Entering the “bathroom wars” surrounding laws like North Carolina’s rule prohibiting transgender people from using the restrooms associated with their gender identities, the Trump Administration will roll back Obama-era regulations that allow transgender students to use their appropriate restroom. Take it from my personal experience, though…really, who uses your restroom is so not a big deal it’s ridiculous.
Take It From Me: Who Uses Your Bathroom Is So Not a Big Deal
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It could be a big deal to those who are traumatized, i.e. people who have been raped (mostly women of course) or otherwise brutalized or ostracized.
So a sane society would arrange protections for them to feel safer – not the very opposite.
I guess the Trump Republicans should re-watch Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers to see that the (neo-)liberal vision of full racial and gender equality (and unisex group showers) is perfectly possible to combine with the most militaristic and generally fascist society imaginable. No free stuff there – for the un-enlisted that is…
There are reports that Auschwitz had “unisex showers”, and also reports of a girl who danced naked before the Nazis to regain her sense of self that, being stripped of her clothes, made her feel depersonalized.
“Auschwitz was the largest of the Nazi concentration camps. It was here that the Nazis perfected their method of mass murder, using Zyklon B gas pumped into rooms that had fake showers.”
http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/01/world/auschwitz-holocaust-showers/index.html
People seem very casual and accepting of the inevitability of living their lives under the gaze a surveillance state.
The ultimate security for our militarized police would be the casualization of public nudity, making objections to strip searches at security checkpoints a suspicious behavior.
It’s like Ted says, it’s all about context.
I went to Hampshire college, around the same time. Even back then there were only 2 single sex bathrooms on campus, in the library. We used to joke that they were trying to no freak out random visitors. Those bathrooms are now unisex too, what used to be the mens room has a sign saying “bathroom with urinals.” 2/3 of the dorms on campus were “mods,” which were just apartments, so the bathrooms were just bathrooms. In the dorm dorms, everything was unisex. One of the dorms, you walked through the bathrooms to go from hall to hall. So sometimes you would come out of the shower, and a bunch of people would be walking past. No big deal, who cares? Who cares who sees who naked? I’ve seen plenty of naked people in my time, most of whom I had no intention of sleeping with. Oh, almost forget, the sauna at Hamsphire was coed, and clothes were optional. Which meant no one wore any. Faculty and students would go in together, naked. Ah, the good old days. That you couldn’t do anymore….
As for Starship Troopers, I think he stole that from The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
> As for Starship Troopers, I think he stole that from The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
Troopers was published in ’59, Forever War in ’74. Heinlein told Haldeman that FW “may be the best future war story I’ve ever read!”
(I’ve got both on the shelf behind me 😉
oh, wait – is “he” Verhoeven or Heinlein? I honestly haven’t read Troopers recently enough to remember the facilities.
Yeah, I meant Verhoeven. I don’t think it was that way in the novel…
I’ve been in unisex bathrooms in other countries. I visited a friend in a dorm when he was in college, and guess what? The dorm had been built before dorms went coed – there simply weren’t any ladies’ rooms.
Weird the first time – but when ya’ gotta go, ya’ gotta go. After that it’s no big deal.
98.6% of the people screaming about pervs, etc, are in reality desperately trying to stop the recognition of trans people. They’ve finally got the message that it’s not nice to talk bad about others, so they attempt to disguise their motivations (and fail)
You are probably right, CH.
Sexual extremists are those who believe that every person must conform to one or the other extreme ends (male or female) of the sexual spectrum, and they dare not recognize those in between, fearing finding themselves therein.
If one says sexuality is a choice then it is a choice for that person. If one says it is not a choice then it is not a choice for that person.
But that says nothing about anyone else, so I say sexuality is not a choice.
I worked with an engineer who was outraged about homosexual marriages. He tried to shock me by saying he was going to divorce his wife and marry a man.
So I shocked him by telling him to do what he wanted to do, and suggested that maybe he wouldn’t be so outraged if he did.
This is the first cartoon by Mr Rall that the leftist comments on gocomics approve (usually, they say Mr Rall worked hard for Trump to win, and now has buyer’s remorse, which is not correct, but that’s what they post).
(The right wing nut jobs still don’t get it: they all say transgender laws will allow rapists to barge into the ladies’ and rape everyone in there, and the cops won’t be able to do anything about it, since it was their legal right under the transgender laws.)
I graduated from ACC (now ACU) in 1966. I remember having to announce, “Man on 1st!” or “Man on 2nd!” etc. if I entered the women’s dorm. 😀
I submit, Ted, that the obvious solution to the «bathroom» (for those needing/wishing to take a bath), «shower»(for those needing/wishing to take a shower), or toilet ()(for those needing/wishing to relieve themselves) quandary is to segregate educational and work facilities by gender. No mixing of women and men (and «other»s, as the choices now read when required to proclaim one’s gender allegiance), no problem. Why do women have to go to Columbia anyway – isn’t Barnard good enough for them any more, like it was when I visited at the end of the 50s ?…
Henri