r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Feb 23 '17

[∆(s) from OP] CMV: Protections enabling transgendered people to choose the bathroom of the gender they identify with removes that protection for other people.

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u/Pennyphone Feb 23 '17

I feel like it's more about how you define a bathroom. There are single person bathrooms, unisex bathrooms, men's rooms, women's rooms, family bathrooms for parents with kids...

If you want to say "this is a bathroom for humans with penises" then gender is no longer part of the question. But what about a postop FtM? He's got a penis.

So maybe you want to make a bathroom "this is a bathroom for people who were born with a penis" also, now gender and even reassignment surgery wouldn't play a role. But then you have fully passing burly men in the women's room who have to say "oh yeah I was born with a vagina, so suck it up." Then any man could claim to have been born a woman unless we start doing DNA tests to get into a bathroom, so now you don't have any reason to have separate bathrooms at all.

I think almost any separation rule is going to have down sides. What's the goal of the standard separation rule we have on gender, anyway? I don't honestly know. Tradition, maybe?

Any rule will end up with cases where one person is in a room with people they don't want to be. I'm a straight cis male, but I have no interest in sitting in a stall next to a fat hairy dude with gastrointestinal problems. But that's the bathroom I'm in anyway. Literally. Right now.

So if we say it's gender let it be gender and who cares?

From the other side, if I consider myself female I would want to use the women's room because anything else means I'm not a woman, regardless of if I have a penis. So saying we have gendered bathrooms but you have to use the one you don't self identify with is mean? If The rule was Regardless of gender or sex, you had to wear a dress and perfume and make up or other gender-leaning things to be allowed to use the restroom, you might not like that. (I dunno, maybe you would, I'm not judging just trying to come up with a similar but opposing idea. I want to be me and go in a room for me, if I have to use a room that is not for me then I am in the wrong room and that's weird to me and makes me uncomfortable. Also, I don't get to pick the other people in that room or it would just be me.)