure you were really asking. Sorry if I took the question more seriously then you meant.)
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It’s a manufactured issue to stoke the fanatical conservative base with an easy trigger point against a vulnerable minority. There was no transgender-in-the-bathroom problem because no one was being harassed let alone assaulted.
If it weren’t for conservative governments firing the first shot and passing laws specifically to discriminate against transgender people, there wouldn’t be a need to create laws to reverse their dirty work.
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Please don’t apologize–I can understand why my question could be read as serious, and I should have clarified that I meant it sarcastically because I realize transgender people don’t pose a threat. I’m sadly all too aware that the real threat is that posed by ignorant and violent cis people.
That’s why my question is meant sarcastically. Given that transgender people have, as far as we know, always been around, why the sudden flurry of attention? And the answer is…
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They are also leftist-double speak for “anti-authoritarianism” and “government for and by the people”.
It’s not what threat transgender people pose now that they didn’t before, that is just a pretense.
We’re just the next opportunity for the religious right to rally their forces and strengthen their coalition. They are and always have been a coalition of hatred and fear, and they need new targets now that they’re losing the battle on LGB.
(Also I know you weren’t posing a serious question, I just wanted to provide a serious answer )
ETA: War mongering is a thing, but what about cultural war mongering? They define themselves by their opposition and cannot sustain themselves without constant conflict.
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The thing is while the left has problems… they’re not demanding a woman go past lines of protesters screaming that htey are literal satan murdering whores to get counciled/talked down to and then a wand shoved up their vaginas to make sure the abortion is ‘legitimate’ and then provide zero help in rearing and caring for the resulting child so the mother doesn’t have an effective financial millstone around her neck that also means the child grows up in poverty only to expect a life of poverty… and GOD ALONE HELP YOU if they detect the child has downs or another birth defect because even those that would otherwise be well off basically live check to check if they have special needs children (On paper my family made good money for years… and all of it was eaten up by medical bills and other help for us. And my family was lucky, it could’ve been a lot worse.)
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I don’t dispute any of that. My point was only that, as a queer person, just about the only people I fear being harassed by are cops. And I don’t intend to tolerate them loitering around bathrooms. Reducing The State’s involvement in people’s lives is also a real concern to others - not only conservatives who selectively use it as an excuse.
Email a picture of your penis to Mike Pence to prove you can use the men’s room.
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“It’s just a phase, like thinking I was gay was a phase… oh, never mind that, I just have a wide stance…”
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Maybe that’s what he wants you to do…
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In that case, everyone wins, I guess.
Seriously, though, the more we repeat that these old perverts just want to look at everyone’s genitals the better. I’m not sure how true it is, but we live in a post-fact era anyway, so who cares.
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I’ll reshare this since depressingly it’s still relevant:
Back in the early 1990’s I was one of a very small group of people helping prepare for an event at a Unitarian church. The group also included a transgender person who asked me if I’d stand guard while he used the men’s room.
I agreed. I thought–but never said–that he was being overly cautious. The building was practically empty, he was among friends (I was the only person in the group who’d never met him before), and he and I were the only ones with any reason to use the men’s room. Also if I hadn’t known he was transgender I never would have guessed or even thought about it. And it was no trouble. At the time I was standing around doing nothing and it was just as easy to stand outside the men’s room as anywhere else.
Events of just the past couple of years have made me look back on that moment very differently. I don’t feel he was being overly cautious. His feelings were, given recent rhetoric, completely understandable. I’m glad there was at least one person there he felt comfortable asking.
That was a tiny glimpse into the terror some–maybe most, maybe even all–transgender people live with all the time. I can’t begin to imagine what the fear and pressure were like even before some elected officials decided it was necessary to pass “bathroom bills”.
In short I can’t even begin to imagine the difficulties faced by transgender people.
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That’s the thing it went so main stream it became a joke, rather than an actual rights issue, and an issue that could be resolved in days by pledging to make a single eveyone use bathroom stall, it would create jobs even if it was for the construction of an added toilet
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There won’t be enforcement (except by the odd—and I do mean odd) mall cop. This isn’t about doing something. It’s about saying something. It’s about signaling that the conservatives are back, baby! I’m not sure they ever went away, but they’re wrestling the country back from all the indecent people out there: Non-white people. Non-male people. Non-straight people. Non-Christian people. Non-born-in-America people. Non-righthanded people. Non-cispeople.
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