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| The Fallacy of Gender Blind Bathrooms |
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| Opinion - Thompson & Gaughan | |||
| Lisa Thompson & Sharon Gaughan | |||
| Sunday, 09 September 2007 21:15 | |||
 Springfield, VA, USA. What happens when we delete the ladies' room to please males? Consider two trains, each heavily ladened with righteous polemic and identity politics, are rushing headlong toward each other down the mainline tracks.
One is engineered by Larry Craig, Republican Senator from Idaho; the other by the gender blind bathroom movement lead by the universities and transgender activists.
Larry Craig, one of many other men, would use the bathrooms for public sex, making them places for impersonal, wham bam thank you sir sexual rendevous.
Straight men, gay men, repressed homosexual men, men deep in the closet, men searching for targets of easy trade, all find themselves in the men’s restroom doing what comes naturally when the urge arises.
Washington, DC, USA. Science observes the universe, records what has occurred, and then develops a testable  theory that can explain those observations and make predictions on future ones.
Albert Einstein was very good at thi...
The gender blind bathroom people, mostly students and academic gender theorists, people who do not live in the world of restrooms serving the general public – and certainly not the restrooms of working class men and women — insist that because there are no significant differences between men and women, separate bathrooms for men and women are unneeded. They add that sex specific bathrooms discriminate against the transgendered (i.e., people who dress as the opposite gender — as they say — but remain the same sex they had at birth. The men are still male, the women still female).
The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed.
— William GibsonIn the gender blind world, women are perfectly safe with every man they meet, sexual predators do not exist, men do not have sexual rendevous in bathrooms, and public concerns for the physical safety of women and young girls and boys are the hysterical rantings of fundamental religious right wingnuts. Men, at least those attending good universities, do not attack women, at least if they attend the right college and follow the college's step by step guidelines for sexual relationships. The vast majority of adult working women to whom we have talked and corresponded — straight women, lesbians, women born with HBS — prefer that public restrooms remain segregated by sex (the boys in the boy’s room, the girls in the girls). The majority of adult working women, the women who are experienced in all the various flavors that adult men come in, want the public restrooms to stay as they are: a relatively safe haven in a male dominated world where women can have their own space without needing to worry what a man might do (in front of them, to them, to their daughters and young sons.)
The normal women’s public restroom has more stalls than the mens (something about the anatomical differences). In a restroom, women take care of more than bladders and bowels. What women wants Senator Craig in the restroom with them? Women don’t need to be confronted with the elaborate foot taps reaching out to stroke them in a stall.
When did common sense surrender to the reality of life in the urban environment (or for that matter, the shopping mall)?
Senator Craig and friends are not the only reasons that gender blind bathrooms are disservice to women. Apparently the rights of the transgendered, however you define that, and however few their true number might be, weigh more than the wishes and safety of fifty-one percent of the human species.
There are others out there that need to be kept out of women’s public restroomsThe following items were extracted at random from the daily news. Anyone can Google this sort of thing from the internet. It is by no means a thorough or exhaustive list — an appaling thought at the outset. It is a source of wonder that that the gender blind bathroom movement seems to care little about the real world track record.
Tucson, AZ, USA. An FBI employee is on the other side of the law, facing charges of inappropriate conduct in a woman's bathroom on the University of Arizona Campus. According to a University Police report, a woman was cleaning the bathroom when she saw a stall door open. Inside stood a man with his pants down, masturbating.
Salt Lake City, UT, USA. A woman who had just used a public bathroom at a Spanish Fork gas station discovered that a camera was hidden on the toilet tank and her restroom visit was allegedly caught on video by a voyeur.
Police say Saturday night around 10:30 p.m. Mindy Carpowich was preparing to leave the bathroom stall at a Chevron station when she noticed a black wire dangling from behind the toilet tank. After a closer inspection Carpowich discovered the wire was connected to a tiny camera drawing power from a 9 volt battery, all stowed behind the toilet.
“It was facing a little bit up so they could see everything,” says Carpowich.
Amanda Self, a friend of Carpowich, says she saw the station attendant, 45-year-old Timothy Anderson, disappear into a back room while Carpowich was using the restroom. Officers say Anderson initially denied knowledge that the camera was planted on the toilet but in later interviews told Detective John Jackson of the Spanish Fork police department that he had setup the camera to watch women use the restroom.
 Long beach Township, NJ, USA. On Long Beach Island, it's a case of candid camera, but absolutely nobody is laughing. A public works employee has been charged with official misconduct for an alleged despicable deed. Police say it was inside a woman's bathroom at the end of Long Beach Blvd that 27-year-old Scot Hampton planted a wireless camera and transmitted the pictures to his home computer. Hampton, a public works employee for Long Beach Twp., was responsible for opening and closing the public bathrooms. Police believe the camera was operating for most of the summer. The women and girls who frequented the facility are horrified.
 Cincinnati, OH, USA. A man with an extensive criminal record in several states is in jail after police found him in the women's restroom. Police arrested Daniel Murphy Wednesday at Tower Place Mall downtown and charged with vouyerism. Investigators say he has spying on women from the stall in the restroom for more than an hour.
Seattle, WA, USA. A 20-year-old Cinerama employee was booked into jail after a moviegoer at the downtown Seattle theater discovered a video camera in the women's restroom. According to police, investigators were able to catch the video voyeur because the man accidentally filmed himself setting up the camera.
Police were called to the Cinerama at 6:20 p.m. on a Saturday following a report that a woman had discovered the camera. According to reports, the camera had recorded four women using the toilet.
Newport news, VA, USA. All Tessa, 17, wanted was a late-night chat session on Valentine's Day with her girlfriends at a local bookstore. Around 10:30, she headed into the women's bathroom. It was empty. She entered the handicapped stall and slipped the lock.
Within seconds, someone else entered the bathroom and slid into the stall right next to her's. Then all was eerily quiet. Instinct told her to glance over at the occupant's shoes. They were big and black. Men's shoes.
She decided to make a break for it and slid the door lock open fast.
He was faster.
"Before I could take a step outside, he quickly shoved his way into the stall and pushed me back. He was waiting."
Postscript: Last month at the same store at the same time of night, another young woman told police she saw a man sitting near her in the children's section, fondling himself.
 Mr. John Walsh, host of "America's Most Wanted," began advocating for missing children in 1981, after a stranger abducted and killed his son. He knows some men are offended by his advice to never hire a male babysitter. But as he sees it, if a teenage boy wants to experiment with sex, you don't want him using your kids.
"It's not a witch hunt," he says. "It's all about minimizing risks. What dog is more likely to bite and hurt you? A Doberman, not a poodle. Who's more likely to molest a child? A male." Cases in point:
Where this leads us. Airlines use reasoning similar to that of John Walsh when they seat unaccompanied minors only with women. They are trying to decrease the odds of a problem. Certainly, many men would be safe seatmates for kids, but sometimes, especially on overnight flights in darkened cabins, "you have to make generalizations for the safety of a child," says Diana Fairechild, an expert witness in aviation disputes.
Airlines have had decades of experience monitoring the gender of abusive seatmates, she adds, quoting a line repeated in airline circles: "No regulation in aviation takes effect without somebody's blood on it."
Rather hysterical? Maybe so.
But that is the world outside, the world women must live in. Let there be unisex bathrooms, who really cares? But don't throw out the women's restroom to please academic theorists and the students of the gender blind bathroom world of the transgendered.
Don't pretend there aren't physical and psychological differences between women and men.
And most of all, don't forget US Senator Larry Craig and all the other boys who use public restrooms to relieve themselves of responsibility.
  Ms. Lisa Jain Thompson is the Co-Founder & President of TS-Si, Inc. She also serves as a Contributing Editor.Ms. Sharon Gaughan is the Co-Founder, VP, and Executive Director of TS-Si, Inc. She also serves as the Managing Editor and columnist.
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