Post by Ayla on Mar 25, 2016 8:31:29 GMT 8
transgender.wiki/why-forcing-transgender-people-into-binary-restrooms-is-wrong-and-harmful/
Our current ideology about which restrooms and locker rooms transgender people use is built around the ideals of following the transsexual pathway, which as I have previously stated, is not a reasonable path or solution for a large swath of the transgender community. In addition to many members of the transgender community not being able successfully emulate the cisgender binary, we ignore the entire portion of the community that has no intention of even doing so. And forcing this binary bathroom usage ideology onto transgender men, women, and most especially children is in my opinion not only extremely toxic, but a potential cause behind why so many of our transgender community members are committing suicide. In conjunction with bullying and hate for who we are, it’s a dual assault on the psyche.
As someone who has a Google alert for every time the word “transgender” is mentioned in a news article, I read and study a lot of trans* news. I also count the dead and record the suicides. I do it in tears. And in doing so for the past three years, I’ve noticed a pretty striking trend of transgender people publicly stating in news articles the fears they have about using binary restrooms. This is a difficult thing for transgender people to admit, especially for transgender men. Because just as the transgender party line says that we as transgender people should be using the binary facilities that match our gender-identities, the male binary party line also says that transgender men must behave as men and not be afraid of anything.
In my case as a late transitioning transgender woman, I am guilty of exactly what the radical feminists claim I am, which is of being socialized as a male for nearly my entire life. I don’t have memories of my Mother teaching me to cook. Instead I was kicked out of the house to go play with the boys. So in that same vein, the radical feminists are also guilty of doing nothing to help socialize young transgender girls. But that male socialization gives me the equivalent of white privilege to claim my space in female restrooms, which I’ve done. I’ve also completely stopped any challenge of me being there by obtaining female identity documents all the way down to my birth certificate. But the shocking truth is that as a transgender woman, I am absolutely terrified of cisgender women despite my male socialization. And that’s because socializing me as a male only works well if you’re really a male. And I’m not.
I should of course state why I am so afraid of cisgender women, which is I don’t trust them. I don’t fear that they are going to physically harm me like men would if I had to use the men’s restroom, but rather I have real fears that they will attempt to concoct some fabricated story that I or some other transgender woman did something to ultimately further their political agenda and get transgender women removed from what they claim are cisgender women’s spaces. If a male is willing to walk into a female locker room just to score political points, then what’s to stop a cisgender woman from falsely accusing a transgender woman of doing something inappropriate? The answer is nothing. The result? It’ll be a nasty she said, she said case that ends with the transgender woman losing in the court of public opinion. It’s also important to note that while I don’t fear cisgender women physically harming me, I do fear them walking out of a restroom and telling or asking their boyfriends, husbands, or fathers to do it for them.
In the case of transgender men, we would be remiss to ignore this same socialization issue. Because many of these transgender men were socialized as women and had all of the indignities of being a woman inflicted upon them by their families, society, and cisgender men. Some, or many transgender men, have been conditioned by society and their families to consider themselves as the subservient sex. That’s not conducive to standing up for your rights and claiming your space in a male restroom. And it’s naive to even think that because they’re men that all of them can withstand the challenges of being men.
I can rightfully claim to have experience with “tough people,” because I served a military career in the United States Army as a transgender woman who had to pretend to be one. I lived and slept eighteen-inches away for months at a time from the folks charged with keeping America safe at night and killing all its enemies, both foreign and domestic. I witnessed plenty of biological, cisgender men that identified as men breaking down from stress even during peacetime operations, men that I had to lead off to the psych ward. Being a man is tough, it’s even tougher when you’ve been socialized as a female and led to believe that you’re an inferior sex your whole life. Which of course would lead to transgender men having real fears about using men’s restrooms.
I’ve also noticed this troubling trend in regards to the stealth and outing topic. The transgender men seem to be far more sensitive on this subject. For me as a transgender woman, if you were to out me, then I still have male privilege to fall back on. Or, more truthfully in my case, I’ve never lost my male privilege because I never gained passing privilege. Everyone that meets me as a female knows that I’m a transgender woman. And every single one of those people knows that if they don’t treat me as a female, then they have to treat and deal with me as a male. This same concept explains why transgender men are so sensitive about the topics of stealth and outing. They fall back to being treated as women if they don’t pass.
The stealth and outing topic is such a sensitive topic with transgender men that I actually had one get quite nasty with me for linking a news article that he was in on this website. He bizarrely claimed that because the Google search ranking was so high for him on the transgender.wiki website that I was outing him. And I was left thinking: how can I be outing him when appeared in a national news article and told the whole United States of America that he was a transgender man and that he feared using the men’s bathroom? That’s when it dawned on me that what this was really about was that by him saying this, he thought that he had weakened his manhood in some way. I couldn’t come up with any other explanation. Since transitioning, I’ve also witnessed and personally spoke with another transgender man who claimed by the military not changing his DD214, the military was outing him. And he was doing this after appearing in a national news article that told the whole world that he was a transgender man. Huh? What? I’m totally confused.
Then we of course have the calls to action and military equivalent of the draft for the bathroom wars. You know what I’m talking about. Haven’t you seen the pictures of how we take the rough, tough, cowboy trans men, take their photos, and ask: do you want this person in the female restroom? Or we take the sexiest, hottest trans women and ask: do you want this woman in the men’s room? Actually, they do. The conservatives would like to beat her to a pulp, because they don’t believe she’s a woman. Real activism and bathroom terrorism would be for non-passing trans women like me to stop making an effort to pass at all. What could women do if I were to stop removing my facial hair and refuse to wear my wig? Especially when you consider that I have a female birth certificate and female identification. I personally know cisgender women that have hair on their faces due to hormone issues and from mental health drugs. They don’t lose their cisgender cards for not keeping their facial hair removed and striving to excel under the female binary, why should I lose mine?
If I force myself to ask myself the “why?” question when it comes to how I’ve thought of the binary bathroom issue up until very recently, the answer is I’ve been following the proverbial transgender party line of “this is how I’m supposed to think,” and this is “what I’m supposed to say,” and “this is how we do our activism.” But when things don’t make any sense to me, and my eyes are seeing something totally different in the results, I don’t follow party lines. Why? Because I learned in the military to never lie. In fact, they have serious penalties for lying. When a general comes up to you and asks: are we winning or losing Sergeant? Then you’d damn well better tell the truth, and tell them exactly what the situation is on the ground. And the truth about binary bathroom usage is our community members are committing suicide. Why? Again, I say part of the reason is the unrealistic expectation for them to meet binary standards of appearance and use binary facilities, regardless of whether it’s good for their mental health and well-being. It’s the transgender community that has conditioned its members to think that they must use binary facilities, not society. The truth is society is saying “get the f#ck out of my binary bathroom.” I’m tough enough to tell you that no, I’m not going to espouse party rhetoric. And I don’t agree with using binary bathrooms. Whenever there’s a family or gender-neutral bathroom, I use it. I’m a female, and I’m scared.
The other part of the “why have I been thinking like this?” question devolves into the transgender community’s longstanding friendship with psychologists. You know these folks. They’re the same people who said transgender people were mentally ill until 2012. Then they had a meeting, drank some coffee, took a vote, and said we’re not. And after the meeting they finished designing the CIA’s torture program. They’re the people who will say whatever research dollars says they should say. And what I learned from the transgender party line was that psychologists say it’s harmful to separate minorities from their peers. I of course repeated it. I’m no longer willing to do that. As transgender people, we are of course minorities. But what’s not being said is: why would you send kids into a hostile situation to fight a war that’s really being waged by and on behalf of adults? These transgender children are being used as child soldiers in an adult, religious, bathroom war. They’re having the expectation laid at their feet that they will take up arms for the cause and go claim binary spaces on behalf of the rest of us. It’s sickening! Do you really wonder why they’re killing themselves? I don’t. End that expectation. Give them the right to be afraid back. Let them just be children. Stop making them fight the war. Be adults and build them a better, safer world. You die instead of them dying. Protect them dammit! Some people are tough enough to do the fighting. Some aren’t. Those that aren’t often commit suicide when they’re made to do the fighting. I know these things. I record the names of the dead. What kind of kid is supposed to be able to mentally tolerate 200 parents wanting to lynch them and not crack or commit suicide?
I perfectly understand how some of these children must feel, because I have their same fears. Since being diagnosed as being trans, the solution was for me to start hormones, dress like a woman, and use female facilities. It’s been nothing but a hostile experience ever since. There’s nothing pleasant about the public bathroom experience for me; it’s downright terrifying each and every time. And it’s so terrifying that I insist my cisgender spouse accompany me each time I use a multi-occupancy facility. I’ve already got PTSD, I don’t need anymore crazy bitches going off on me.
Sad isn’t it? Here I am a military trained 52-year-old transgender woman that’s scared to use a female bathroom. Do you know what the only thing sadder than that is? It’s people like some of you that are expecting a young transgender child to do that exact same thing, alone. I don’t even have legal adjectives for this behavior.
What makes me tough enough to buck the transgender party and not espouse party lines on the bathroom and locker room issue? The answer lies in my years of holding leadership positions in the military. When you’re a military leader, or any level leader in any entity, those under you will frequently challenge you. Others will like to see you fail, so they can have your job. I know what’s it like to have people think you’re gay in a military that said gay wasn’t allowed, and wanted to dispose of me for that reason. And in the military, they have tough rules against fraternization, so being a leader is a pretty lonely life, especially when you carry the secret of being transgender. All that said, I describe what I see, and I say what I think. And I don’t say or do anything so you’ll be my friend. I also won’t toe the party line when we’re losing lives. I’ll say that we’re losing lives, and tell you why I think we’re losing them. And in this case, I believe that in conjunction with the bullying and hate, we are losing lives by forcing transgender people into male and female binary facilities to appease the transsexual end of the transgender spectrum. Why are we doing this instead of fighting to create our own spaces? What are you afraid of? Are you afraid to fight? Are you afraid of being out? Do you expect other people to fight for you?
Do you know what gives me hope each day as the actions of the old guard just makes me want to slit my wrists? It’s the young people who are changing academia by stripping down those male and female signs of the binary and creating safe, neutral spaces. These are the real heroes of the transgender community, the unsung ones.
Join me in the fight to build and claim our own spaces. Let’s not only challenge the binary system, let’s rebuild it. Let’s do things like get building codes changed so that all future buildings have gender-neutral restrooms and private locker rooms. Let’s get those male and female signs torn off the walls where single-occupancy restrooms exist. And let’s get family restrooms built where multi-occupancy male and female bathrooms exist now.
Let’s be clear. This conversation isn’t about “sending the trans kid to the nurse’s bathroom” like the Republicans want to do. Rather, this conversation is about saving the lives of transgender kids. These kids are having to exist in the moment, but the people giving advice and calling the shots got to grow up in stealth. If this means changing the party line to end the expectation for them to use binary facilities because of the expectations built into the transsexual pathway, then so be it. Get over it, and yourself – this isn’t about you. Lives are more important than your binary vanity. This conversation also isn’t about sending all trans people to the “other bathroom.” It’s about creating separate spaces that are equal, safe, and private for everyone, spaces we created, our spaces. If we do this right, when we finish everyone will be in the “other” bathroom at the finish line. All parties will have respect and privacy. Cisgender women in a single-occupancy bathroom won’t be able to bitch about sharing it with “men” (read transgender women). And cisgender men and women won’t be able to complain about transgender people being perverts either. Private, single-occupancy spaces are the sole solution to protecting everyone. And it requires compromise from all parties to make that happen. Are you part of the solution, or are you part of the problem?
Our current ideology about which restrooms and locker rooms transgender people use is built around the ideals of following the transsexual pathway, which as I have previously stated, is not a reasonable path or solution for a large swath of the transgender community. In addition to many members of the transgender community not being able successfully emulate the cisgender binary, we ignore the entire portion of the community that has no intention of even doing so. And forcing this binary bathroom usage ideology onto transgender men, women, and most especially children is in my opinion not only extremely toxic, but a potential cause behind why so many of our transgender community members are committing suicide. In conjunction with bullying and hate for who we are, it’s a dual assault on the psyche.
As someone who has a Google alert for every time the word “transgender” is mentioned in a news article, I read and study a lot of trans* news. I also count the dead and record the suicides. I do it in tears. And in doing so for the past three years, I’ve noticed a pretty striking trend of transgender people publicly stating in news articles the fears they have about using binary restrooms. This is a difficult thing for transgender people to admit, especially for transgender men. Because just as the transgender party line says that we as transgender people should be using the binary facilities that match our gender-identities, the male binary party line also says that transgender men must behave as men and not be afraid of anything.
In my case as a late transitioning transgender woman, I am guilty of exactly what the radical feminists claim I am, which is of being socialized as a male for nearly my entire life. I don’t have memories of my Mother teaching me to cook. Instead I was kicked out of the house to go play with the boys. So in that same vein, the radical feminists are also guilty of doing nothing to help socialize young transgender girls. But that male socialization gives me the equivalent of white privilege to claim my space in female restrooms, which I’ve done. I’ve also completely stopped any challenge of me being there by obtaining female identity documents all the way down to my birth certificate. But the shocking truth is that as a transgender woman, I am absolutely terrified of cisgender women despite my male socialization. And that’s because socializing me as a male only works well if you’re really a male. And I’m not.
I should of course state why I am so afraid of cisgender women, which is I don’t trust them. I don’t fear that they are going to physically harm me like men would if I had to use the men’s restroom, but rather I have real fears that they will attempt to concoct some fabricated story that I or some other transgender woman did something to ultimately further their political agenda and get transgender women removed from what they claim are cisgender women’s spaces. If a male is willing to walk into a female locker room just to score political points, then what’s to stop a cisgender woman from falsely accusing a transgender woman of doing something inappropriate? The answer is nothing. The result? It’ll be a nasty she said, she said case that ends with the transgender woman losing in the court of public opinion. It’s also important to note that while I don’t fear cisgender women physically harming me, I do fear them walking out of a restroom and telling or asking their boyfriends, husbands, or fathers to do it for them.
In the case of transgender men, we would be remiss to ignore this same socialization issue. Because many of these transgender men were socialized as women and had all of the indignities of being a woman inflicted upon them by their families, society, and cisgender men. Some, or many transgender men, have been conditioned by society and their families to consider themselves as the subservient sex. That’s not conducive to standing up for your rights and claiming your space in a male restroom. And it’s naive to even think that because they’re men that all of them can withstand the challenges of being men.
I can rightfully claim to have experience with “tough people,” because I served a military career in the United States Army as a transgender woman who had to pretend to be one. I lived and slept eighteen-inches away for months at a time from the folks charged with keeping America safe at night and killing all its enemies, both foreign and domestic. I witnessed plenty of biological, cisgender men that identified as men breaking down from stress even during peacetime operations, men that I had to lead off to the psych ward. Being a man is tough, it’s even tougher when you’ve been socialized as a female and led to believe that you’re an inferior sex your whole life. Which of course would lead to transgender men having real fears about using men’s restrooms.
I’ve also noticed this troubling trend in regards to the stealth and outing topic. The transgender men seem to be far more sensitive on this subject. For me as a transgender woman, if you were to out me, then I still have male privilege to fall back on. Or, more truthfully in my case, I’ve never lost my male privilege because I never gained passing privilege. Everyone that meets me as a female knows that I’m a transgender woman. And every single one of those people knows that if they don’t treat me as a female, then they have to treat and deal with me as a male. This same concept explains why transgender men are so sensitive about the topics of stealth and outing. They fall back to being treated as women if they don’t pass.
The stealth and outing topic is such a sensitive topic with transgender men that I actually had one get quite nasty with me for linking a news article that he was in on this website. He bizarrely claimed that because the Google search ranking was so high for him on the transgender.wiki website that I was outing him. And I was left thinking: how can I be outing him when appeared in a national news article and told the whole United States of America that he was a transgender man and that he feared using the men’s bathroom? That’s when it dawned on me that what this was really about was that by him saying this, he thought that he had weakened his manhood in some way. I couldn’t come up with any other explanation. Since transitioning, I’ve also witnessed and personally spoke with another transgender man who claimed by the military not changing his DD214, the military was outing him. And he was doing this after appearing in a national news article that told the whole world that he was a transgender man. Huh? What? I’m totally confused.
Then we of course have the calls to action and military equivalent of the draft for the bathroom wars. You know what I’m talking about. Haven’t you seen the pictures of how we take the rough, tough, cowboy trans men, take their photos, and ask: do you want this person in the female restroom? Or we take the sexiest, hottest trans women and ask: do you want this woman in the men’s room? Actually, they do. The conservatives would like to beat her to a pulp, because they don’t believe she’s a woman. Real activism and bathroom terrorism would be for non-passing trans women like me to stop making an effort to pass at all. What could women do if I were to stop removing my facial hair and refuse to wear my wig? Especially when you consider that I have a female birth certificate and female identification. I personally know cisgender women that have hair on their faces due to hormone issues and from mental health drugs. They don’t lose their cisgender cards for not keeping their facial hair removed and striving to excel under the female binary, why should I lose mine?
If I force myself to ask myself the “why?” question when it comes to how I’ve thought of the binary bathroom issue up until very recently, the answer is I’ve been following the proverbial transgender party line of “this is how I’m supposed to think,” and this is “what I’m supposed to say,” and “this is how we do our activism.” But when things don’t make any sense to me, and my eyes are seeing something totally different in the results, I don’t follow party lines. Why? Because I learned in the military to never lie. In fact, they have serious penalties for lying. When a general comes up to you and asks: are we winning or losing Sergeant? Then you’d damn well better tell the truth, and tell them exactly what the situation is on the ground. And the truth about binary bathroom usage is our community members are committing suicide. Why? Again, I say part of the reason is the unrealistic expectation for them to meet binary standards of appearance and use binary facilities, regardless of whether it’s good for their mental health and well-being. It’s the transgender community that has conditioned its members to think that they must use binary facilities, not society. The truth is society is saying “get the f#ck out of my binary bathroom.” I’m tough enough to tell you that no, I’m not going to espouse party rhetoric. And I don’t agree with using binary bathrooms. Whenever there’s a family or gender-neutral bathroom, I use it. I’m a female, and I’m scared.
The other part of the “why have I been thinking like this?” question devolves into the transgender community’s longstanding friendship with psychologists. You know these folks. They’re the same people who said transgender people were mentally ill until 2012. Then they had a meeting, drank some coffee, took a vote, and said we’re not. And after the meeting they finished designing the CIA’s torture program. They’re the people who will say whatever research dollars says they should say. And what I learned from the transgender party line was that psychologists say it’s harmful to separate minorities from their peers. I of course repeated it. I’m no longer willing to do that. As transgender people, we are of course minorities. But what’s not being said is: why would you send kids into a hostile situation to fight a war that’s really being waged by and on behalf of adults? These transgender children are being used as child soldiers in an adult, religious, bathroom war. They’re having the expectation laid at their feet that they will take up arms for the cause and go claim binary spaces on behalf of the rest of us. It’s sickening! Do you really wonder why they’re killing themselves? I don’t. End that expectation. Give them the right to be afraid back. Let them just be children. Stop making them fight the war. Be adults and build them a better, safer world. You die instead of them dying. Protect them dammit! Some people are tough enough to do the fighting. Some aren’t. Those that aren’t often commit suicide when they’re made to do the fighting. I know these things. I record the names of the dead. What kind of kid is supposed to be able to mentally tolerate 200 parents wanting to lynch them and not crack or commit suicide?
I perfectly understand how some of these children must feel, because I have their same fears. Since being diagnosed as being trans, the solution was for me to start hormones, dress like a woman, and use female facilities. It’s been nothing but a hostile experience ever since. There’s nothing pleasant about the public bathroom experience for me; it’s downright terrifying each and every time. And it’s so terrifying that I insist my cisgender spouse accompany me each time I use a multi-occupancy facility. I’ve already got PTSD, I don’t need anymore crazy bitches going off on me.
Sad isn’t it? Here I am a military trained 52-year-old transgender woman that’s scared to use a female bathroom. Do you know what the only thing sadder than that is? It’s people like some of you that are expecting a young transgender child to do that exact same thing, alone. I don’t even have legal adjectives for this behavior.
What makes me tough enough to buck the transgender party and not espouse party lines on the bathroom and locker room issue? The answer lies in my years of holding leadership positions in the military. When you’re a military leader, or any level leader in any entity, those under you will frequently challenge you. Others will like to see you fail, so they can have your job. I know what’s it like to have people think you’re gay in a military that said gay wasn’t allowed, and wanted to dispose of me for that reason. And in the military, they have tough rules against fraternization, so being a leader is a pretty lonely life, especially when you carry the secret of being transgender. All that said, I describe what I see, and I say what I think. And I don’t say or do anything so you’ll be my friend. I also won’t toe the party line when we’re losing lives. I’ll say that we’re losing lives, and tell you why I think we’re losing them. And in this case, I believe that in conjunction with the bullying and hate, we are losing lives by forcing transgender people into male and female binary facilities to appease the transsexual end of the transgender spectrum. Why are we doing this instead of fighting to create our own spaces? What are you afraid of? Are you afraid to fight? Are you afraid of being out? Do you expect other people to fight for you?
Do you know what gives me hope each day as the actions of the old guard just makes me want to slit my wrists? It’s the young people who are changing academia by stripping down those male and female signs of the binary and creating safe, neutral spaces. These are the real heroes of the transgender community, the unsung ones.
Join me in the fight to build and claim our own spaces. Let’s not only challenge the binary system, let’s rebuild it. Let’s do things like get building codes changed so that all future buildings have gender-neutral restrooms and private locker rooms. Let’s get those male and female signs torn off the walls where single-occupancy restrooms exist. And let’s get family restrooms built where multi-occupancy male and female bathrooms exist now.
Let’s be clear. This conversation isn’t about “sending the trans kid to the nurse’s bathroom” like the Republicans want to do. Rather, this conversation is about saving the lives of transgender kids. These kids are having to exist in the moment, but the people giving advice and calling the shots got to grow up in stealth. If this means changing the party line to end the expectation for them to use binary facilities because of the expectations built into the transsexual pathway, then so be it. Get over it, and yourself – this isn’t about you. Lives are more important than your binary vanity. This conversation also isn’t about sending all trans people to the “other bathroom.” It’s about creating separate spaces that are equal, safe, and private for everyone, spaces we created, our spaces. If we do this right, when we finish everyone will be in the “other” bathroom at the finish line. All parties will have respect and privacy. Cisgender women in a single-occupancy bathroom won’t be able to bitch about sharing it with “men” (read transgender women). And cisgender men and women won’t be able to complain about transgender people being perverts either. Private, single-occupancy spaces are the sole solution to protecting everyone. And it requires compromise from all parties to make that happen. Are you part of the solution, or are you part of the problem?
