[Discussion] Trans Issues and Rights

This thread is for the discussion of current events relating to trans rights, for discussion of the lives of trans people and difficulties they face, and for basic questions about the lives and experiences of trans people. (If basic questions become dominant we'll look at making a Q&A thread at that time.)

I demand to have the same rights to access public facilities as any other woman does, trans or cis. I demand this because I am a woman. If you want to call me a bigot for refusing to internalize the narrative that the manner of my existence makes me a pervert and I should be careful never to impose in even the smallest way on the "real" people, knock yourself out. I promise I couldn't care less how many times you say it.

As to my 'zero tolerance' of your discomfort:

I said, verbatim. "That's fine, it's not a sufficient reason to bar me from a woman's locker room."

I recognize your discomfort. Your discomfort is not good enough to segregate a woman out of women's spaces because of an accident of anatomy.

I do tolerate your wish. I happen to refuse to submit to being stigmatized because of it.

When someone defines "their way" as deserving the same rights as everyone else, I don't think that makes them a bigot for demanding they get it.

SixteenBlue wrote:

When someone defines "their way" as deserving the same rights as everyone else, I don't think that makes them a bigot for demanding they get it.

Reminds me that not that long ago in yon olden P&C days some of our gay members were being called the real bigots for demanding they be able to get married.

SixteenBlue wrote:

When someone defines "their way" as deserving the same rights as everyone else, I don't think that makes them a bigot for demanding they get it.

What about my young daughter's right to not be subjected to seeing a penis in a woman's locker room? She's showing intolerance for my opinion and that is the definition of a bigot. She's said she doesn't care and it's not her problem.

She has a right to use a public locker room. The one that matches the anatomy. That's how it works today. If you want to change it, you can't just come in and demand it and say to hell with whatever other people's opinions are.

I've been tolerant. Go back and read the other thread about my stances on the bathroom issue as a whole, on marriage, and on health care (I think I included that). There is a single point where I said it gets tricky, and you want to call me intolerant because of one small piece of the overall issue. I never said you can't use a public locker room. I have an issue with which one and the potential for male to use the trans excuse as cover for going into women's locker rooms. Instead of calling me bigot and transphobic maybe you should have been tolerant even a little bit of MY opinions and discussed possible solutions.

Freyja wrote:
SixteenBlue wrote:

When someone defines "their way" as deserving the same rights as everyone else, I don't think that makes them a bigot for demanding they get it.

Reminds me that not that long ago in yon olden P&C days some of our gay members were being called the real bigots for demanding they be able to get married.

I'm really impressed with your ability to continue to engage and stay rational.

Perhaps you missed the few posts upthread where I expanded on what the other options were for trans women instead of using women's locker rooms, because I did do that.

I have an issue with which one and the potential for male to use the trans excuse as cover for going into women's locker rooms.

I have two questions.

1) Which locker room do you propose I use? Keep in mind what I've already outlined as the consequences of me using the men's.

2) Should I be punished for the hypothetical bad acts of a cis person?

e: At the risk of giving the impression that I think the 'men will pretend to be trans to get into women's rooms' is anything but a contrived boogeyman intended to rhetorically trap trans women into submitting to be mistreated, I don't give it credence or think it has any basis in reality. But it's been unfortunately successfully spread and taken hold and I think asking if it's fair to penalize me because a cis man might do something bad illustrates the point I'm trying to make.

MathGoddess wrote:
Freyja wrote:
SixteenBlue wrote:

When someone defines "their way" as deserving the same rights as everyone else, I don't think that makes them a bigot for demanding they get it.

Reminds me that not that long ago in yon olden P&C days some of our gay members were being called the real bigots for demanding they be able to get married.

I'm really impressed with your ability to continue to engage and stay rational.

Thank you. I run into this sort of thing every day of my life. One develops coping mechanisms after a while.

Freyja wrote:

1) Which locker room do you propose I use? Keep in mind what I've already outlined as the consequences of me using the men's.

2) Should I be punished for the hypothetical bad acts of a cis person?

1. If you have anatomy of both sexes, then whichever locker room you use, you should cover up the parts from the opposite sex of the locker room you are in. Unless you were born with both, you put yourself into that position by getting surgery to get breasts. If you put yourself in that stage, don't complain about having to go out of your way to accommodate others until you have completely transitioned. I don't think that is asking too much or violating your rights.

2. No. I'm not trying to punish you. Whatever your stage, I'm not keeping you from using a locker room. I'm just asking you take steps to prevent my daughter from seeing your penis if you are in the women's one.

Freyja wrote:

Thank you. I run into this sort of thing every day of my life. One develops coping mechanisms after a while.

Freyja, I want to just give you a big hug and cry. This just makes me so sad.

MattDaddy wrote:

What about my young daughter's right to not be subjected to seeing a penis in a woman's locker room?

Not to downplay how this may make your daughter feel, but isn't this a teachable moment for her? Is she not learning that identity and the genitalia you have aren't necessarily the same?

skylarhawk wrote:

Not to downplay how this may make your daughter feel, but isn't this a teachable moment for her? Is she not learning that identity and the genitalia you have aren't necessarily the same?

Sorry, but no. If I am to be expected to respect the opinions and feelings of others, I expect others to respect mine. For my family, the locker room of the YMCA is not the place for that.

MattDaddy wrote:

1. If you have anatomy of both sexes, then whichever locker room you use, you should cover up the parts from the opposite sex of the locker room you are in. Unless you were born with both, you put yourself into that position by getting surgery to get breasts. If you put yourself in that stage, don't complain about having to go out of your way to accommodate others until you have completely transitioned. I don't think that is asking too much or violating your rights.

First, I haven't had any surgery. I have breasts because I grew them once I started taking hormone replacement therapy. Estrogen does that.

Second, there is no one thing that means a trans person has 'completely transitioned'. I could decide I want to do nothing else regarding my body right now and for me, I've 'completely transitioned.'

Third, perhaps it's easier for strangers to not carry around a bizarre obsession with my body and let me be. It's not reasonable for me not to be able to use a locker room in the same way everyone else does. So yes, subjecting me to extra restrictions on my use of a public space that everyone else gets to use because I am trans is asking too much, and it is violating my rights.

Fourth, have you seen what estrogen does to a penis? Trust me, I am not waving this thing around even if I wanted to, which I don't.

2. No. I'm not trying to punish you. Whatever your stage, I'm not keeping you from using a locker room. I'm just asking you take steps to prevent my daughter from seeing your penis if you are in the women's one.

Like I said, I take the same steps that every other woman in the locker room does. No more and no less. I don't think it's fair to expect me to be more restricted than any other woman.

e: I played football in high school and farted around with intramural basketball in college. I don't know about y'all but in my experience with locker rooms, we did everything possible to avoid looking at each other's genitals.

It seems like there's this notion that teenage girls spend time staring at each other's crotch which, while I have no direct experience being in girl's locker rooms at that age, doesn't really pass the sniff test and looks a lot to me like cis men projecting their fears onto trans women and using that as an excuse to marginalize us. I'm not surprised, but I also decline to be a vessel for men's insecurities about their ownership of women's bodies.

Calls to crisis and suicide prevention hotlines surge post-election

In particular LBGTQ helplines and the especially the Trans Lifeline.

I just want to take a moment to put forth some solidarity to our quiltbag and, given the thread, in particular trans* goodjers. I, and I'm sure others here are by your side, and will remain so as long as able. While the number of haters who suddenly feel their views have been socially acceptable grows the rest of us are here wanting to help keep you safe and secure and whole in every way we can. There may not be much we can do in practice, but I will damn well try.

Looks like 2016 is the deadliest year for trans people on record.

2014 and 2015 were also the deadliest years for trans people on record at the time.

Article

Freyja wrote:

I played football in high school and farted around with intramural basketball in college. I don't know about y'all but in my experience with locker rooms, we did everything possible to avoid looking at each other's genitals. It seems like there's this notion that teenage girls spend time staring at each other's crotch which, while I have no direct experience being in girl's locker rooms at that age, doesn't really pass the sniff test.

Delurk

I asked my wife about this.

She said that, in her 30ish years in and around locker rooms (she coaches highschool cheerleading) and in her experience (and this is not me trying to say this is universal) the only place that women walk around nekkid in a locker room is (a) porn; and (b) a Japanese women-only spa (just outside of Tokyo) where *all* of the guests walk around naked. Beyond that, they tend to, for the crotch, wrap a towel around their chest that goes down to mid-thighish and pull their panties up, while still covered. Or, if there is a changing stall (which many change rooms have now) there is a lineup to use that.

Relurk

I continue to be impressed by your patience, Freyja.

[Edit: paragraph which came across as moderatorial removed at mod request]

(I also am a little weirded out to learn how much attention some folks apparently pay to other people's genitalia in locker rooms, but will gladly deal with far greater personal discomfort if it allows people to have equal access to facilities whose use I take for granted).

Freyja wrote:

First, I haven't had any surgery. I have breasts because I grew them once I started taking hormone replacement therapy. Estrogen does that.

Second, there is no one thing that means a trans person has 'completely transitioned'. I could decide I want to do nothing else regarding my body right now and for me, I've 'completely transitioned.'

Third, perhaps it's easier for strangers to not carry around a bizarre obsession with my body and let me be. It's not reasonable for me not to be able to use a locker room in the same way everyone else does. So yes, subjecting me to extra restrictions on my use of a public space that everyone else gets to use because I am trans is asking too much, and it is violating my rights.

Like I said, I take the same steps that every other woman in the locker room does. No more and no less. I don't think it's fair to expect me to be more restricted than any other woman.

1. It's wasn't surgery, but it was something you chose to do that resulted in having breasts. I feel that because you chose to put your body into that state, you do bear the responsibility to adjust your locker room actions as to not expose children to the opposite sex "parts".

2. That would be your choice, but the second part of 1. applies here as well.

3. You can't force people to automatically become normalized to see breasts and a penis on the same person. It sucks that people may stare and be taken aback. I don't think it's unreasonable for you to slightly adjust your behavior (i.e. covering up certain parts). I do not feel that is violating your rights. I do not feel that you should allowed to walk around with male and female parts exposed to minors, it violates their rights and the rights of their parents.

I know we will probably never agree on this, but that is how I feel. As much as you argue against it, I will argue for it. I will leave it at that, and hopefully we can at least come to an agreement on the other pieces of this issue (bathrooms, marriage, healthcare, etc.). If Trump does go against the things we agree on, I will not vote for him again in 2020.

I hope that is enough to come to a truce on the bickering about this between us.

(I also am a little weirded out to learn how much attention some folks apparently pay to other people's genitalia in locker rooms, but will gladly deal with far greater personal discomfort if it allows people to have equal access to facilities whose use I take for granted).

I think the reality of the situation is closer to 'Nobody pays any attention to anyone else's gentialia in locker rooms, but when someone manufactures a moral panic about the existence of a group outside the norm in order to other them, portraying them as threats to the innocence of children is both common and unfortunately effective, because people will invent scenarios in their head they have no direct experience with and treat them as fact'.

In this case, trans women's penis's being boldly visible, instead of under a towel, like every other woman behaves in the locker room.

referring quote was removed, so I've edited out the reply. ~d

MattDaddy wrote:

1. It's wasn't surgery, but it was something you chose to do that resulted in having breasts. I feel that because you chose to put your body into that state, you do bear the responsibility to adjust your locker room actions as to not expose children to the opposite sex "parts".

Given that the alternative was 'kill myself'. I don't think this is particularly fair. Also, like I say below, people wear towels in locker rooms.

3. You can't force people to automatically become normalized to see breasts and a penis on the same person. It sucks that people may stare and be taken aback. I don't think it's unreasonable for you to slightly adjust your behavior (i.e. covering up certain parts). I do not feel that is violating your rights. I do not feel that you should allowed to walk around with male and female parts exposed to minors, it violates their rights and the rights of their parents.

I know we will probably never agree on this, but that is how I feel. As much as you argue against it, I will argue for it. I will leave it at that, and hopefully we can at least come to an agreement on the other pieces of this issue (bathrooms, marriage, healthcare, etc.). If Trump does go against the things we agree on, I will not vote for him again in 2020.

I hope that is enough to come to a truce on the bickering about this between us.

You really seem to be fixated on this idea that trans people are just parading nude around locker rooms exposing themselves to minors. Nobody in reality actually does this. Even if we lived in a world where adults and minors both walked around locker rooms nude together, which we do not, you would still be expecting me to accept extra restrictions on my behavior solely because I am trans, and that's wrong. You can not feel it stigmatizes me, but it does, no matter how much you say it doesn't.

I understand you have some fear for your daughter. Regardless of how reasonable or not that fear is, I decline to be a vessel for it and in my opinion, you're projecting your insecurity onto trans women, and that's honestly really scary.

Sorry to say but your hope isn't going to come true, we can stop talking about this particular issue now, but you and I are most definitely not cool and not on good terms.

I'm not a trans woman and I've never looked "masculine" so I've never run into the difficulty of being questioned whether or not I've belonged in women's restrooms or locker rooms. Now I don't tend to hang out in locker rooms on a regular basis, but during the times when I've been in one, I can't recall a single time when there were women walking around naked in there, or women staring at each other while they were getting dressed. We didn't walk about comparing our breast sizes or the sizes of anything else, and if anyone happened to have a penis, I doubt it would have even been noticed unless someone really did shine a spotlight on it. (I've never seen a spotlight in a women's locker room either.)

It seems to me that cis men are making a really big deal out of nothing. Personally, I'm much more afraid of the perverted men who are lurking around women's areas with some ridiculous excuse of "protecting" me and not at all afraid of the actual women (trans or otherwise) who are going about their normal, day-to-day business.

It seems to me that if someone is really scared of the very possibility of seeing a naked person, then a public locker room is probably not the place they would want to be. Maybe it should be up to the person having these fears to make the effort to change somewhere in private rather than inconveniencing everyone else with what basically amounts to a personal phobia.

Freyja wrote:

Sorry, we can stop talking about this particular issue now, but you and I are most definitely not cool and not on good terms.

Your choice. That's the best I can do.

MattDaddy wrote:
Freyja wrote:

Sorry, we can stop talking about this particular issue now, but you and I are most definitely not cool and not on good terms.

Your choice. That's the best I can do.

Indeed. I do choose to keep myself safe from people who would have me act or be treated as a different class of woman because of an accident of birth. Keeping those people at arms length has done a great deal of good for my well-being.

It might be time for a mythbusters post about trans women's bodies, because if anything I learned over the past couple days there's a lot of misconceptions about how our bodies work and what happens during a medical transition.

I have an idea about where some of these ideas come from (porn), but it's gonna take me a while to put that together.

This does come back to one of my hangups with it comes to trans issues. I'm going to ask and I understand this may not be the best time, but it's on my mind and if you wanna deal with this later I have no issue with that.

Gender and sex are things a lot of people don't grasp when it comes to the line between them. I think it may be a lot like how people balk when you say "well you can be bigoted against a race that's in power, but you can't be racist, because racism denotes something more structural." To them, the two terms are intertwined. To a degree, I do get that, because we have a habit as a society of using them interchangably.

My question, though, comes back to kind of... definitions, I guess. If you say "I am a man," what does that mean? We've had a bracing and fun talk about penises and breasts, but what makes a man or woman a man or woman? The answer I typically get is, essentially, "it's up to the person to self-identify", which is where I get tripped up. I don't mean this in a negative or leading way, but to me it sounds a lot like "if I say I'm a man, I'm a man, so anyone who says it also is a man because they say so, and so the term itself doesn't really mean anything".

It's more of an academic question than anything - in my experience trans folks tend to push towards typical gender conforming ideas of what they identify as, but it's just something that bugs me to no end.

Bloo Driver wrote:

My question, though, comes back to kind of... definitions, I guess. If you say "I am a man," what does that mean? We've had a bracing and fun talk about penises and breasts, but what makes a man or woman a man or woman? The answer I typically get is, essentially, "it's up to the person to self-identify", which is where I get tripped up. I don't mean this in a negative or leading way, but to me it sounds a lot like "if I say I'm a man, I'm a man, so anyone who says it also is a man because they say so, and so the term itself doesn't really mean anything".

It's really the only way to define it without declaring ourselves gatekeeper for the term. Once you take it upon yourself to be the gatekeeper you have to come up with resolutions to all the myriad possibilities, and that inevitably leads to deliberately excluding someone for something that wasn't their fault which typically feels very uncomfortable to those of us who want to be accepting of others.

I promise I have a longer answer, but I'm phone posting right now.

Short answer: If a bunch of people in Western society can arbitrarily assign traits and behavior into a incomplete heuristic of a rigid binary that doesn't exist, why can't I say "No it's more complex than that?"

For me, the only way I know I'm a woman is experiment - I tried being a man and I wanted to die. I tried being both and I felt fake. I tried being a woman and I felt *right*.

As for trans folk skewing to traditional presentation and roles - sadly we often have to to be seen as who we are, and for our own safety.

Sometimes this means we get accused of upholding the gender binary. We're in a constant double bind. (This isn't happening here.)

Not that this is going to matter to anyone here, but locker rooms include showers. Showers that do not always have individual stalls. If stalls are present, I would hope (for the sake of my child) that someone with both breasts and a penis would use a stall. I don't think that's too much to ask.

If all the other women use a stall, sure. If not, I've already said that's too much to ask.

I decline to be a vessel for the fantasy projections of people who posit my body as inherently threatening to children.

I have been thinking about this all night, so please bear with me if this post is a bit rambly.

First of all Matt, I think it is awesome that you are engaging(I may be a minority opinion here:)). I also think it is unfair to arbitrarily call someone who feels the way you do a bigot - it is a lot more complex than that. I think uninformed is a better way to put it.

I am a father to two young girls, so I get the natural desire to be protective of them. My daughters are active girls, so we are always at pools, gyms, parks with public restrooms - and the amount of times they have been exposed to naked people (other than family) is zero. The idea that somehow if trans people use public restrooms/showers means that there are going to be a lot of confused children/children being exposed to genitalia is just anti-trans propaganda. Every restroom that the girls have ever used has had stalls - even when I take them in the men's room with me, we use stalls. Trans people are no different than cis people in their bathroom habits - it isn't as though they are going to be running around showing off. I see no reason to even consider that a possibility. Most people in restrooms just want to get their business done and be left alone.

On the off chance that your child did see a penis unintentionally - is that the worst thing in the world? There is nothing magical about a penis(my own excluded), and we really mess our kids up with body shaming and with the idea that the naked body is taboo, in my mind. Just use it as a teachable moment. That is what parenting is about.

I guess I have a different view on all of these things, largely as a result of conversations on this board and my own friendship with the trans-women on this board(Notably Clocky, Garden and Boog) - but I am trying to raise my daughters with the idea that sex and gender aren't linked and that if you say you are a woman, you get treated like a woman and perceived as one. That isn't how I was raised, but that is how I want to raise my girls.

I completely acknowledge my own cis-privilege in my opinion and have zero criticism for any of my LGBT sisters who feel differently.

Sorry for the rambly post and much love to all involved in the conversation.

I will point out that the only person who has actually called any other person a bigot here is MattDaddy, calling Freyja a bigot for demanding equal treatment.