I am trans. I go into the women’s locker room at they gym because that is the gender with which I identify. The reality is most of us just go to our locker, grab our stuff, and hit the road. Most people come dressed to work out and go home to shower or change into regular clothes. There are private dressing areas in the dressing room for those that want privacy. I go in, make eye contact with no one, and get out as quickly as I can.
I live in a red state. Even though I pass well, I am terrified that someone will harass or attack me in the bathroom or locker room. All it takes is for one person to say something or yell out to their male partner and I will be in danger. I cannot trust the employees to help me and the cops would likely assume that I was the antagonist. It’s a no-win scenario and the best I can hope for is not to get beaten.
The price for trying to get in shape and lose a few excess pounds could be my life.
There are groups scouring the news for black on white crimes so that Breitbart, Fox and other outlets can run them. There’s no way that they’d skip over LGBTQ+ pedophile cases.
I doubt they really would have done it but this falls squarely into the right-wing “boys will be boys” trope where bad male behaviour is seen as an unavoidable fact of existence and the rest of us just have to live with it if not love it.
The notion that self-confessed badly-behaved bros are incapable of moderating themselves or even growing up a tad is… revealing.
Oh, I do occasionally. Once a year I go to a week long, private event that’s amazingly inclusive and we’re accepted. At the campground there’s a lovely pond and this last year, although it was cold in that water, I went for a swim. I wasn’t counting, but out of the 12 or so people at the pond when my partner and I got there, I’d say probably 8 of us were trans.
I have also gone swimming at a hotel’s pool – once in the last several years. We were a group of five, so I had back up, and I wore a robe to the pool and back. I also stayed very close to my friends, interacting with no one else.
My fitness center has a pool. I don’t think I’m ever going to even try.
Honestly, the people believe this kind of shit about trans folks are really telling on themselves about how they think about women in general and what THEY themselves would do with the opportunity to be in a woman’s locker room…
You shouldn’t have to worry about this kind of shit. It really sucks that you do. I hope that we can get to a point where all of us feel safe just… going into a locker room…
From their POV, anyone who is not “one of them” are disposable and worthy of less than contempt. As such, it’s not a sin to hurt “the other” because god approves of it, from their bigoted theology.
He’d pretend to be trans the same way he (badly) pretended to be a good person in order to get into Congress. The world would function better if people acted with better principles then a Republican member of congress.
Sigh. Let’s not do the hates-queer-people-because-he’s-in-the-closet thing. It’s insulting to gay men, puts the onus of homophobia onto gay people, and ignores the reality that there are a great many haters who just hate people who are different.
He leads with “nobody knows what gender identity is and trying to define it is bad”, so he basically disqualifies himself from even talking about it. “nobody’s allowed to even talk about something I don’t understand” isn’t something anyone should say out loud, not seriously. Of course his further words on the topic don’t make sense; his brain is broken.
Yeah, right-wingers are always saying this, and they’re a bunch of fucking liars, because of course they weren’t going to identify as girls and live that way. That’s not a serious assertion - at best, it’s some creepy adult publicly indulging in a sex fantasy about teen girls. But it is the kind of assertion someone who hasn’t actually thought about the issue would say (or accept), the kind of thing you’d disingenuously claim just to fear-monger.
Yeah, it’s such a weird self-own - if someone had hypothetically told me, when I was a teenager, “You get to go into the girl’s locker room if you want, you don’t even have to claim to be a girl,” my response would have been, “Are you crazy? I’m not going to do that. Who would do that?”* To claim, even dishonestly, otherwise, makes him look pretty awful, either admitting he was a weird sex-offender teen or that he’s now a creepy adult projecting back a fantasy about teen girls onto his teen self.
*Thinking back, if we’re being honest, my peers and I really didn’t want to be in our locker room, even.
Before the current moral panic, nearly every accusation of LGBTQIA paedophilia for ten years was preceded by a news story of an right wing evangelical protestant leader who had been caught sexually abusing children. Seriously, it seemed like it was every time, just a day or two earlier.
The current moral panic seemed to kick off around about the time when it was reported that evangelical child abuse is widespread.
And it’s specifically so focused on trans people, because a) they’ve become a lot more visible, and b) cis queer people are less and less “acceptable targets” in the public mind.
