Does it only require a person to state that they identify as a certain gender or are there others? X amount of time as such.. Legal change from one to the other...

Etc... Etc...

on hormones.

... who still identifies as the opposite gender but isn't willing to go the hormone or surgery route?7

them. Really the only ones who don't have a medical condition that contraindicates hormone use.

Having said all that if a trans person wasn't using hormones and could pass or nearly pass as the opposite sex, yes as well.

Generally the physician writes the letter as to state jane doe has been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and part of her treatment is to live and work as the opposite sex blah blah blah.

"you need to get right with God." I often imagine what my life could have been if I hadn't been forced to live it in misery because of poverty and the stupid ass bigotry in the Bible Belt.

Any man can go into women's locker room if he says he identifies as a woman.

and struts into the wrong bathroom has a lot less legal footing than a trans woman. If they ask the trans woman why she's in the wrong bathroom and she doesn't have a letter but has been treated for being trans with hormones and/or surgeries well that's still more proof that she's in there because of her identity and not to harass other women.

Of course there is a question of if walking into the wrong locker room or bathroom by itself and just doing your business as ordinary without leering, flirting, peeping, exposing yourself unnecessarily is even illegal. It probably isn't (especially with bathrooms), though it certainly would violate cultural norms and likely get you thrown out. Think about it - walk into wrong bathroom or locker room by mistake. Illegal? Doubt it. Walk into wrong bathroom with a child (or child is wrong gender) or disabled person. Illegal? Doubt it. Go charging into the wrong bathroom faster than Usain Bolt because you're about to poop your pants or hack your guts out. Illegal? Doubt it. Of course police can come up with generic charges like disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace as well (not that these are big deals, just fines usually).

It's the leering/peeping/exposing yourself unnecessarily part that's illegal. If a gay man was harassing other men in the men's room it would be illegal too... it would just be harder to prove because he's not violating any cultural norms being there.

Really though trust me, the last person you should be worried about harassing you is a trans woman. A very high percentage of us are lesbians but most of us are terrified of police. Police treat us like shit because they're usually ultra conservative men (and what more disgusting to them than a "man" who doesn't want to be a man) and often try to put us in men's jails or in administrative segregation. I've never seen the inside of a jail cell or even known another trans woman who has but it still frightens the hell out of me.

use isn't solely based on what gender one identifies with, but also with how one is dressed.

The club's membership agreement probably gives them wide latitude to cancel her membership for being irritating.

A clinical threshold is passed when concerns, uncertainties, and questions about gender identity persist in development, become so intense as to seem to be the most important aspect of a person's life, or prevent the establishment of a relatively unconflicted gender identity. The person's struggles are then variously informally referred to as a gender identity problem, gender dysphoria, a gender problem, a gender concern, gender distress, or transsexualism.

Such struggles are known to be manifested from the preschool years to old age and have many alternate forms.

These forms come about by various degrees of personal dissatisfaction with sexual anatomy, gender demarcating body characteristics, gender roles, gender identity, and perceptions of others.

If a decision is made to make a transition then something like this is required


1) legal age met to make decisions

2) 12 months of continuous hormonal therapy for those without a medical contraindication

3) 12 months of successful continuous full time real-life experience. Periods of returning to the original gender may indicate ambivalence about proceeding and should not be used to fulfill this criterion. (This seems to indicate use of the restrooms, locker rooms of the transitions target gender, would be expected)

4) necessary psychotherapy to deal with the experiences of the real life trial.

5) knowledge of the cost, required lengths of hospitalizations, likely complications, and post surgical rehabilitation requirements of various surgical approaches.

6) awareness of different competent surgeons

I think most folks concerns would be with someone who decided yesterday and they feel entitled to use the new locker room.

much other than fear and bigotry acquired from prejudicial myths they picked up informally

... but rather would be using the tolerant policy to get their jollies...

is that a -real- person or just one of those pretend people upon whom doubts are projected in a discussion?

and who identify as male but would pretend to identify as female just to be able to go into the women's locker room and see naked women. I wonder about that myself.

I don't see it as a slight against a transgendered person, it's more of a critique against certain hetero males, though I can see that it might be taken as a "concern" that is used to not allow someone who identifies as female into a women's locker room.

I don't think the poster meant anything negative by it, which seems to be what you are getting at.

"surgical transition" is not required for legal gender change here in the UK, for instance. And surgery is both very expensive and frequently less than optimal; a neo-vagina requires dilation for the rest of one's life, for instance, and a constructed penis frequently has functional issues; there's also potential loss of sensation and such, some surgery is possibly recommended, hysterectomy and oophectomy for trans men, and orchidectomy for trans women, but full genital reconstruction surgery is something that a lot of trans people choose not to have. (The idea that "you're not a *real* trans person if you don't have/don't want SRS" is kind of generally wrong and cisnormative.)

required in quite a few US states, unfortunately. Some states demand it before they will - for instance - change a birth certificate (some amend, some will reissue).

The problem is no clear set of rules from state to state. It has less to do with the perception of the individual and much more to do with the perception of the rule-makers.

(An fyi - my son recently completed a successful surgical series for a complete phalloplasty - in London. He had originally leaned toward oophectomy, but after research and consultation with his surgeons, opted to go the whole way. It has worked out very well and yes, luck always has something to do with it - but he's very happy with the result. Everyone's mileage varies, but I think that you are expressing the most conservative options. Techniques are improving every day).

Mind-Your-Own-Business, as Ann Landers or Dear Abby might say.

I strive to accept people on their own word and it always makes me sad when they (very rarely) violate my trust.

Let me be explicit. I grew up in a culture of casual and occasionally artistic nudity. There are naked pictures of me on the internet. Back when Costco was still developing film the photo clerks got an eyefull of my naked self because I'd brought one of my film cameras to the river and my wife had taken pictures knowing that I mostly develop my own film.

Oops...

I saw great grandmas naked on a few occasions...

Do your tits hang low?

Do they wobble to and fro?

Can you tie them in a knot? Can you tie them in a bow?

Can you toss them over your shoulder ...

using the bathroom the transitioning person identifies with seems to me to be part of the expectation

I imagine getting clocked by the unaccepting is surely one of the hard things about transitioning

guess that this became policy to fight fat shaming. Which really makes sense to me, anyway, because the people who one would want to attract as customers would be everyone, including those who might be afraid to be embarrassed by other customers.

All someone has to do is to say they identify as a woman.

permitted in which areas of their club.

They are very cool in dismissing this woman's irrational fears and phobias and in canceling her membership. She is free to choose another workout facility that perhaps more closely reflects her narrow minded views.

I won't exactly shriek 'go team' and hang a Pride flag on their front door, but this contemporary view is to be embraced as the norm rather than the exception.

and it may not be in business much longer.

Gender identity is much more complex than you will admit. And the woman who was shunned exhibited creepy, disruptive, and obsessive behavior by coming back to the gym day after day specifically to shame one individual. She violated the terms of her membership and was rightly banned.

More importantly, compassion in the area of gender identity is not mutually exclusive with economic equity. In fact, the two are related — and are deeply held progressive values.

You're the one in the minority here.

But, you seemed to have filled in the gaps, so to speak. She (the woman complaing) never said anything about "dangling genitals" what she did say was:

the trans woman she was sharing a locker room with looked too much like a man.

“He looked just like a man,” Cormier told WNEM. “He did not look like a woman.” She did, however, want to make clear that she has “no issue with the LGBT community and fully understands the issue surrounding gender identity.”

But, she also said that when “a person walks into a women’s locker room and, in appearance, presents themselves like a man, the initial reaction is to think that there’s a man in the women’s locker room.”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/03/planet-fitness-drops-member-who-complained-about-manly-trans-woman-in-locker-room/

I wonder how she would of reacted if any of the females from Meg Allan's Butch exhibition walked into the locker room?

?format=750w

It is amazing the lengths some go to discriminate (or make excuses for it) against transgender people or even peoples' appearances.

the picture I posted is of a CIS woman, as are all the participants in the exhibition that I linked to above.

It really goes to that idea we were taught as children: don't judge a book by it's cover.

what does it stand for?

Short.

With your post except that violence against women 'all over the world' is irrelevant to this particular issue in my opinion anyway and I would also point out that men are are the majority victims of violence. I do agree and think this woman was right to complain though.

It's time for some late night pizza, methinks.

US Americans and some of the other telltale signs. Sounds like her, anyhow.

I despise that they are allowed to be so overtly bigoted nowadays. The other day a poster said the GLBT community were making people hate us with all our demands for equal rights. They said we were causing a backlash for marriage equality. They must have had their head in the sand before marriage equality. It's not backlash. It's more of the same lash from the same bigots. There are far too many bigoted posts on DU nowadays. No wonder most of the GLBT community and the AA community and so many others have left already or are in the process of leaving.

I'm thinking about it too. If I wanted to hear bigotry all the time, I could just step out into the Bible Belt here where I live for that kind of hatred. Don't need to see it on DU too. I'm glad there are good people around too, who see the bigotry for what it is. Thanks for your post.

We are terrribly sorry you were not satisfied with your experience here. Would you like a $5 gift certificate for taco Bell by way of compensation for your time?

Farewell, Exhibit A, you will be missed.

on a Saturday morning. The lack of reading ability (or, more accurately, reading things into the article that it does not say) is not exactly a shining example of "serious think(ing)" on your part.

Hold it until they get to a bathroom approved by you?

Ban them from the library, obviously.

Hold it? Stay home? Piss somewhere in public?

Just like the homeless. And anyone else they hate.

It just makes me sick to see so much of it here. This used to be such a great place.

What happened is that a man walked into the women's locker room. The woman who was already in the locker room correctly identified a male-bodied person as a man, and objected, which is exactly what one should expect in such a situation. We have sex-segregated spaces that involve partial or total nudity specifically to protect women from male violence, which, if you haven't noticed, remains extremely common all over the world.

Are you seriously applauding a woman being punished for recognizing a male body when she sees it and knowing that a male body is a threat to her wellbeing, especially when that man has already indicated he has no respect for women's boundaries by forcing his way into a space where they are supposed to be safe from men? What kind of gaslighting bullshit is this?

"Pay no attention to the dangling genitals! I IDENTIFY as a woman, so you're a bigot for even thinking my male anatomy is male."

Eventually this kind of stupidity is going to destroy what remains of the political left in this country, and you're willing participants in that destruction when you allow yourself to be distracted by this kind of foolishness instead of the urgent and essential concerns of politics: economic issues. Politics is not about men pretending to be women. It's all about how resources are distributed. And while you halfwits are demanding that men in dresses be accepted as women because they say they "feel like" women, we are slipping back into a feudal system that makes serfs of the 99%. This is, of course, exactly what the 1% want. They want you distracted by bullshit so you can't fight them on the issues that actually matter.

I suspect that the complainer would have objected to them as well.

There's something awfully familiar about that hidden post. I'm pretty sure that person's been here before. Repeatedly.

:bowdown:

yes INDEED

Last edited Sun Mar 8, 2015, 06:55 PM - Edit history (1)

with male genitals who entered women's bathrooms and locker rooms actually did identify as a woman.

But we know that's not the case. Straight men do assault women in these public spaces. So what is a solution that will keep all women safe -- including transwomen?

http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Police-Warn-of-Attempted-Rapes-in-Downtown-LA-Restrooms-286162531.html

Police on Tuesday were alerting the public to be aware of their surroundings after three men were arrested in connection with a series of attempted rapes in women's restrooms in downtown Los Angeles.

There have been three attempted sexual assaults in the past two months in downtown LA restrooms. Police believe the men have either hidden inside restrooms or forced their way in, police said.

SNIP

In the office buildings where the incidents took place, changes were made to make the restrooms more secure and inaccessible to outsiders.

The story you linked to — about attempted assaults — and transgender people.

they see a person with the physical appearance of a man in a private space reserved for women.

Transwomen don't always physically transition and could appear to be male. And men in the ladies room can be a threat.

Honestly, now: if you had a 9 year old daughter and you escorted her to the ladies -- only to watch a person who appeared to be an adult male go through the door first -- would you let your daughter follow the person in, so that they'd be alone in the restroom together? Or would you tell her she should wait till the male-looking person came out?

There are some very masculine-looking women who were born physically as women. Are they a threat too?

It was about a person with a male body who identifies as a female.

how can someone know?

Where in either article did you read the other woman didn't transition? I must have missed that part. What I didn't miss, but you seemingly have missed...again..., is the complainer thought the other woman wasn't "female looking" enough.

Anyone who doesn't look feminine enough can be taken aside and asked to either produce their birth certificate or drop their pants so that any dangly bits are located and sent off to the mens loos. Anyone who gets through the first checkpoint has to deal with the secondary checkpoint set up by the fashion police where anyone wearing lycra or colours that don't work well together get turned away or sent to the back of the queue.

Or.....women who need to go to the loo but who have the overwhelming urge to know what's inside everyone elses undies can just mind their own fucking business. Yeah, this second one works for me.

just to make sure. The preoccupation with genitalia is amazing. As you say, those "... who have the overwhelming urge to know what's inside everyone else's undies can just mind their own fucking business. Yeah, this second one works for me."

vanishingly small as to be irrelevant. If you frequent trans womens message boards or reddits you will see countless "which bathroom do I use?" or "I'm scared shitless to use the women's room and I can't use the men's one any more because some dude started yelling at me" posts. And no one would endorse a non-transitioning woman to use the women's room.

I know more than my fair share of trans women who are post transition and even then go out of their way to avoid bathrooms and locker rooms as much as possible (ie they change at home, go to the gym without using the locker room, then go home to change). I used to do this (now I have workout equipment at home so don't need to), even though I haven't had anyone think I was a man since Bush's reign of error. :p

Anyway. I'm interested in hearing solutions to this issue. Having legit trans women use the men's bathrooms and locker rooms is obviously a non-starter, but rather than just complain let's find an actual solution here.

Last edited Sat Mar 7, 2015, 09:46 AM - Edit history (1)

many react with primordial instincts as a first thought with a fight or flight reaction. That, I don't think is going to change for many because it's an ingrained sense. ... that said, I think what is helpful is the increased visibility transsexuals now have. I think it's something many have not thought about, but with improved communications it can now be a topic of enlightenment and hopefully more sensitivity that everyone is not exactly the same in life in many many ways.

there is certainly more tolerance I could still get assaulted or fired if I did out myself.

They understand the issue.

Unfortunately, the number of women attacked in restrooms by straight men isn't vanishingly small.

what is the solution to trans women needing to take a piss? Third bathrooms? All one toilet bathrooms with locks? Or?

No more urinals. It wouldn't matter if sinks were gender-neutral.

"the number of women attacked in restrooms by straight men isn't vanishingly small..."

By how much and by what measure will the current policy of the club affect this number?

Once she consulted with the gym's management and discovered that the other woman is transgender, her discomfort at the possibility of a sexually violent man lurking in a women's locker room should have dissipated. It did not. This was not the fault of the other woman, nor was it a problem that the other woman should be expected to correct as she did nothing wrong.

the management's decision. I can understand her having concerns at first, but she persisted, that, crossed the line for me.

And this is the harassing behavior that got her kicked out. It happened well after she was informed, and had absolutely nothing to do with safety.

the person was a transgendered woman, and that shoul have been that. Instead, though, she spent the next several days pestering other women and complaining to them about that member, which would have been both annoying to other members and harassment against her gossip target.