Today I thought I might blog on a subject I understand nothing about. (Cries of “no change there then” echo around the internet). For the life of me, I have not been able to absorb what the controversies around transgender and non-binary actually are. I can think of no vaguely sensible reason why people ought not to be allowed to be what they wish to be. I am astonished there should be arguments about public bathrooms, and cannot understand why people cannot use whichever of these they wish to use too. There must be more to it than this, or people wouldn’t keep writing newspaper articles about it or asking POTUS. But the nature of the controversy is to me entirely mysterious.
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Well Baal you could do well for the exercise and it might bring you to get ya wallet out of your pocket and if it’s something you buy that you don’t need ten give it away to someone who does!
Ps I forgot the free car parks in their entirety might go as well.
I’m ok for exercise, ta. I do it in attractive surroundings, not a monument to waste. And wasking through a mall with your legs crossed attracts unwanted attention.
/walking. Insert another letter for a further snigger – still true.
It is men taking advantage of self declaration we are concerned about, please investigate voyeristic toilet amatuer porn sites.
As a self declared trans woman can have a fully working penis, have not taken any hormones yet, still have a beard, nice deep voice, be over 6′ tall, and this is a description of a real trans women.
how are we supposed to police this to keep men out who just want to leer at us in communial changing rooms, even worse in places where the doors are made with gap to deter drug taking etc.
If you really want something to be paranoid about in public toilets, instead of bearded men, have you considered how many bacteria and viruses are covering every single surface in such places? You really are endangering your life every time you enter one.
For example, HCV, HIV… need I go on Control Freak?
You can’t catch HCR or HIV from a toilet seat.
I know this because I’m wearing a white coat and a stethoscope so that makes me a doctor.
It is impossible to scientifically prove something doesn’t happen; you can only prove something does happen. Now how many millions of germs are on that white coat you’re wearing?
Does your hairdresser sterilise his/her scissors, combs, brushes, etc? I do hope so, because that is certainly one way of spreading HCV. Do feel free to go ask a competent gastro-enterologist.
http://www.hepctrust.org.uk/risk-factors
HTH with your education, Doctor.
I’m not wearing a white coat any more, I decided to be an airline pilot instead.
Oh dear.
“The SNP Seems To Have Ripped Off Margaret Thatcher’s Election Slogan”
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jamieross/vote-for-one#.pmr0ZkyvM
So good, he posts it twice…
Come back to Engerland, Fred.
“You know it makes sense”.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/YourCountryNeedsYou.jpg
PS
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/–FnasMyK7zY/VLBUUNzKoHI/AAAAAAAAUaw/Py0uapEOfMI/s1600/jim1.jpg
“Come back to Engerland, Fred. ”
I wouldn’t want to live in the same country as an arsehole like you.
You do know HIV can’t be spread like that don’t you?
Why should i be taking part in an unknown man’s sexual activity. There was a piece of ground non of the girls were allowed to go on as kids because of the amount of flashers who were there getting their jollies showing their dicks to girls on their way to school.
But now they are inside we are meant to stop worrying about them?
I have to object to this. Trans-people are in general very passive, either trans-men or trans-women. Of course you could in theory have a fraud, a guy in a dress, out to sexually aggress, but that is not real. I’ve never heard of an actual example. Of course not impossible, but I would have thought the vibes would be obvious from the beginning.
Wendy, trans and gender non-binary people are more likely to be attacked by cis people than the other way around. Don’t believe the scare stories and blatant misinformation that you read in Murdoch’s daily tabloids or on Fox/Sky News. Regarding the North Carolina anti-trans bathroom bill, the only threats of violence that we’ve heard so far have come from the likes of right-wing gun-wielding Rethuglican Americans like the lawyer who threatened to go hunting with a gun for trans women in women’s toilets (*Btw…had a dark-skinned Muslim said that instead of a white Christian then chances are that individual would have been arrested on suspicion of terrorism before you could say ‘homeland security’!) Similarly, a male Texas sheriff somewhat ironically named *Tracy* Murphree who describes himself as a ‘conservative republican’ threatened to beat the living daylights out of any trans girl or woman he found in the Ladies toilets. Which begs the question as to why he’d be loitering in the women’s loos in the first place! He may consider himself as infinitely more of a man than any of us in the LGBT community, and yes he is also an officer, but any man who beats up girls and women (whether trans or cis women) is definitely not a gentleman! As for gender non-binary people: I agree with Craig they should definitely receive legal recognition and full rights too. Michael Gove may hate the idea of such recognition having what he calls “far changing consequences”, but he’s a Tory and they hate change full stop (100 years’ ago he would probably have felt the same way on votes for women!) However, countries as diverse as Germany, Australia and India already recognize non-binary gender people and they haven’t gone to hell on a handcart. So, excuses, excuses for bigotry as usual, Mr Gove. York University student Maria Munir did a really brave and game-changing thing the other week when getting up in front of the President of the United States, a studio full of hundreds of people and all the viewing public watching at home by coming out as gender non-binary. Obama’s reaction to her is to be commended and he encouraged her to go on fighting for equal rights. He does have his good points even if you guys on here have a lot of issues with him (and I know you do). He’s been the best president so far on transgender rights – apart from not standing up to the US army who are treating Chelsea Manning appallingly. For goodness sake, assert yourself President Obama – you are supposed to be Commander in Chief of the US armed forces! Are you as scared of the wrath of the generals as some puppet civilian president in an old skool Latin American country, for instance? But yeah, equal rights and opportunities for trans* and gender non-binary people: bring it on!
Oops used the word “her” instead of “hir” – sorry, totally guilty of gender brainwashing I am! Hopefully, one day gender non-binary pronouns will be so commonplace that even dull people like me won’t make such stupid mistakes.
It’s because control-freaks (of all kinds) like to place other people in little boxes, such as “male” and “female” (but there are many other boxes they love putting people in as well) and when an individual appears to (in their mind) jump from one box to another, it enrages the control-freak because that reveals he/she is not really in control. That’s when they write to POTUS because POTUS is one of the chief control-freaks, otherwise he wouldn’t want the job.
Couldn’t agree more, Craig. I myself have been treated as a fat, balding middle-aged man of no attraction whatsoever by an unkind world when I know in my heart I am actually an outstandingly handsome, charismatic and visionary person of unique worth. Why can’t people just accept me as such?
Nuada
Here’s one for you and all your nakedness!
Love..
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9ogQ0uge06o
All this palavra about toilets, etc., just shows what assorted shit holes we live in.
I wouldn’t like to be caught on my mobile camera in the loo. It shows my pate as bald, where I can actually feel hair. Can anyone airbrush it in for me in this virtual age ?
trowbridge
I await your next educated observation!
Thanks, Jay.
I suggest you look at the DM article about Ted Cruz’s father Rafael allegedly handing out pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans with Lee Harvey Oswald.
Of course, Ted denies the man is his father, but it looks only too true to me, especially since both men are wearing the Agency’s civilian clothes while on duty.
Of course, the most damaging conclusion one can conclude from the photos is that the CIA was setting up LHO as the fall guy for the JFK assassination.
This is the worst kind of shit we have to endure.
If I am wanting a meeting of minds, then I am uninterested in the body that houses the mind, and I seek out the company of similar minded people. Happy to debate with whomever.
I don’t use a public toilet for a meeting of minds. Obviously.
If I have to be naked in a communal changing room, deal with menstruation in a public loo, have a gynaecological exam or otherwise deal with personal bodily functions, and by necessity these might occasionally need to be in the presence of others, I choose to be exclusively in the the presence of women who share the same body as me. In those circumstances, I don’t care what orientation or identity someone possesses as it is entirely irrelevant. My personal boundaries draw the line at sharing intimate public space with people who have male bodies and who imagine – wrongly – that we share a ladybrain in common and thus THAT should be my criteria for handling my childbirth-related incontinence in their presence.
“cannot understand why people cannot use whichever of these they wish to use too”
Biological women who wish to perform biological functions in the presence of people who share their biology are finding that they no longer have that option.
I care exclusively about biology and deny any ‘gender identity’. I want to share bathrooms with people who have my biology.
Transfolk care exclusively about gender identity and deny the importance of biology. They want to share with people who believe in and share their gender identity.
There is no common ground. At all. No similarity of body nor of mindset between a MTT person and a biological woman who thinks as I do. In what way do we belong in the same intimate space? Different body, different mind – not a common group.
I would applaud the creation of a third space for people who care about brain gender identity – open to all who actually believe they have one regardless of biological sex. The gender identity loo.
And we also should provide for women who think ‘brain gender’ to be a pile of steaming sexist irrelevance to continue to share space with other women for whom biology matters.
Unless of course this whole issue has never really been about allowing all people the choice to share space with ‘people like me’, and has in fact been a thinly veiled attempt to force women to shut up and abandon their own needs to validate someone else’s identity.
good reply Hairy
So what do you say about women who want to become men? Doesn’t match your argument; Nobody cares.
Isn’t this of a piece with your complaints about the instututionalised anxiety about terrorism? Mostly, none of us will ever encounter it, it’s a hobgoblin. I’m 67, and I have been around the sexual block (happy memories) but I have met (that I’m aware of) only one transgendered person. He/she/it was a warehouse supervisor, and didn’t seem at all dangerous, apart from her habit of nipping a cigarette and putting it behind her ear (I was thinking of the flammability of things that women put on their hair).
Waddya mean you’ve been round the block?
67? That’s young – you should still be an active cocksman at that age.
Come to Tel Aviv…!
The anxiety is not that women might meet a transwoman; the anxiety is that women might encounter male sexual harassment and violence. Women experience male sexual harassment and violence all the time and with documented cases of men exploiting self identification to perpetrate harassment and violence against women it is reasonable for them to feel anxious and not akin to fear of terrorism, which happens extremely rarely and very few people have experienced.
I actually prefer open-air or pay toilets myself when I can’t use my own facilities, as I don’t like sharing my elimination space with anyone, especially those of my own gender, no matter what their sexual preference is.
Can see that you were never drafted, Ben Gonad.
Howddya get out of it? Canada?
When very young, a friend and his family emigrated to Australia on the ten pound ticket deal.
The lad re-appeared about 6 months later.I naturally asked about is experiences in Australia.
“It was terrible-we had to live in a wooden hut (it was some kind of interim barracks for newly arrived, would be ozzers) and the toilets didn’t have doors, so we had to came back”.
Habby, just more shit from you.
I am not Ben Gonad, I let myself be drafted during the Korean War, and I had the biggest knock up with CIC authorities when they ordered us not to smoke in the latrine, and I forget, being required to write 500 times why I wouldn’t do so in future which I resolved by writing all kinds of possibilities about why I might still do so, and almost got kicked out of the rotten Corps, you know the guys who took Nazi scum to SA.
I did help a few of my students go to Canada during the Vietnam War, though.
One just cannot avoid all kinds of shit these days, but you should consider that there are more Americans here than just Ben, who I certainly don’t like being confused for.
Gender whether self determined or otherwise is not the issue. It’s a matter of manners and civility.
The signs outside public conveniences make it clear they are for the exclusive use of Ladies and Gentlemen. Anyone who falls short in that regard should therefore properly look elsewhere for their relief and convenience. I have seen such places and at one time they had the terms “Men” and “Women” stencilled on or above the doors. Being for the less refined sort, perhaps those who also struggle with their letters, they are now vulgarly advertised by pictograms and line drawings. I’m sure that before long this current fashion for stylised representations of man and woman will be replaced by hieroglyphs depicting water closets and urinals
Here in France, women are in mens’ toilets all the time. Lack of women’s cubicles, no doubt. Should I shoo them out, to preserve male purity?
They say that the difference is between Catholicism and Protestantism. The Prods are obsessed about maintaining the sexual separation, but the Catos don’t care.
My opinion is that you should use the toilet which corresponds to your appearance. The cubicles are the same. In the rare case where an aggressive male puts on a dress, it will be immediately obvious, much as if he hadn’t bothered to dress up.
The pictograms are a great help if you’re a foreigner who doesn’t speak the language.
I once went into a ladies’ room in Turkey by mistake because I didn’t understand the local code; turns out ladies’ rooms in Turkey can be identified by a colorful piece of cloth that is posted above the entrance.
So you wouldn’t mind unisex toilets where men can loiter inside, waiting for women to come in? You cannot imagine the potential for problems? Would you allow urinals to remain so guys can swing their dicks around in view of women washing their hands or would they be removed, thereby requiring more toilet cubicles to be constructed? I’m sure women will love the idea.
You’re just an old sexist. The toilet next to my office is unisex. You just disappear into the nearest cubicle, if it’s looking uncomfortable.
Don’t worry about him. These repressed far right-wingers are obsessed about toilets and gay sex, for reasons best known to themselves.
Why am I not surprised that you’re ok with public toilets being used as cruising stops for casual sex between strangers, Glenn? You’re not a truckie are you?
There you go again, talking about toilets and gay sex in the same sentence at the least opportunity – just can’t help yourself, can you? 😉
“You’re not a truckie are you?”
Sorry (well, not really) to disappoint. Why, were you cruisin’ for a piece of ass?
Is it a public toilet, moron?
Why don’t you stop obsessing about toilets?
I’ll hazzard a theory. People of your age (and possibly your inclination, given all the smoke you’re blowing) went cruising in public toilets. You don’t understand that it’s different now – they aren’t pick-up spots. It doesn’t have to be all underground and sordid, everything is legal and contact making is very easy.
But that notion that it’s all about toilets, and furtive encounters there, has somehow stuck in your collective psyche. Don’t worry, such an aberration is ageing out. I doubt if anyone under 60 even considers a public toilet a pick-up spot anymore.
Paul Joseph Watson wades in to the discussion – https://youtu.be/2dBpR36VFQM
Regarding the law: women currently have sex-based rights to safety and privacy. This is because of biology. These are hard-won rights which help towards women’s equality: many women in the world are still fighting for these rights because it is understood that women cannot play their full part in public life without them. You have to understand that it is nothing to do with an individual woman’s feelings, but a structural inequality based on rates of male sexual violence (98% of all sexual violence is committed by males). It is also based on biology in the sense that women need different facilities to men physically and need privacy because of having periods (which, for example, can sometimes necessitate the using of sinks to wash soiled knickers). Men will not feel threatened by a transman in their space in the same way that women can feel threatened by a transwoman who presents as masculine. Many women are survivors of male sexual violence, and many transwomen are still quite masculine. The question is, should women’s sex-based rights be set backwards by transpeople’s gender-based rights? Because you can’t have both. So there must be an answer which will keep everyone safe: the trans population is tiny and so there could be a change to the status of disabled toilets for example. I doubt whether the trans lobby would be happy with the implications of this, but it serves as an example of how we could be thinking around the issue, instead of calling worried women bigots and transphobes, which doesn’t help anyone.
Transwomen are very passive, it’s not a problem. You’re putting up a non-existent danger. The only real danger is that they can be quite neurotic, as you would imagine with people with identity problems.
What was Tara Hudson convicted for again?
You precisely demonstrate my point. The crime was “drunkenly head-butting”.
And that is passive, is it?
How can the human race hope to survive if it cannot sort out its basic problems of keeping alive, and surviving as a species!
The dumb dinosaurs survived for hundreds of millions of years, so what does that say about us?
Are you trolling, or actually the complete and utter bigoted chump that your posts suggest?
So you find no problem in the ‘First Lady’ being a man?
Idiot.
The PTB have been engaged in promoting the break-up of traditional morality, and the nuclear family.
They are trying to establish the notion that the State really owns their children, and are unfortunately succeeding in removing children and even new-born babies from mothers and families on the most specious of excuses.
That was one of the points made by Aaron Russo in his video ‘Mad As Hell’, which Nick Rockefeller said or implied led him to contact Russo. Rockefeller tried to recruit Russo into the CFR while Russo was campaigning to be Governor of Nevada; see: ‘Aaron Russo’s MAD AS HELL’ (FULL) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgaoS6AUCzk (it would also be extremely informative to watch Aaron Russo’s ‘Final Interview’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3NA17CCboA ).
The PTB could plainly see Russo had seen through their scams, and was seriously campaigning against them (see also his video ‘America : Freedom to Fascism’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6ayb02bwp0 ), but rather than eliminating him, they decided to recruit him. They failed, BIG TIME.
Among the movements the PTB openly or covertly supported Women’s Lib, the drug culture, sexual deviation, ‘Flower Power’ and ‘Free Love’, for their own purposes of breaking up families and encouraging moral degeneracy.
Aaron Russo was one hell of a guy (though he does clown about a bit in ‘Mad As Hell’)!