Two arguments often made about current topics that piss me off

[conuly]

I'm so sick of "blah blah blah, women toilets!!!" being used as a lazy trump card in the "I hate transfolk" bingo.

Aside from every other point, as a cisgender woman I dream of the day when we get universal unisex toilets. Not because I care about transgender rights that much - though the fact that I think this would benefit that population is a delightful benefit - but because I'm certain that women won't have equal access to public toilets until everybody stands on the same line.

If you have a uterus, you pee more often, because the uterus co-opts space that ought to belong to the bladder. This is even more true if you're pregnant - and the nightmare doesn't end at childbirth! No, you're probably the one ferrying the small children around, so they go to the bathroom with you, and they not only have to pee all the time but they take forever. And if you manage to dodge both pregnancy and childcare, then you probably spend a lot of time in the stalls dealing with menstruation. And if all this is true, then statistically speaking you're probably a woman, which means you spend a lot of time holding it in while standing on line, which puts you at risk for utis and bladder infections. Even more so, I mean.

Equal access to public toilets means that either the ladies' room has more toilets than the men's room, consistently, or - since that's never going to happen - all bathrooms are unisex, no urinals. (Urinals could exist in single stall bathrooms which only have a toilet, a urinal, and a sink - and only one person using the facilities at a time unless that person is a very small child.)

Of course, we'd have to come up with some sort of solution for people trying to dodge the toilets altogether and use the great outdoors. I suggest more bathrooms.

I saw this article on yet another man who was choked to death by the police.

The comments where I found this were full of garbage "personal choice" rhetoric. As in, this man chose to be 400 pounds, he chose to have his headlights too high, he chose to"lead the cops on a chase", and then he chose to resist arrest and be choked to death. If they could condemn him for choosing to be black I'm sure they would.

Some other comments note that the police department in that particular county are notorious for their brutality and, as mentioned in the article, for their habit of initiating dangerous car chases in response to minor crimes. So why didn't this guy pull over? IDK, probably because the cops there are super duper extra bad and he didn't want to risk it. Somehow the first batch of commenters doesn't seem to think the police did anything wrong in choosing to go on a high speed chase over some petty bullshit, much less in then choosing to murder somebody. No, this man made "poor lifestyle choices", but the poor cops never had a choice at all.

Uh-huh.

I'm never using the phrase "led them on a chase", or anything similar, again. It's bullshit is what it is.

Comments

[jessie_c]

The public learned about Christine Jorgensen when the Press Outed her on her return from Denmark on December 1, 1952.
Since that date, not one trans person has been arrested, charged and convicted of sexual assault in a washroom/changing room.
Not.
One.
Contrast that with the number of Conservatives.

[alexseanchai]

and Orange brags about invading women's locker rooms

[jessie_c]

Kind of like that Pharmacy Manager from Gainsevlle Florida who led a transphobic campaign to keep trans women out of ladies washrooms because they might "rape or otherwise prey on the opposite sex", and then was arrested for concealing a camera in - wait for it - ladies washrooms.
Can you say "Hypocrites" boys and girls? How about"projection"?

[conuly]

I'm stunned.

[jessie_c]

I'm not.
But then, I've had to deal with transphobes more than you have.

[conuly]

I think I forgot my sarcasm tag there.

[bibliofile]

I am shocked. Shocked!

Yeah, when people go on about stuff like this, so often it turns out that they're protesting too much (great line, sexist of Shakespeare though dammit).

[jessie_c]

Yeah, that's transphobes for you. Hypocrisy would be their middle name, except Hatred got there first.

[dewline]

Teenage girls' locker rooms...

[alexseanchai]

and further, time elapsed to just pee and wash hands is less for people who don't have to take any clothes partway off to do it

and even factoring out time per bathroom break and bathroom breaks per day, a bathroom with three toilets and two urinals has five places to pee, and a bathroom with three toilets and zero urinals has three places to pee!

[hudebnik]

You know, when we're in medieval clothes, I take a good deal longer in the bathroom than shalmestere does: I have to take off a brae-girdle, untie the lacing cord of a pair of braes, pull down the hosen, pull down the braes, and hold the skirts of my upper-body garment out of the way, then reverse all that when I'm done, including adjusting or re-tying half a dozen points, while she only has to deal with skirts and maybe braes. Men's clothes are so complicated!

[sabotabby]

The bathroom solution that works for trans women, trans men, and enbys also benefits cis women, and disabled people of all genders, and it pisses me off (sorry!!!) that it's not universally adopted. But I guess that would make the genders sad.

I'm reading Desmond Cole's book right now, and he makes the astute point that it is indeed a shocking coincidence that all of these Black people have so many health conditions that just so happen to kill them at the exact moment that the police choose to apply excessive force.

[alexseanchai]

shocking

[potofsoup]

haha, a lot of bathrooms around here are going unisex, and a male colleague told me that it's made line-waiting much worse for him, and I was like "good."

[ratcreature]

I never really thought about the male bathroom access privilege, but that probably explains why unisex toilets aren't more common here in Germany, even though unisex saunas are the default (and those are used naked).

Frankly I'd have no problem if unisex bathrooms offered a row of urinals outside of the toilet stalls for people to use, so more facilities were available simultaneously, even if that maintained the disadvantage if you need a toilet stall. There'd at least still be more of those available, and you'd just need to change signs rather than remodel so it should be easy to do.

[conuly]

We all need to pee more often than we poop. If there are urinals and toilets then the people with penises all stand on the urinal line until they need to poop, which really means that those of us who can't use urinals have even less toilet access than before.

[ratcreature]

But wouldn't it move faster overall? I mean, you'd have one line to the bathroom that has say a wall with three urinals and three bathroom stalls, all occupied, with a bunch of people waiting with the first in the line sort of crowding in the entry area. If a stall becomes free, the first in line will use that whether for peeing or pooping. If a urinal becomes free, and the first in line doesn't want that, it remains free until there's someone later in line who can see that not all urinals are occupied, who's willing to use that instead, sees that the people before them make no motion towards, and goes to the urinal rather than a stall, shortening the overall line.

[conuly]

I don't see how you can possibly imagine that this means the line moves faster. This is basically the situation we have now except that everybody would be in the same room together.

If we give the people with penises a choice of stalls or urinals, then that means that they always will have more toilet options than the people who can't use urinals. That means their lines will always move faster, and since society sucks, nobody will increase toilet access for the rest of us.

The only way to make the line move faster is to make sure everybody waits on the same line. If some people can duck out and use the urinal then those people aren't waiting on the same line - and if those folks think the line moves fast enough for them they won't care that it's slow for everybody else.

[ratcreature]

I agree, it wouldn't be equal, but it would be better than now, because there would be twice as many toilet stalls open to me, but not twice as many people waiting on just the stalls, because most penis owners also use the urinals, so I'd profit at least slightly from the presumably faster throughput of the urinals, whereas right now that doesn't help me at all, because I can't access the toilet stalls in the men's room, even if they were totally empty with no line at all. Admittedly it's a sort of trickle-down effect of the urinal benefit, and certainly not as good a solution as sufficient number of toilets accessible for everyone, but you could implement it right now without having any costs for changing the bathrooms themselves.

[conuly]

I don't think so. I don't seriously believe for one minute that unisex toilets with urinals AND stalls will have twice the number of stalls.

[hudebnik]

Two urinals and four sit-down stalls is indisputably, provably less time-efficient than six sit-down stalls, because some of the facilities are only useful to a fraction of the population a fraction of the time; it's possible that facilities will go unused while people are standing in line because their needs don't match the available facilities. Standard queueing theory.

However, urinals take up less space than sit-down stalls; if you can fit four urinals and four sit-down stalls in the space of six sit-down stalls, that might well be more time-efficient. Less fair, since half of the population gets lower average latency than the other half, but more efficient in moving people through. Computer scientists deal with the "fairness vs. throughput" trade-off all the time; there are lots of academic papers about it.

[conuly]

If I honestly thought that the people mandating the number of stalls/urinals in public buildings would think this through and do the right thing, that'd be one thing.

But I don't. I really, really don't. I think that so long as we have both it's same old, same old and nothing ever improves.

[alexseanchai]

If there are urinals and toilets then the people with penises all stand on the urinal line until they need to poop

p sure not true of many trans women; also gadgets exist so that vagina-type people can use urinals (p sure not that common among trans men, though, never mind anyone else)

[conuly]

You're right. Cisgender men use the urinals, everybody else is trapped in the stalls because hardly anybody is going to truck along a urinal device with them.

[greghousesgf]

My uterus is long gone and I have to pee more than I did before I had my hysterectomy.

[conuly]

Your bladder didn't grow, it's still shrunk just in case the womb comes back.

[cellio]

Plus, using a urinal is presumably faster -- walk up, pull it out, go, and (we hope!) wash hands.

I have wanted unisex toilets for as long as I can remember. Once you're going into a *stall*, who *cares* who's in the stall next to you? And who in the world thought it was a good idea to assign gender designations to *single-seater* bathrooms?? Sometimes I see a pair of single-seaters (one each), a long line at the women's, no line at the men's, and think "hey everyone, why are we doing this?". But I'll admit I often don't have the self-confidence to just go in anyway. Sigh...

[conuly]

Once you do it, others will follow. (Though if it's not a single stall bathroom I do recommend announcing your entrance first, just in case any men are self-conscious.)

[hudebnik]

My employer has been making a point, whenever it renovates part of a building, of putting in a unisex bathroom with shared sinks and a bunch of fully-enclosed stalls (no space over or under the doors or partitions). It seems to work out well, but then my employer has aggressively-rational employees and enough money to throw at the problem.

[alexseanchai]

I still wanna know who thought stalls being anything but fully-enclosed was a good idea in the first place.

[conuly]

They're easier to mop.

[hudebnik]

And presumably cheaper to build and repair.

[conuly]

Most likely.

[silveradept]

Oh, could we please just have enough stalls in gender-neutral bathrooms everywhere? That will make things so much better for everyone.

Also, there's no way that something as minor as a traffic violation should ever result in the death of a man at the hands of the police. And miss us with that personal choice rhetoric, because the only people choosing to kill others are the police escalating.

[hudebnik]

I can imagine a situation in which somebody stopped for a traffic violation actually attacks the cops, and needs to be restrained. But there are usually two or more cops, and they're armed with more than guns, so it should never be necessary to use lethal force unless the civilian does so first, and certainly not after they've already disarmed and subdued the civilian.

The problem is... no, wait. Our two chief problems are... I'll come in again. Amongst our problems are such divers elements as... that cops are far too ready to interpret a civilian's actions as "trying to use lethal force", and far too ready to back up one another's stories to justify their actions retroactively, and if the civilian in question is dead, there may be nobody left to dispute those stories, and even if alive, who will believe the testimony of one civilian wrongdoer against that of two or three cops?

[conuly]

Indeed, random traffic stops are legitimately a dangerous activity for the police.

However, at no point during this stop did anybody ask if they really needed to be doing this. They had the dude's plates. They could've sent a ticket to his home. Or, alternatively, their police cars, like the ones in NYC, surely have loudspeakers. They could've blared out "YOU IN THE RED CAR! TURN OFF THE HIGH BEAMS!"

They didn't have to chase him if he refused to be pulled over. That's on them.

[hudebnik]

Trying to see things from the cop's point of view: if I try to pull somebody over and he refuses, he's probably got something to hide other than the reason I wanted to pull him over in the first place, so it is now my obligation as a law enforcement officer to find out what it is.

From the other side: the cops are trying to pull me over. I don't want to interact with cops, because they randomly kill people who look like me, so I'm not pulling over, at least not until I get to a crowded place with witnesses.

[conuly]

Second paragraph: much more relatable, especially in an area where the police are, as I was informed repeatedly, notoriously corrupt/brutal/bad.

[alexseanchai]

Far's I know the Charleston shooter is still alive, and either way the fuckin' cops definitely bought him the fuckin' Burger King on the way to the fuckin' station. And I don't know offhand how many jurisdictions still do capital punishment at all, but I believe it isn't many and it's getting fewer.

[fyrdrakken]

Speaking from my sole personal experience, the only bathroom transgressions I have run into were A) aggravated assault in a mall restroom, carried out by a male-presenting presumed-cisgender-male (who made no attempt to disguise himself as female before sneaking into the restroom and grabbing me by the throat when I came out of the stall) and B) small boys too young for their mothers to want to send them into a public men's room unaccompanied but old enough to have an interest in peeking under the cubicle walls at women on toilets. (Most recently a very innocent transgression of a boy who seemed to have just reached the age of using a public restroom unaided, and didn't seem aware of the significance of the signs on the doors, or was just too used to going into the ladies' room with his mother. His father turned out to be in the hallway outside, distressed at his son's mistake but wisely unwilling to go into the ladies' room to retrieve him.) As a female-only space, its protections are entirely based on social custom and thus nonexistent to a willing transgressor.

I felt pretty bad for the transitioning coworker who felt like he needed to use the women's restroom because it would get him less aggravation. Between getting misgendered by some other coworkers, not feeling like HR had his back in the event of a dispute, and still looking mostly female-ish despite the new beard growth, it seemed the safer option to him.