Florida’s Anti-Trans Bathroom Law Spurs Harrowing Vigilante Attacks

jeffw@lemmy.worldmod to News@lemmy.world – 202 points –
Florida’s Anti-Trans Bathroom Law Spurs Harrowing Vigilante Attacks
thedailybeast.com
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The solution is so simple to me. Please explain why we can't just have gender neutral bathrooms with actually private stalls/changing rooms and just a shared handwashing area?

Because none of this is actually about bathroom privacy. It's about an excuse to hate and fear the other.

Bathroom bills don't even seem like they increase bathroom privacy. The only passable justification (which still relies on demonstrably false assumptions and in fact completely backfires in practice) is to "protect women" from "predators".

In reality, trans people are less likely to be predators than cis, and bathroom bills primarily serve to increase the number of cis people being accosted in bathrooms because they don't look "normal" enough. So it's still completely unjustifiably stupid. But it's the only justification that even makes any sense at the outset even when you believe the fear mongering lies.

Eh. The vast majority of feminists I know regularly complain that they don't feel safe being around men.

They use rhetoric similar to racists by saying men are more likely to commit acts of violence than women, so it's okay to discriminate against them.

When you say things like this is it a Strawoman or a Straw-woman or Strawperson? I feel like there isn't a good way to spell it.

Because that costs more to install per toilet.

Money is why you cannot have privacy, safety, or a better experience.

Because women don't like going to the bathroom with men.

So don't. It's a different room, enclosed off from all others. Like a bathroom is intended to be and, indeed, is like, in just about every other civilized country in the world.

So I guess now we need our own vigilantes to keep those other vigilantes in check. Should have purged the remnants of the Confederacy back in 1865, no amnesty for traitors.

Fuck Florida.

It's Republicans, not Florida. Just take a look around the country.

It's Christianity and always has been. You can't have a minority be left in peace and distinct in a Christian country. Their book tells them that there is only one way to live, only one way to salvation, only one truth. When you have such a radical monotheistic view of humanity the unavoidable result will be to murder the Other. Any follower of Christ who claims to be tolerant is at best inconsistent at worse bidding their time.

This isn't about Florida. This is about the Republicans becoming the Nazis, and needing minorities to demonize.

This garbage is happening in other red states too; Florida is just ahead of the curve.

Fuck Florida. Fuck Tennessee. Fuck every red state harming people. Fuck the GOP. Fuck Israel. Fuck 'em. I'm not blind to this being a rightwing problem.

This makes me so sad.

Thank goodness I’ll be out of this horrorshow state soon.

Easy solution... no more gendered bathrooms.

Women won't go for it.

We should really normalize unisex bathrooms.

I don't care what you've got in your pants, I just want to fucking pee. Or I very, very badly need to poop. Do whatever you need to with changing diapers or taking your toddler to the bathroom, I don't care.

The fact that we have different bathrooms points to a societal problem. Men need to keep their hands to themselves, and all we do by having separate bathrooms is perpetuate the idea that men will assault women in bathrooms.

Something like 80 years ago there were no gender specific bathrooms. It was just, The Bathroom

I just made a comment how the protest solution is simple. Sledgehammer the urinals and then all bathrooms are genderless...

Do that more than once and I almost guarantee the establishment says "fuck it, we're not replacing those again"

Oh good, any cis-woman who happens to look more on the masculine side will be in trouble now too.

Edit: Added cis. Apologies for not doing that.

This is something I'm kind of scared of. I'm a cis woman, but I have facial hair for medical reasons. I keep it because it's what nature gave me and I kinda like how it looks, and people generally don't seem to care. I do fear, though, that I might be harassed for it someday.

I thought of this with the whole Planet Fitness fiasco. Many, many women shave their faces, but the "can always tell" crowd is so sure that they know men from women.

One of my wife's cis co-workers has a mustache. She definitely would look like "a man in a dress" to these bigoted fucks. She probably already gets harassed all the time, which is awful because she's really nice and loves working with the public (she's a librarian).

Yeah, I’m a trans woman and my girlfriend is cis but she has way more body hair than me because of our ethnicities. She’s probably safe because she has the body type of a Paleolithic fertility idol, but these people aren’t rational and that’s scary.

Like I’m also scared for myself, but I’ve been living with that fear for myself for my entire adult life, so I’m used to it.

Oh they have been. And because masculine cis women outnumber trans women guess who’s going to be persecuted more by raw quantity

Excuse me sir, we are required to check for penises and vaginas at the door. Thanks for understandi...dang dog! Is that thing 12 inches?

Pretty impressive to have a 12-inch vagina! Congratulations!!

Fuck it. New protest...

Take a sledge hammer to every urinal... all bathrooms are gender neutral now.

Any wonder LGBT folks are one of the largest gun buying demographics in the past few years? Ain't that something?

Just put enough stalls there aswell as urinals and make it gender neutral. Most men don't care about women in their bathrooms anyway. It's - as demonstrated by this article - women that care. Wether it be gender neutral bathrooms or trans athletes it's almost exclusively biological women that are the only ones with something to lose.

Where I go swimming there's almost always female staff doing cleaning in the men's locker and shower rooms and nobody gives a damn. Good luck putting a male cleaner in the female shower space though.

Armed queers bash back.

SocialistRA.org

I fuck hate guns but I am starting to understand it now. I am not a member of the LGBT but if I were I might consider going around armed.

One thing to keep in mind is armed allies keep the persecuted safe and ensure that the vigilantes stop before the moral panic moves to something they are