Oh, for fuck’s sake. Can we just eliminate gendered bathrooms entirely? They serve no purpose whatsoever.
7 Likes
I wouldn’t mind but I don’t see that happening in the near future. In a world where every restroom had individual stalls maybe, but there is a lot of legacy infrastructure to deal with.
http://www.workerscompensation.com/compnewsnetwork/files.php?file=/urinal_808113539.jpg
Plus you’d still have to get everyone on board with the idea of coed communal showers and locker rooms for gyms. That’s a hard sell.
3 Likes
Yes, it was mind boggling because I am out as transgender. Like open as fuck. That’s one of those conversations, where I just watched it go down before I spoke, because seriously?
12 Likes
A locker room is not a bathroom, and I’m not proposing that. But the vast majority of restrooms do have individual stalls. I haven’t seen a trough urinal like that except in an amusement park that’s largely unchanged since the 1930s. It would be incredibly easy to convert most existing bathrooms to be unisex (it literally involves just changing the sign, unless you feel urinals have to be mandatory), and there’s no reason new restrooms should be built gendered to begin with.
5 Likes
Changing restroom infrastructure across the nation is still not going to be an instant or universal shift. Until then, we need laws that allow trans people to use whichever restroom they are most comfortable in.
10 Likes
Why can’t we eliminate gendered birth certificates as well?
8 Likes
Definitely agreed.
1 Like
Is it just me, or does the figure standing to the right look…um…a bit inappropriate?
I would not miss trough urinals one bit. [shudder]
I don’t love amusement parks either, but they can stay.
1 Like
Don’t forget the only reason why they’re even backing down on the original HB2: the NCAA said that they’d stop doing events, and college sports are everything here.
1 Like
Headed to a town near you. Well, oddly not NC.
2 Likes
I have seen long, painful online arguments where conservatives say: yes, keeping trans men like that out of women’s bathrooms is exactly why we need these laws. We’re not exactly up against the best and brightest here.
4 Likes
I dramatically prefer bathroom signs to just be like, a picture of a toilet. The all-gender bathrooms with the half-skirt person feel extremely other-ing.
6 Likes
“What’s clear is that the compromise is not about the safety, well-being, or basic human dignity of LGBTQ people; it’s about money. Governor Cooper gives the game away when he says that the compromise is “not perfect” but “begins to repair [North Carolina’s] reputation.” What this means is that the compromise is not satisfactory to LGBTQ people, but it may satisfy the multinational corporations boycotting the state because of HB2. This, in turn, reveals one of the dangers of using boycotts to safeguard basic human rights. The pivotal question becomes about optics and marketing—can the state “sell” this solution?—and not about the substantive and fair treatment of the state’s citizens. Marginalized people already face daunting challenges in obtaining basic protections. Making those protections dependent on the beneficence of multinational corporations only alienates marginalized communities further from the political process.”
3 Likes
As a former Bostonian, I will say that that bus won’t fly there.
Although as both a genderqueer person and really nitpicky communicator, I think that people need to be careful how they confront stuff like this. The bus’ message is that sex is biological, which coincides (to a degree) with what gender studies and activists teach, along with the distinction between sex and gender. But the bus is apparently being decried as anti-transgender.
This can put gender activists in the position of appearing to contradict themselves, if they aren’t very clear. It was a subversive calculation by those who commissioned this.
1 Like
It’s because they are being gender essentialist, stating that gender is 100% connected with what chromosomes you have. I would like to know how they deal with intersex people, but I suspect I won’t like the answer.
9 Likes
I have not read every side of that bus, but how it seems to me is that they are explicitly stating that sex is biological, but passive-aggressively implying that sex == gender so that gender is biological also. Its XX and XY also depict one tightly constrained marker of biological sex, reenforcing the notion that biology means a binary rather than a continuum. It seems calculated to function as a dogwhistle for essentialists, while saying very little outright.
An amusing contradiction I would press them on is that if it’s all simple biology, then why are the “boy” and “girl” glyphs visually reduced to one of them having a dress and pigtails? Does that mean they are fine with boys wearing a dress and having pigtails, just so long as they know what chromosomes they have?
Cisnormativity assumes that a whole host of characteristics can be neatly divided into two distinct genders, modulo whatever infinitesimal exceptions they’ve been convinced to make. IMHO the sex/gender axis is only one way to subdivide that mess of assumptions. Despite its emphasis in gender studies, I’m not sure it’s the most meaningful axis. After all, it’s difficult to sort a whole host of gendered characteristics into distinct biological or cultural boxes, especially in a world where culture shapes biology, in the form of workout regimens, body-shaping clothing, surgeries, and exogenous hormones – all used by both trans and cis people to conform to cultural ideals.
Aside and pure speculation: the sex/gender distinction almost seems like an accident of the English language. The language obtained these near-synonyms, and so it seems natural to interpret them along English’s traditional germanic/latin distinction. “Sex” isn’t germanic in origin, but it sounds like it is, which is maybe good enough 
sex : gender :: pig : pork
Sex is to nature or “the raw” as gender is to culture or “the cooked.”
– Judith Butler abridged by Riki Wilchins.
In any case, I think their conflation of sex/gender here is only a symptom of conflating all gender axes, including presentation, hormonal differences, birth sex assignment, chromosomes, etc etc. I doubt there’s any subtlety intended by the bus’s designers 
3 Likes
…enforced by a small fine on the man and felony convictions for both women.
6 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
