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How about Peeping Toms? Do they happen? Bathrooms seem like a great place to be a Peeping Tom.
I'm sure there's not very many pervs out there who get off on hearing women pee, but it's definitely not zero -- can you understand how women might not like wondering whether there's a perv jerking off in the next stall while they are trying to pee?
Do you think the sort of women who is concerned about males in the woman's room would prefer Buck Angel, or the "IT'S MA'AM' guy? Is Buck Angel prohibited from going into gender neutral bathrooms? Not sure how Buck Angel is relevant here, but under the trans-acceptance framework it seems like women are expected to put up with both Buck Angel and "IT'S MA'AM'.
First of all, your mask is slipping - your original claim was that you were worried about cis men pretending to be trans in order to access women's spaces, not about trans people themselves. But you have immediately moved your rhetoric to 'women putting up with trans people', revealing pretty much exactly what I was talking about in relation to the 'scrutiny' thing.
Second of all, I'm not sure if you're confused or what... under the trans-inclusive framework, Buck Angel and people who look like him go to the men's room. He only goes to the women's room if forced to do so by bathroom bills. That's the point.
So there are police outside bathrooms stopping people and saying "Yes, I know you look like a man but you have to use the women's room"? Or checking birth certificates? Apparently there was some such allegation, but I have to say - this is so clearly "used to be a guy" that I can see why they were allegedly asked for ID. There's an unfortunate photo doing the rounds but, um, yeah. Real Woman versus Cis Woman imagery.
This is the kind of "so stunning, brave, courageous!" puffery that annoys me. (Is the person portraying the trans girl trans or cis, because I have my doubts). Mainly I'm live-and-let-live about this; so long as you don't look too much out of place or behave weirdly, go right ahead (and hell, if you're cis male or cis female and the relevant bathroom is too crowded and you really need to go, then use the other one in an emergency).
But if you're having a cute little 'all girls together' online discussion about "so what is the etiquette about unsolicited offering tampons to another woman in the woman's bathroom" or similar, that's when you've crossed over from "I just need to use the bathroom" into "this is getting into fetish territory".
Alright, lets clarify here.
I'm saying these laws would oblige male-looking people like Buck Angel to use the women's restroom, which would normalize male-looking people going into women's restrooms, teh precise thing people are claiming these laws are intended to fix.
It sounds like you're saying this won't be a problem because you expect male-looking trans men to break the law and go to the mens room anyway. Please stop me if I am misinterpreting or misrepresenting you.
Are you saying that you want and expect the laws as written to be broken routinely, would be upset if most people the laws applied to were not breaking them most of the time, but still want the laws passed?
Because like, yeah, it's true that marijuana laws are broken all the time, and police only bother to enforce them when they want to punish some citizen for a different reason. That doesn't make them good laws, that makes them terrible affronts to our civil liberties and freedom.
Laws should not work like that.
I am reassured to know that trans people are so law-abiding and biddable, even if they really do look enough like a dude to be cast in a gay porn flick, they will obediently follow "I must use my natal sex bathroom". No, no, I realise there is no visual way to tell I am not a guy, but it's the law! Even if there are no police to enforce it, I will stick by the letter of it and not ignore it!
This line of argument is so stupid, are you surprised I'm not convinced by it? The people who would make a fuss are the likes of Sam Brinton, who get their kicks out of stealing women's luggage. Buck Angel may or may not be known to the wider public who don't view porn, and so they may or may not recognise "Hey, that's Buck Angel, trans man, trying to use the men's room! I am going to march up to him and demand he use his natal sex bathroom instead!" Also, whatever my views on Buck Angel, I'm pretty sure they're not interested in creeping on women, unlike the 'I'm trans, how dare you stop me!' cases. Oh but I forgot: if someone does that, well they were never really trans in the first place, they are No True Scotsman.
Yeah, progressive activists are so well-known for sticking to the laws and never opening their mouths. I think bathroom laws are not helpful, but I think laws enforcing "yes, this guy can use the same bathroom as women and children" aren't any better than "yes, this guy has to use the ladies' room".
My view is that nobody will know you are trans or not unless you are so obviously not the gender you are presenting as, and that's not a problem that can be solved by passing laws about gender-neutral bathrooms or 'anyone who says they're trans can use that bathroom', because there is also the problem right now of the trans activism push around 'nobody owes you feminism' or there is no one way of being female or the rest of it, which means a guy can stick on a wig and a skirt, claim to be trans, go into the women's room, and nobody can do anything about it because that's transphobia.
I would be way more sympathetic to "that will never happen" (as were the debates I got into way back when, before all the push for legal laws) except the 'slippery slope fallacy never happen cases' did happen, and the trans activism set had nothing to say about that except, in the extremes, "well that person wasn't really trans anyway". How can you be 'really' trans when there is no way to be 'really' trans that is not decried as medical gatekeeping, transphobia, enforcing the gender binary, and the rest of the political sloganeering?
Ok, so you're among the group that wants to pass a law they actively want people to break.
I thought that was an insane position no one would ever take, especially given how may libertarian-oriented sentiments we normally get when things like speech or guns or etc. come up.
But I guess that's a really common position, we want to pass a law that we want most trans people to break most of the time.
Seems insane to me. I will never agree to that being a good idea, even if I agreed with the rest of the logic behind the motivation.
Sweet Baby Ray, how much clearer can I get? I think bathroom laws are stupid, but I also think that trans people crying about bathroom laws is 90% political activity of the same sort that saw "we just only want the right to LUV, TWU WUV" get same-sex marriage passed in my country (and then prominent gays, like our current Taoiseach, are happy to appear in public with their partner but are conspicuously not getting married, doesn't he know he won't have visitation rights! if he's not married! he'll have to die alone and miserable! all the campaigning told me that and surely they didn't exaggerate just to get their way!).
The 10% of people who can't pass convincingly and so need legal bulwark about "yeah I know I look like a guy, but please let me into the women's bathroom" I'm sorry for, but there's nothing that can be done to help them until the creepers and predators are disavowed by the same campaigners who are out there convincing the world that "trans people are being literally lynched in bathrooms by the bigots right now".
If it's a stupid law, break it! Where the fuck did this worship of the literal letter of legislation come from, from people happy to go out screaming in the streets on protests about this, that and the other? I don't expect Buck Angel to go "well gee, I guess I'll have to use the ladies' room" in reality, no matter what the law says, any more than I expect them to stop being a sex worker, no matter what the law says. It'd be freakin' lovely if the trans lot were so slavishly ruled by "if the law says this, then I can't do it", because that would save the rest of us an ocean of trouble, but I don't see that happening in the world.
And if you really want my views? Trans women are not real women, trans men are not real men, biology is real, trans issues are mental health issues, but so long as you are not a screaming lunatic about it then hey, I can call you Susie and use she/her and not blink too hard if you show up in the ladies' loo. But I'm never going to believe that trans is the same as cis, and I'm not going to be brow-beaten or bullied into "if you don't think this, then it doesn't matter how you act, you are literally murdering trans people".
EDIT: Good God, I can't believe I'm having to invoke St. Thomas Aquinas here on "oooh, you want us to bweak the law!!!!" logic-chopping, but here goes: a bad law may be broken in good conscience. If the suffering trans martyr who will just die if he can't get his big hairy legs into the girlies' potty genuinely thinks the law is wrong and unjust, then he can break it:
The last word on this damn topic, and I wish the bloody bathroom law makers would think about this:
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Whenever I see a photo of "Charlotte" I can't stop laughing, because the motivation for her "transition" is so transparent. What a sick indictment of woke culture that you can have people calling for your head over some meaningless "infraction", and all you have to do is play Transition Card (+10 to cancellation resistance) and, literally overnight, you're back in the Twitterati's good graces.
Wow, 2014 was a different time.
Still—less booing of the outgroup, please.
You're right, I was in a bit of a goofy mood at the time of writing, I could've worded that better.
It really is crazy comparing 2014 Discourse (TM) to current.
I can’t imagine Scott wading into that kind of beef today. Not because he’s unwilling, but it’s so…earnest. I’m struggling to put it to words.
Maybe everyone learned something from the last ten years. Now the battle lines are drawn, the witty rejoinders are prepared, and the epistemic helplessness is learned. There’s no alpha in an earnest chat about the philosophical grounding of tribal affiliation. Which isn’t to say there’s no value—just that it’s harder to stand out in a field of cynics. No one leaves home without his umbrella and his casual disdain for Twitter randos. Delivered, of course, on the same site.
I dunno. Surely I’m overthinking the issue.
I think it is indeed because Scott is unwilling. Simply put, he doesn't write like he used to back then. Some of that is probably because he figures he said everything useful he can say. Some of that is certainly because he doesn't want to deal with the social blowback from writing posts like that. There may well be other reasons as well. But at the end of the day, Scott has long since made the switch from "insightful criticism of social justice" to "anodyne pieces about medicine and science", and the Clymer piece doesn't fit into his current MO.
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Multiheaded:
What's changed, other than the people resisting this behavior being even more marginalized than they were in 2014? The tactics haven't changed, the vain last stands on hills of civility haven't changed, and nor have the fellow travelers telling the defenders to surrender yet another hill "because it's just the nice thing to do."
Nothing substantive has changed. It's still late for talking and early for fighting, and in this place, the latter is still off-limits.
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To be fair, Scott was an outlier at that time. I didn't and don't have his way with words, but I'd had similar drive to overtures of earnest engagement and disarmament, and then had them burned out of me in around 2010-2011. I hope that there's something more or deeper, and in a way I'm reminded of Chuubo's, where :
But there's reasons I can't post on rpgnet, anymore, and reasons why they never responded to my appeal, and why I only bothered to send one because one of their moderators demanded it. There's a reason I don't have discussions like those here, on a wide variety of other locations and nyms that are tots open to serious debates, fingers crossed. There's a reason Scott knows that there are things that put his practice or license or career at risk, or whatever is left of his friendships.
There's a reason Moran finished her otherwise-excellent piece about the horrors of a Bleak worldview with
Jenna Moran remains a design treasure.
Ah. This puts a few things into focus about her other projects.
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Dunno who you think I am, but this is the first comment I've made in the thread and I don't do masks.
I'm not worried about any of it -- I'm a man and don't care who goes in the men's room. I do know IRL women who are worried about who goes in the women's room though.
My guess would be that a given Peeping Tom or piss perv is extremely likely to be a non-transgender heterosexual man? Who (in the case of the Peeping Toms) are known to go through schemes much more elaborate than "walk into a washroom and claim to be trans if challenged" in the course of their fetish.
You're the one bringing up Buck Angel -- it's a different failure mode, but still pretty valid. Not all women want to 'put up with' sharing a bathroom with trans males, is this under dispute?
If the bathrooms are gender neutral, Buck Angel can go in whichever one he chooses, no?
You were also the one who brought up the idea that Buck being in the ladies room would be some sort of problem under the traditional bathroom management policies -- or that's how I took "If your worry is that seeing male-looking people go into the women's room will make life more dangerous for women" anyways. If not, what did you mean by that?
So it's totally fine if you have a different position than the one I was responding to, it just means that my comment naturally wouldn't be a coherent reply to your position since it was responding to a different one.
The position I was responding to, as I understand OP to hold it, was: If trans women are allowed in women's restrooms, that will normalize malelooking people being in women's restrooms. That will make is easier for cis men who are perverts to fake their way into women's restrooms for nefarious purposes.
My point in bringing up Buck Angel is, if that is your model of the danger at play here, then Buck Angel using the women's room is an equally large problem. That would also normalize male-looking people going into the women's restroom in exactly the same way.
So, if your position is that the problem is male-looking people in women's restroom, bathroom bills do not actually solve that problem. They probably make it worse.
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