gxesio: bitter-and-blonde: bathroom sign at hampshire college :) #transgender acceptance Actually, I
gxesio:bitter-and-blonde:bathroom sign at hampshire college :)#transgender acceptanceActually, I’m a trans* Hampshire student and these signs have caused us significantly more problems than the policy we had before. We used to have gender-neutral bathrooms all over campus and now there are tons of buildings with only binary gendered bathrooms. The problem with the phrasing is that now, by entering the bathroom, you are declaring that you self-identify in a certain way. When someone is non-binary or questioning their gender, it can become incredibly uncomfortable to enter a bathroom that says “By entering this bathroom you identify as a man.”The trouble is bathroom genders is that it doesn’t matter how you identify when it comes to if someone else in that bathroom is going to harass you. I was in a building on campus without an all-gender bathroom and I had been getting misread as a man when I really did not identify that way in that moment and had been insisting I wasn’t but was ignored, with all that stress I really wanted to just go splash water on my face and calm down. Unfortunately, the building only had binary bathrooms. I certainly was not going to enter the “self-identified men” bathroom and declare myself as identifying as a man when all I wanted in that moment was to get away from people telling me I’m a man when I didn’t feel it. So I went into the other bathroom, the self-identified women room. I splashed my face with water a few times and then a (I presume) women leaves a stall and when she sees me she gets really furious! She asks me what I’m doing in the bathroom and I tell her I’m splashing water on my face but she didn’t care how I identified she read me as a man and didn’t want me in the bathroom. She actually pushed me out of the bathroom (with her unwashed hands after being in a bathroom stall) and then out of the building! For a trans woman who doesn’t pass, it doesn’t matter if she identifies a a woman, the bathroom is still unsafe for her if she is misread. An all-gender bathroom is safer for all trans* people because nobody will question your presence in the bathroom. These signs have not helped in making bathrooms safer for trans* people.And for non-binary identified people, it is a stricter enforcement of the gender binary. You can sometimes just say “Well the bathroom has a picture of a person on it but just because they’re not wearing a dress in the silhouette doesn’t mean it has to reflect on me if I go in here” but with these signs you’re forced to decide between two identities you must “self-identify” as in order to enter. It makes cis people feel like they’re doing good while doing harm. All-gender bathrooms are needed in every building in the same way women’s bathrooms are needed. Gendered bathrooms are not safe for trans* people unless they are very good at passing and very binary identified. -- source link
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