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The most plausible way I can see Democrats shifting on trans issues is to shift focus to encouraging and/or mandating individualized unisex bathrooms. It resolves the most salient of the objections (biological men creeping on women), while still enabling trans people and their preferences (not have to be treated as someone of their birth sex), and more importantly appears like they're supporting trans people, while offloading all of the burden onto private enterprises who now have to pay for enough individualized bathrooms to accommodate everyone. They can even spin this as "all inclusive", because only having women's and men's bathrooms still buys into the gender binary, while unisex bathrooms support everyone of all genders and fluidities and whatever.
Agreed. The only practical benefit of sex-segregated toilets is that women don't have to walk past an operative urinal on the way to their stall.
Not quite. There's still the broader bathroom that itself contains the stalls. Men and women both are going to feel less comfortable pooping in a stall next to someone of the opposite sex, and coming out and washing their hands, or doing makeup, or whatever. Not that it's super comfortable to do that among people of the same sex, but its worse if they're opposite. All of the unisex bathrooms I've encountered are real life are defined that way because it's like a normal house bathroom: one room with one toilet, one sink, and a lock on the door. From that perspective then, the benefit of sex-segregated toilets is the economy of scale because you can build 5 stalls in a large room much more cheaply than you can build 5 separate rooms.
I didn’t realize I’d typical minded others in this way until now. I feel no compunctions about shitting next to someone. The only thing that might give me pause is if I’m shitting loudly next to acquaintances, but it’s okay if they don’t know I’m the one in the stall.
The fact that some people feel discomfort from pooping in a public space certainly changes the political implications of such a move.
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