Redesigning the rules around restrooms

The article I Think You Should Be Kind by Freddie deBoer (Substack) is the first of two about genders and biology and stuff. I read with interest and took some notes. The follow-up is linked in the second half.

“Almost all vertebrate animals exhibit some sort of sexual dimorphism, and saying so does not in any way undermine the case for trans rights. The whole argument is that physiology does not dictate gender, and acknowledging that most people with penises go through life uncomplicatedly accepting a masculine gender does nothing to undermine the felt, lived, and thus very much real gender identities of people who have penises but go through life as women.”

“The vast majority of people who are trans-identifying identify as transmen and transwomen, and not misgendering them is simple. Some people identify as non-binary or gender queer. Do I fully understand this? Not really. Do I need to? No, as I’m someone who knows how to mind his own business. Simple human respect and basic manners compels me to call these people what they would like to be called. (I cannot stress this enough: it costs you nothing to respect someone else’s gender identity.)

“Are there some people out there, particularly on social media, who have more exotic gender definitions? Sure. Do I sometimes find that stuff a little silly? I guess so. But, again, since it costs me nothing to respect their gender identity − as in, I literally don’t have to do anything at all − I’m very happy to do so. I suspect a lot of those people will probably adopt a more conventional gender identity as they age, but if they don’t, again… who cares? It’s none of my business.”

I’ve heard the argument that all of these new identities make extra work for businesses, and agencies, and forms, and such. I suppose it does, at the beginning, but a little flexibility on both sides ameliorates the situation. Forms should stop asking for gender or sex or whatever—unless it’s relevant. They should stop asking for titles—because no-one cares outside of Germany. They should even just move to “Name” and “Preferred Name” and be done with it.

But if someone with an unlisted gender identity has to fill out out a form for a little old lady who needs that item on a form filled out, they could maybe not suspect a vast conspiracy of gender reassignment and just randomly choose one of the ones available.

It’s what I’ve done with all available fields in all sorts of forms for years. I rarely give my real birthdate. I rarely give my real gender. None of it matters online, so don’t make such a big deal out of it.

“In this they are no different from people who take Ozempic or steroids or TRT to treat “fatigue.” If you’re a trans man and you want to look more like conventional ideals of masculinity, you might take hormones. Some trans men have no interest in that, so they don’t take the hormones. It’s not particularly complicated; if you’re concerned about people using medical advances to change their physical bodies, I’m afraid that ship has long since sailed. The hormones don’t make you a woman or a man, they just make your body more like the body you would like to have.”

Excellent point.

“The right to gender self-expression does not require any underlying biological reality. Even if there had never been a single intersexed person born in history, the right to define your gender identity in a way that’s consonant with your heart would remain.”

“Someone asking you to respect their pronouns is by definition not trying to eliminate any notion of sex or gender differences! No one wants you stop calling your kids boys or girls and no one wants you to stop being a man or woman. Besides, I have to live in a country where seven out of ten people believe that God sent Jesus to save us all from a hell he created himself, which doesn’t exactly make a ton of sense to me. And that set of beliefs is of course vastly more consequential than trans rights are for our society. You can live alongside people who believe things you find crazy. That’s the whole point of freedom.”

“[…] let’s say that, over time, transwomen do come to dominate in women’s sports, and at the Olympics in 2028 transwomen are on every podium, OK. Then we as a society will come together and find some equitable, just solution that respects everyone’s rights and personhood, a solution which takes as a core requirement that transwomen be treated with dignity.”

That’s a glib response from someone with no skin in the game. There is a strong focus on sports. Women fought for years to gain legitimacy, which led to the viability of female sports careers. The window is short for them. Some have invested their whole lives.

They were told that their investment was legitimate thing to do, something that society valued. There were certain parameters. Their competition was circumscribed by certain biological realities. Those realities no longer apply. They had grown used to having a chance, to knowing their rank. I think it’s silly, but it’s their lived experience. Fuck them, I guess? Or, maybe, just maybe, we think about it a bit more before just obviously offering preference to those who came later. Those who came before can hardly be expected to react generously, especially when the game is, by definition, zero-sum.

“Not once have I ever been confronted about using language that suggests a gender binary. Not once! Because aside from a class of professional busybodies, most people are normal and just want to be chill about stuff. Honestly. The number of LGBTQ people who just go about their lives, asking only for rights and respect, dwarfs the number who yell at you on TikTok. Yes, there are social justice-y annoyances and excesses in this domain, as there are with any constituencies favored by progressives now. Don’t let that distract you from the fact that almost everyone just wants to live in peace and dignity.”

And, equally, don’t let yourself (FDB) be distracted by all of the extremely loud and boorish and intolerant and hateful voices who overwhelm the more timid voices who have legitimate concerns and questions about how all of this is to work, what is expected from them, what will change for them—in a non-dismissive manner—and how they can navigate the new world. Maybe the answer is that “nothing changes for you” and maybe it’s even true.

But people are naturally sensitive to change and have become very accustomed to change meaning “something bad that makes your life tangibly worse.” We owe everyone the same generosity we show to our trans brothers and sisters, don’t we? Not everyone who’s not trans is automatically a potentially transphobic, privileged piece of shit, guilty until proven innocent. Holy shit … am I arguing that “all lives matter”? I guess they kind of do.

“I think that there is a cohort of people in our political world now who have made a fetish of counterintuitivity and who have mistaken the absurdities and petty corruption of many liberals for an affirmative argument against any liberal ideals. And that is a powerfully stupid thing to become. Let me say this as directly as I can: adopting a politics that is merely the inverse of what you take to be contemporary liberalism does not make you any less of a follower. You’re still allowing your fundamental political identity to be derived from the beliefs of other people; that you’re trying to turn those beliefs 180 degrees doesn’t make you any more independent.”

“I’m asking you to be kind to a group of people who have become a political football in a way that makes no sense whatsoever, given the scope of our actual problems.”

All humans deserve dignity and comfort. Done. We have bigger fish to fry. Namely, the real possibility that there might not be any humans left to whom we can even give comfort, if we don’t get on top of these little climate-change and nuclear-power-pissing-content problems.

“[…] if it’s indeed true that ordinary people reject these values, is it not the case that the rights of trans people are the ones that are in jeopardy, not yours? And might it occur to you that, even if you feel some sort of personal revulsion at the idea of people with penises wearing dresses and people with XX chromosomes being referred to as “he,” the dictates of personal freedom should come first? If you’re a conservative, can you not focus on the wisest conservative value of all, which is the right to be left alone?”

“I worry, for young trans people, that they’ll find transitioning to be just another of these human disappointments − things will be better, no doubt, but as we all tend to do they’ll have idealized the next stage of their lives and then may experience that sudden comedown when they realize that they’re still just humans with human problems. Certainly this happened to many gay people, of the past several generations, finally coming out and living according to the dictates of their hearts, only to be reminded that openly gay people have to pay the rent and squeeze onto the subway and be subject to all of lives little indignities. Equal rights, I’m afraid, generally lead to lives of equal disappointment. I do hope that young LGBTQ people will understand that, beyond all of the Instagram memes telling them to love themselves, there’s still just this broken world.”

“[…] it is better, far better, to be able to say that you are the gender that you feel you are, that you love the people that you say you love, that (even if a bit crass) you are down to fuck the kind of people you want to fuck. It’s easy to be cynical about the gains we’ve had in the past several decades, as I frequently am, but the reality is that in the societies which have dedicated themselves to LGBTQ rights, the ability of people to love and live in a way consonant with their hearts is one of the most significant positive changes in our collective lives, a sign of genuine societal progress.”

Amen.

RESTROOM − URINALS AND STALLS

The article What Goes On in the Public Bathrooms Where You’re From, Exactly? by Freddie deBoer (Substack) is the follow-up I mentioned above.

“I did what I usually do when it comes to this issue: I asked them what they want. Literally, what do you who oppose so-called “trans ideology” want? What do you want that trans people won’t let you have? What do you want to do, that trans people won’t let you do? This is very instructive, and I think it points to a core reality for a lot of this “gender critical” stuff: those who espouse it are mostly motivated by feelings that trans people are freakish or revolting or ungodly, but know that such arguments have little purchase in modern society, and so dress up those feelings in a lot of argumentative kabuki that doesn’t really add up.”

I usually ask, ‘what should we do, specifically, with the group that you’re railing against? What would it take for you to consider this issue to be resolved?’ Plow ‘em all into the nearest body of water? What is the endgame?’

“[…] the anti-trans contingent talks about this issue as though the very status of having sex-segregated bathrooms amounts to a protection against assault. As I said, this logic seems bizarre to me − someone determined to sexually assault a woman in a bathroom is not going to be deterred by a sign or policy saying that that person can’t be in there.”

Perfectly average and non-psychotically conversative women do too, though. And it’s not really about assault: it’s about making the decidedly uncomfortable custom of using a public restroom even more uncomfortable. I advocate for individual stalls with sinks for everyone, like many places in Switzerland. No.gaps anywhere. Civilized. Obviously this a first-world problem and this is a first-world solution, but we can dare to dream, can’t we?

Still, maybe we could take this opportunity to address how terrible public-restroom infrastructure is for everybody rather than just shuffling the deck chairs. Or I guess you could hypnotize us all into having fewer hangups about public bathrooms. It’s an uphill climb, though. We have little to nothing to do with strangers, but then we gather together into close places to expose the parts of our bodies that society has brainwashed us into thinking are our most private, and to perform some of the more noxious acts our bodies are capable of, in environs in which we’re quite poorly shielded from one another, both visually and aurally.

“My argument is that formal policies dictating sex segregations in bathrooms do nothing to actually reduce sexual assault, and can’t, and so the idea that women are losing an important protection is simply incorrect. There is no reason to believe that sex segregated bathrooms, which anyone can walk into at any time, actually protect against sexual assault”

The taboo against someone being allowed to go into the wrong bathroom is strong, though. It’s been built up over generations. People actively police it. Don’t pretend you’re stupid enough to think that a reduction in potential contact doesn’t reduce incidents. Why the hell do you think they tell women not to walk down dark streets at night? What difference does it make which street they’re on? By FDB’s argument, rapists are going to find them on any public street anyway, if they really want to. Being able to intervene when seeing a man going into the women’s bathroom makes it easier than having to wait until someone makes a move, already within the relative privacy of the bathroom.

“Let me underline that last part. There is no credible evidence that the presence of transwomen in women’s bathrooms increases the prevalence of sexual assault or any other crime.”

The “there is no credible evidence” is disingenuous. We went through this with COVID. People cited the “testing parachutes” story ad nauseum. Sometimes you have to make a decision with little to no evidence because no evidence for or against exists, because the situation is too new for any data to have been gathered. For and against are both engaging in speculation, are both asking for things to be done based on gut feelings. You either have a gut feeling that allowing biologically male people into women’s bathrooms will cause problems or you don’t. You don’t have any evidence either way (yet).

But what I’ve heard from people who are not psychotic and hateful strangers online is that women are not afraid of actual transwomen. They are instead afraid that others, riding on easier access, will cause problems. It’s debatable! Of course it’s debatable. But the fear exists. And it causes discomfort. And it leads to pushback.

I think it behooves us not to overestimate members of our own cisgender here (males) because they are capable of truly disgusting acts and many of them hold truly shocking opinions and attitudes, in their heart of hearts. Especially when drunk. While I admit that being able to prevent obvious males from entering women’s bathrooms was a crude and shitty tool to prevent assault, but I’m not as ready to round its effectiveness down to zero as FDB is.

“And if we acknowledge that sex segregated bathrooms do nothing to create an impediment to sexual assault, then the only way to seek to exclude transwomen from women’s bathrooms is to base that desire on the evidence-free claim that trans people are unusually likely to commit sex crimes.”

That’s quite a leap, but again, I think that you’re listening to all the shitty people online. That’s not at all the argument I’ve heard when talking to relatively normal, real-life people. I’ve heard that women are worried, whether that’s justified or not. Perhaps they just hate change. A lot of people hate change! Even if what they’ve gotten used to isn’t particularly good for them or others—or fair to themselves or others—they’re still going to cling to it, if only for its familiarity. The devil you know. It’s a natural instinct to not consider what harm your lifestyle is doing to others, especially when you don’t think you have it so great yourself. People are like this.

Making an argument that condemns nearly everyone isn’t very helpful (even if you’re morally in the right). What I trying to say is, is that the reason they feel this way doesn’t have to be overtly evil. There’s room to work here, I think, but you can’t just bull-in-a-china-shop accuse everyone who doesn’t already agree with you of being transphobic. Well, you can, but that almost guarantees that your movement will stay pretty exclusive. That can’t be what you want? Or maybe the tactic will work, who knows? Maybe you’re exceedingly lucky and can buck the trend. Yelling at people that they’re disappointing you doesn’t usually work. It seems to work for getting people to buy a whole new wardrobe every season of every year, so what do I know?

At any rate, women—reasonably or unreasonably doesn’t matter, ‘cause its feelings—see their collective discomfort and angst as being increased for the benefit of a handful of people—people who were born male and now jump the line of victimhood ahead of women. Even if it will never personally affect them, it sticks in their craw.

Not being careful here might mean pushing away a large group of potential allies by dismissing their concerns and calling them TERFs. Also: preventing actual physical assault is a pretty low bar. Women are concerned about all sorts of things. They’re worried about assholes pretending to be trans to get their disgusting pervy selves into women’s bathrooms. They’re worried that they won’t be able to taboo-shame them out of there anymore. They’re worried that they’ll feel less safe and they’ll also be derided by a potential attacker that they know is only pretending to be trans for being anti-trans themselves. People are shitty. FDB seem to be temporarily ignoring how such social systems can be hacked.

Just rounding up anyone with questions to TERFs is not productive, but you do you, Freddie. I personally think we should reduce contact with strangers when we’re at our most vulnerable in public. I think we should stop peeing into drinking water. But I’m a weirdo.

“I’ve never seen someone else’s penis because the way it works is, you go in, you keep your eyes trained at your feet, you pee in such a way as to minimize the chances of anyone else seeing your junk, you zip up, you wash your hands, and you walk out.”

You claim to be totally OK with it, but the way you’ve described the custom of public urination doesn’t suggest anything comfortable about the experience. You’re describing an inherently uncomfortable practice as if it’s perfectly ok to feel mortified while micturating in public—a screaming desire for privacy is hammered into a lot of us. The whole public-bathroom scene flies in the face of this.

“This is where the TERFy element attacks me, a man, for talking about women’s spaces. But of course there are many millions of cisgender women who are trans-affirming and who welcome transwomen into women’s bathrooms, and I’m sure some of them will be very willing to express the same sentiments I’m expressing.”

Here’s where I fear that FDB is discriminating based on intellect and ability to communicate. I’m hearing from him that anyone incapable of articulating their angst sufficiently eloquently and clearly for him is a TERF whose angst can be dismissed. I’m kind of surprised to see him come out this hard, but maybe I’m not getting what he’s saying. It seems like he can’t conceive of anyone having doubts without being full-on anti-trans. That’s probably being ungenerous, but he’s repeated himself several times now just in this essay, and that’s what I’m hearing in all of these formulations.

We can’t possibly suddenly only care about trans feelings and not about ciswomen’s feelings, can we? Or is anyone with the wrong misgivings an enemy who loses their right to speak on the topic because of those misgivings? Somehow, if you’re not able to prove why you feel the way you do, you get ostracized rather than helped. Unless, of course, you’re in one of the right minority groups whose completely justifiable feelings are what kicked this whole things off. Neat trick. Very progressive.

It feels just like when society gets rid of jobs for the sake of progress, when no-one cares about helping those who will be affected to learn how to live in the brave new world. This is similar: let those dozens of millions of women who’ve kind of figured out public bathrooms—let them figure out how to be enlightened on their own. If they can’t? Fuck ‘em. Backwoods hicks. I feel sometimes like FDB’s brain is still in Brooklyn. Try thinking about the part of the country that isn’t comfortable enough—doesn’t have enough free time—to spend a ton of time getting their morals straight, who don’t want change because it has historically almost always meant regress, not progress, for them.

FBD is fighting the loud idiots online here. He’s thinking of his friends in Brooklyn (I know he now lives somewhere that he almost certainly calls “upstate”, but which can still see the glow of NYC on the horizon) and he’s talking to idiots online. His comments section has a massive selection bias.

I know we started off trying to help people, but God forbid you try to help anyone who gets in the way, even slightly, even temporarily, even unwittingly. I mean helping people who are not whatever fad-minority-of-the-moment it’s popular to help. No-one got any likes online for trying to convince normal women to ease up a bit, it’ll be OK, we’ll get through this together. Trans people should be able to be just as uncomfortable in public as the rest of us. No more and no less. So maybe this is egalitarian? Distributing the extra discomfort that trans people have right now to the much-larger group that should pretty easily be able to accommodate it?

But maybe pretending like you’re asking for their help would ease the transition, I dunno. I know, I know, you shouldn’t have to beg and cajole for rights! Being on the side of justice is one thing but, man, I wonder how just a little bit of sugar in some of these arguments might not go a long way. Some people are lost causes, of course, but you shouldn’t just shitcan everyone else. You’re only making things harder for yourself.

“The question is whether we can protect the dignity and safety of trans people, the vast majority of whom simply want to live their lives, while we wait for them to do so.”

Absolutely, they should have as much dignity and comfort in public restrooms as I do, but that’s a pretty low bar. I pretty much despise public restrooms. I despise the openness of urinals, but rue the waste of water that is peeing into a toilet. You’re uncomfortable using what you think isn’t the right bathroom for you? I’m uncomfortable using the only one I can reasonably claim as my own. And discomfort is often hindering to micturition. At least you have hope for change for the better. 🤷‍♀️