Wisconsin judge sides with 11-year-old trans girl over her right to use school toilets

GrenadineBombardier@lemmy.ml to politics @lemmy.world – 1149 points –
Judge sides with 11-year-old trans girl over her right to use school toilets
thepinknews.com

A district judge in Wisconsin has sided with an 11-year-old trans girl over her use of the girls’ toilets and temporarily blocked school officials from preventing her access.

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Good lord they are only 11 years old. Who cares what bathroom they use.

Make them all unisex. If it's a large facility with a bunch of stalls or a small facility for only one person, make them all unisex.

I went to a club with only one, huge, unisex bathroom once. It was.. like any other bathroom. Seeing people of the opposite gender wasn't really a concern anyways.

Since it was a rather yuge bathroom for a yuge club, if there was any shenanigans going on there would've been plenty of witnesses to call it out.

There was even one guy who went piss at a urinal, and started to leave without washing his hands. All the other guys started shouting at the guy to was his hands lol.

I support this.

To be fair, there is safety in numbers and consequently I also see a benefit to combining them. I'm a dude, and I would rather walk down a busy pedestrian mall than a sketchy half-empty street or an urban trail on a moonless night.

Same thing with bathrooms. I imagine women feel better in a bathroom where other women and other people are present and aware, vs a nearly empty bathroom where a creep could walk in and isolate them at any moment. I've been to places with large unisex bathrooms (hot springs, spas, etc.) and there's enough people in there that no one is gonna try anything stupid/inappropriate without being immediately noticed. Bathroom troublemakers are a small subset of the universally large group of people who have to use the restroom anyway.

I only support gender-segregated bathrooms because I don't want a bunch of chicks clogging up the mensroom with their slow pissing/shitting/bloody paper towels on the floor. :D I am unreasonable and self-centered, but anyone who has ever been to a concert knows which line is longer.

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Pretty much only conservatives. They're actually pretty obsessed with thinking about children being raped in bathrooms.

We need to separate the bathrooms by function!

Number ones on the left number twos on the right!

Now the problem with that would be that then people would only use the pissing bathroom, because who would want to poop with other people? I sure wouldn't.

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gender neutral bathrooms are the answer here.

most public places have them now, don't get why you can't have one in a school.

In places with large crowds, gender neutral bathrooms (assuming you also mean single-use) don't really work. It causes massive lines.

Not to mention, there's no need. It's a bathroom. Why does anyone care who they pee or poop next to? It seems so silly and arbitrary to me. Just get in, do your thing, wash your hands, and get out. haha

We can have gender neutral bathrooms where we have a shared hand-washing area, and individual stalls. Heck, you can even have cameras pointed towards the sink area if people are so afraid of getting harassed in the bathroom. Gender should not matter when you have individual stalls.

Right? I've been using public restrooms for a long time and I don't recall ever seeing anyone's naughty bits.

..and for me the most ridiculous part of this discussion is that bathrooms have never been a secure space. If some creep wanted to go into a bathroom to harass people, there is literally nothing stopping them. It's not like bathrooms have guarded entrances and now people have a sneaky way to get into a bathroom by pretending to be transgender or something insane like that.

It's literally a manufactured issue to get the GOP electorate terrified, as everything they do is designed to do.

I've been using public restrooms for a long time and I don't recall ever seeing anyone's naughty bits.

I see you've never had the misfortune of using the circular trough-style urinal where everyone is facing each other and peeing into the middle. Thankfully, they are not very common.

From the Horrible Bathroom Hall of Fame, I present the Mathematical Sciences bathroom at the University of Central Florida:

https://imgur.io/gallery/FJvcZ

What is it with the US and making public toilets as weird as possible? Your freaking walls & doors are bad enough but this is like a piss fountain. I'd expect something like this in maybe a swinger / fetish club or something like that.

It's not a urinal, it's for washing your hands. I've mostly ever seen them in factories where you have shifts coming on and off the clock at the same time so they need to be able to handle a high volume of workers.

That said, I'm not a big fan of the piss walls you get in the UK and Ireland. They always feel awkward to me, but I guess if you're used to it...

LOL when I first saw the pic you posted I thought the sink in the middle was for communal pissing

This is what happens when you have theoretical scientists in charge of bathrooms.

Oh you know what? I think I did have those in elementary school. That was a while ago though.

Yes I hate this kind of shit too. It costs less and somehow might be able to pack more pissers, but it's so weird. Maybe unless you're into staring at other people when you're peeing.

Lol! Those are meant for washing your hands, not for pissing. Although I guess I can imagine a scenario where some genius thinks one is a urinal and somehow the idea catches on. Still pretty funny though.

The best compromise for neutrality and efficiency is to keep gender neutral stalls but also retain an area with urinals which will be much quicker for large numbers of men to pass through then using stalls, and also saves water.

The other consideration would be that the stalls will need to be sufficiently screened that people in them don't feel overlooked or vulnerable (I'm looking at you USA with your weird gappy stall building!).

Um I think if we're gonna have urinals, they need to have a divider to completely separate them from the rest of the bathroom area, just so some conservative women don't freak out about the idea of men urinating outside of a closed stall.

But yea the stalls need to have no gaps in them. I hate people just peeking in, especially when I was in k-12 public school.

I went to a mixed bathroom in France and had to walk past bare backsides to get to a stall. I don't want to see one guy's ass let alone a whole row of them.

In the US at least people don't generally have their asses hanging out when using urinals.

That's not really a thing in Europe either. I saw it only once in my life, and that was back in school, from some third or second grader or something.

You're supposed to run down the line and slap those butts.

While cheering about your favorite sportsball team.

I was at a concert at Red Rocks Amphitheatre and they had gender neutral single stall bathrooms with a shared sink area. It was great. Sure, there was a line, but there was going to be one anyway. However, it ensured 100% utilization, when potentially one side would have less than 100% usage when the other has a line. It's ideal for places with large crowds.

(The stalls were also well built basically single rooms, not the shitty American stalls with gaps in them.)

It works perfectly, it's just more expensive to construct. In some Nordic countries there are very few places with bathroom stalls, they either have lots of single-use bathrooms or completely walled-in rooms (wall from ground to roof, regular door) with a toilet and then sinks outside to wash your hands. Works in shopping malls, airports, schools (from small elementary schools to huge high-schools, I've never seen one with stalls). The only exceptions I can think of that have stalls are amusement parks, some sport arenas and (ironically) IKEA.

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I've never understood why I should care where someone else goes to the bathroom anyways.

I also agree with the judge in good faith, however it raises some questions about the authority of the school system. Schools are known to not give kids the amendment rights like them being able to search your backpack or locker and most states have laws that demand that kids go to school which limits their freedoms, we all know why that is, but the judge has barred the school from using this power and gave it to a kid. Someone might go through the verdict and see how reaching this is, but it is interesting.

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Imagine holding in a shit for months as a court determines where you can poop.

Just shit in front of the door. Someone will move it to the correct toilet eventually.

While this is welcome news, it's also depressing that we live in a timeline stupid enough that bathroom panics are enough of a thing that there are laws on the books like this to be struck down by judges (and of course, the fact that other judges are likely to reverse this ruling).

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I keep asking myself this every time the christofascists win a supreme court case.

The majority of US citizens believe in legal abortion but, hey here we are!

Err... this simply isn't true.

Children are fucking brutal and always looking for ways to put others down. Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Remember when we were kids?

Sided with an 11 year old or sided with the law and the 11 year olds rights?

Good point. Shouldn't slaves have just been happy what the majority of people in the south wanted?

This is like the 4th time the state congress has tried pulling this crap and it keeps getting shot down. Meanwhile they don't even consider marijuana legislation even though millions of dollars are going to taxes for other states they have it legalized. So stupid.

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Its not, literally all you have to do is not discriminate.

A little bit of an overreach here.

I'd like it so we can easily see censored content, so we don't have to scour the modlog to see what happened. Is that possible?

I am annoyed with all the deleted high-activity comments as well.

Bet the school will find some small thing coming out of this to attach to that they will claim have endangered/inconvenienced their life somehow.

The obvious solution is to make available an additional bathroom that is universally available to anyone.