See..how I think on this is that people like your friend will have been using their preferred sex areas for years and noone will have been any the wiser. if you 'pass', noone will bat an eyelid. People like your friend do not need laws passed that allow basically anyone access to the opposite sex areas. This push for self identification I just don't understand. 'Genuine' transfolk...they do not need these laws as they are just quietly getting on with their lives, not shouting on about how unfair everything is. So who exactly do these laws help? I know 2 transwomen who are disgusted at the way some have been going on recently and feel that the way this is going is going to harm them in the long run...as they have never had any issues, never been 'called out' or anything, probably as they do 'pass', or one definitely does, the other you may do a bit of a double take but realistically, noone is going to say anything about a masculine looking woman in the loo/changing area as you do get masculine looking females...so unless (if she still had a dick) she was swinging a penis around or something, again it wouldn't be an issue. So basically, IMO the only people these self-identification laws will help, are those who wish to abuse it.

So if there has to be a blanket rule so to speak..I would go for post-srs is fine. But before all of the transactivists started bleating on about self identification and gender trumping sex...everything was ticking along pretty nicely. Its kind of an honour system...genuine transgender people will use where ever they feel they fit in best. A law is not needed for this. A law only allows pervs to take advantage

Obviously this wouldn't be the case in schools as everyone in the school would know what sex the kid actually was unless they started transitioning as a toddler (which is ****ing wrong) but I don't really see a way around this except for having a further option for 'transkids' or letting them use staff facilities if they don't want to use the ones for their own sex. The answer definitely is NOT to remove funding for schools who refuse to let kids into either loos/changing areas. That was a ridiculously stupid move on Obamas part.

I also really dislike when gay rights are brought up in relation to this issue. Mainly as...gay people were not wanting the rights of others taken away, they simply wanted to be treat as equals. Noone else had to lose protections and such. Also so many aspects of the whole transgender thing are homophobic...so many of my friends on facebook are up in arms about it and most do not even understand why T was added onto LGB given they have nothing in common and the first 3 are sexualities where transgender is not. To explain this further...the push for 'transing' children and getting them onto (dangerous) puberty blockers...if left alone to develop the huge majority of those who are dysphoric as kids/teens will simply grow up to be gay/bi adults, not trans at all. But once on blockers 100% of people go on to 'transition' as adults. So effectively, while the transactivists push for puberty blockers and such in young people, this is little more than conversion therapy. Secondly, the treatment of lesbians by 'lesbian' transwomen (aka...straight males...) is horrendous. I personally know 3 lesbians who have had issues with this, one of those was seriously assaulted for being so 'transphobic' as to refuse to shag someone with a penis (who did not mention said penis until it was...unveiled so to speak). Apparently being a lesbian is transphobic in itself, and should be known as vagina fetishism. Cuckoo or what :S There are hundreds of stories online from lesbians of similar treatment, so I would wager a guess that this is NOT rare, its not a 'couple of crazies' and that it seems to be the current mainstream thinking among transwomen, unless its the same couple of crazies moving up and down the country and to other countries constantly treating lesbian women this way, which I doubt. It would be amusing to see a transman trying to tell gay men that they should be shagging people with vaginas otherwise they are horrible bigots...I wonder how that would go down

I actually think the problem is with those who are 'transgender' not 'transsexual'. The second are those who actually suffer crippling dysphoria and deserve sympathy and respect, those who truly do feel 'trapped in the wrong body'. The first lot, are the ones who claim there is such thing as 'lady dick' and harass lesbians for not liking penis. The second lot appear to be those pushing for access to female areas. The first have been welcome there for years...

Yes Vicky it was a Mess
Trump sorts out a mess,

Third bathroom/locker room etc would be the best solution.
I feel so bad that transgender people have to go through this hard problem and i cant even imagine how they feel basically everyday. I also understand the other people having concerns about fake transgenders perving on people.

This

perverts would love that

The unisex option wouldn't work in schools though. Dunno about anyone else but I remember what it was like at school...I remember how the boys would grope and leer. I expect boys might have found girls to be pervy too though obviously I don't have that perspective myself. Separate spaces are needed, especially for females (sorry truth) who will be getting their first periods and such. Its a horrific enough time without having to worry that a boy might be hovering to take the piss/try to watch. It was bad enough dealing with that whilst knowing other girls were around.

Does anyone seriously think that having a unisex changing room for PE and stuff...would go down well with the average teenager? That it would not cause huge problems?

My imagining of a unisex solution, personally, would be that it would be all individual self-contained cubicles (without gaps above / below the doors) and each cubicle would have a mirror / hand washing sink as well. It wouldn't be unisex in the sense of "shared", rather every individual toilet would be completely private so it would become irrelevant.

So what would you do for changing rooms in schools? The funding and space is not there to have individual cubicles...

Also funding issues with the full length cubicles actually...

Our school changing was grim. Just a big room with some benches and clothes pegs. I was 'ill' nearly every PE lesson as I didn't want to change infront of anyone, let alone the guys who were touching me up and calling me 'tits' as an early developer :laugh:

Changing rooms is another issue, to be honest the only realistic solution there is to have a "third option" changing room, though that's not really ideal.

Funding regarding the toilets wouldn't be an issue in newly designed buildings to be honest... if it was designed that way from the outset the cost wouldn't be hugely different to a "traditional" setup. You're talking a difference of a few thousand pounds in a building that will most likely total £millions so not really a concern. Similar to how anyone designing a commercial building these days will design it to be wheelchair accessible from the first stroke of the pen, and the cost isn't really any different. Whereas converting current buildings for wheelchair access can get complicated / expensive.

Of course the problem lies in the fact that it WOULD obviously be hugely expensive to convert currently existing facilities. I don't think that's any reason to not do it differently moving forwards, though. Just be honest and say that, unfortunately, it's not feasible to convert every school, but that school design going forward will be changing for future generations :shrug:.


As a circumcised white Christian (atheist...) at a 99% white christian school, I feel your pain. The thought of the school changing rooms still fills me with horror...

most buildings are still not wheelchair access and ost new flats do not have any lifts in them so no one in a wheelchair can get upstairs? meanwhile women with babies are allowed to steal disabled peoples seats on buses too

Well exactly, a lot of buildings are still not wheelchair friendly because CONVERTING an existing building is expensive. However designing a brand new building to be wheelchair accessible doesn't really have any difference in cost at all to designing one that isn't. It's about forward planning. If the transgender toilet issue is a problem currently, then even if we can't realistically change anything in current buildings, we can at least consider it in building designs for the future.

Oh yes, newbuilds I agree entirely. Unisex cubicles are definitely the way forward. This will obviously work well in the long term but in the short term, obviously these are not going to be available, so there is still an issue of what to do for now :S I would argue though, that whilst adults would be fine with floor to ceiling loos and a communal sink area, in schools I do still think this could be a problem so maybe cubicles like current disabled ones, with a sink in each and no communal closed off bit?

This issue does go beyond toilets though. Loos is pretty easily solved as above.

OK this is kind of offtopic but do you realize quite how sexist this statement is? Its like you assume men do not take their children out of the house alone. Fathers are also perfectly capable of pushing prams and such..and a lot actually do do it funnily enough. Unless you are going to argue that fathers would never dream of using the disabled spots. If so, I would argue that men and women alike may well do this, it doesn't matter what sex the person is, its how twatty they are.

I get that trans issues are different to gay issues in that sexuality isn't the issue for trans people, but in a social respect they're interlinked and I'd guess that's to do with them feeling more welcomed in and a part of the 'gay community', and I think that's because there are a lot of similarities in terms of experiences. Trans people face a lot of similar struggles to gay people such as coming out, rejection from family and friends, workplace issues etc, so since a lot of gay people also have experience of those things they can empathise in a way that straight people might not be able to. Or at least historically gay people faced those things a lot, it's obviously much better now. But yeah I've heard the "they shouldn't be included they're not like us" thing from gay people before too but in my opinion that attitude goes against the whole idea of what LGBT should be about which is just a group of people who find an affinity in each other because of similar things they've been through and are supportive of each other, not necessarily having to be limited to strict definitions of sex/gender/sexuality but like I mentioned, societal issues too. So I think comparisons are fine if there's a comparison to be made, it's not taking away from anything else or taking away from gay people, or using gay people or anything like that, and I don't think they're looking for rights to be taken away from anyone. There's a lot of things I don't really know a lot about or disagree with such as puberty blockers and transing children, but on the whole I think trans people just want to be accepted, yes there'll be groups and individuals who push for things that they probably shouldn't, but the majority are just normal people who want better lives and treatment from society. The examples you've given about lesbians' experiences and 'vagina fetishism' etc all sound awful but I'd still argue that those people aren't representative of ordinary trans people and I would be shocked if it was the mainstream thinking amongst trans people, they're just normal people and on the whole they don't think differently to you or me. It's the crazies and the perverts who attract the attention though, but they're in every walk of life and examples could be made against gay people, straight people, any group of people. I would imagine however that many trans people suffer from psychological issues and this is just me guessing but just from looking at the suicide rates there's obviously something wrong there, so maybe something like that could go some way to explaining the 'crazies', I don't know I'm just thinking out loud. Basically though I think that if we had a more trans accepting society there'd be less psychological issues amongst trans people and we'd see less examples like those not more.

It depends on your definition of trans. Do you go 'old school' and think trans means sex dysphoric folk who were born in the wrong body?

Or todays meaning that includes males who expect people to just accept their say so that they are 'women deep down' and those who say it is transphobic to think sex dysphoria is (obviously) a requirement for being trans and bleat on about how penises can be female and so on?

If the first group, I would agree and probably say that someone who is actually transsexual harassing a lesbian for sex would be very rare. The issues (as I said on the end of my ridiculously long post) are with those who claim to be trans but have no dysphoria, shout on to get their own way, make a huge fuss about entering female areas, and attempt to bully lesbian women into sleeping with males, and more specifically, males with a penis. These males are self entitled horrible little ****s and I do not think they should be lumped in with those who actually are sex dysphoric...and sadly, it seems that these people outnumber the 'transsexual' people.

I suppose I'm somewhere in the middle. I think I generally just like to trust in what people say unless I'm given a reason not to, so if I met a man who said he felt he was a woman, but hadn't yet undergone any steps towards becoming a woman I'd take that on face value, and I'd refer to him as a woman if that's what he wanted, and I'd consider him a woman if I felt he was genuine, it's not something I've personally experienced so I can't really judge it and there's still not really a great deal of understanding around it. If I met someone though who gave me reason to think they had ulterior motives, or had beliefs that I disagreed with (such as the example of bullying lesbians to sleep with men or that it's transphobic to consider dysphoria a requirement in transsexuals etc) then that'd be different. I would hazard a guess that issues like these and these ways of thinking have always been around though amongst some people but are only becoming highlighted because there's more of a spotlight on all things trans related nowadays, rather than them being issues that are growing.

Not sure of the media source but the headline was, " world leaders shake heads at trumps transgender toilet ban" made me giggle.

I dare you to post on reddit/twitter/tumblr that you think sex dysphoria is an essential part of being trans. I know those sites are not necessarily representative of real life but you will be called a terf, told to die in a fire, and get rape threats by the minute, from hundreds of different users. I assure you.

D: I think I'll stick to tibb

But it's not so much that I think dysphoria is an essential part of being trans (I don't really have a solid opinion on that either way because I'm not sure) I just mean that I agree that it's wrong to go as far as to label someone as transphobic for having that belief.

Interesting. If you did not feel you were born in the wrong body and feel you should be the opposite sex....then how are you trans anything? I actually cannot understand this so I am genuinely interested in why you think this. When I have tried asking this elsewhere I have received answers such as 'I am not here to teach you, go educate yourself' which...don't help :laugh:

Honestly I don't know, it's just that I don't fully understand everything relating to being trans, or the feelings trans people have, or how they view themselves etc, so it's just that if someone was to say to me that they were trans but didn't have gender dysphoria then I'd try to accept that even though I wouldn't fully understand it. I think psychologically it's probably far more complicated than non trans people would really be able to appreciate so I'd just consider it to be a case that they'd know how they feel better than me and that it wouldn't really be for me to lay a definitive on them of 'you must be this' or 'you must think like this' sort of thing.
Like I say, it's more that I'm undecided on it rather than having an opinion on it either way.

Thanks. I guess all of this interests me because going by current definitions, I am trans myself. Which is...odd. I always assumed that everyone felt like I do...which is basically this

I do not feel 'like a woman', though I am obviously female. I just feel 'like me', or like a person.

I honestly thought that this was how everyone felt. However, not 'identifying' as a woman whilst being female, makes me trans. As does not being 'purely feminine'. Which is an odd concept in itself. I don't think many people in the whole world perform femininity to a tee...and have nothing even slightly masculine about them.

I think there's a lot of 'definitions' for things that we don't really understand, which is very odd when you think about it. How can we define something that we don't understand? I don't really know what 'feeling like a man' entails so maybe I'm trans too :laugh:
I think the definitions are only really there to try and help people who struggle with their identity though and are trying to understand themselves better and who do have feelings that connect with those definitions, I'd guess that even if you don't consider yourself 'male' or 'female' but are content with who you are then there's no trans issue there because you're not looking for anything to change and you're not looking to be thought of differently, I don't know

I am the same and I think that's probably the case for a lot of people? Last year a video came out online of a girl 'coming out' to Obama as non-binary, supposedly meaning she doesn't identify as male or female, and I thought... big deal, isn't that the case for most people. :laugh: Unless I'm totally misunderstanding the definition of it. Not that I mean to sound rude, if a friend told me they were non binary then I'd respect that, but I'm not really sure why people want to give every possible identity a label.

It's a mine field.I don't think inventing all these labels is helpful for society as a whole tbh.There comes a point where things get so complicated that people just give up trying to understand.
Everone's different.I don't think there needs to be a label for every different feeling or emotion that everyone experiences.