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The Strange Erasure of Women’s Rights
“Never pass up a clean, safe bathroom” is one of the timeless rules, especially in female life. Yesterday, my husband and I were at the Maine College of Art together, looking at an exhibit, and we decided to use the restrooms before leaving. Down a corridor, we found two of them. One was labeled “Men” and the other was labeled “All Genders.”
Got that? There weren’t two all-gender bathrooms, nor three — a men’s, a women’s, and an all-gender. Nope. The only choice that I, as a woman, was offered was a bathroom in which a man (any man, not just a man who identified as a woman) was expressly permitted to enter into and share with me.
As it happens, I am quite accustomed to sharing bathrooms and much else with men. I work in a predominately male field, after all. And beside, I’m 55 years old and the mother of six, three of whom are men. So it’s hard for any bathroom arrangement to make me uncomfortable.
But what if I was an 18-year-old art student? Or maybe the 11-year-old daughter of another gallery visitor?
Wayyyyy back in the mists of time, when being a feminist meant advocating for the Equal Rights Amendment, the Stop-ERA anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafley conjured dark and (I thought) absurd visions of a future in which laws protecting women would be abandoned.
As one educational site sneeringly describes Schlafly’s points: “Those opposed to the ERA even suggested that single-sex restrooms would be banished by future courts!”
Modernity being what it is, there are no longer all that many places (or “spaces” as we are now supposed to say) in ordinary life where anatomy matters. Up until recently, however, bathrooms were among these, along with locker rooms at the gym.
And once a female athlete had changed into her gym clothes in the all-female locker room, Title IX meant she could have opportunities to compete at a level earlier generations could only dream of. The result has been a lot of fun and satisfaction for girls and women, and some pretty wonderful play for spectators to enjoy.
The same transgendered movement/fad that found me … um … attending to my personal hygiene needs in an “Any Gender” bathroom has brought chromosomally male athletes into direct competition with the chromosomally female.
“They’re women!” activists insist. “How dare you say otherwise!” But a 20-year-old who has spent two decades as a male does not magically become physiologically female by changing the costume, the name, or the pronouns. Even hormone treatment and surgery can’t change the fact that a transgendered soccer player, say, is going to have a significant advantage in size and strength over a soccer player who has been a girl all her life. There have already been instances in which female athletes have been defeated and even hurt in competition with stronger, heavier transgendered opponents.
Naturally (and I use the term deliberately) the same is not true of female-to-male athletes; even a lightweight mixed martial arts champ like Conor MacGregor isn’t going to get stomped by a fighter who grew up female in the way Tamikka Brents was defeated — and badly injured — by the transgendered Fallon Fox.
There are scholars now suggesting that having separate teams for males and females is simply sexism; all teams should be co-ed. The proponents of such schemes do not appear to be jocks. I suspect it’s an idea that sounds fine to academics who, at most, might occasionally play pick-up softball with other middle-aged desk-potatoes. But forcing Venus Williams to compete against male tennis players would mean, simply, that Williams would lose. And instead of watching (and marveling at) her superb play, we would all end up watching … men.
Perhaps the theorists and advocates genuinely don’t realize that the losers in this utopian scenario will be, inevitably, women. Yes, there may be a few top female athletes who make it onto their high school co-ed soccer team, but girls who aren’t superb but merely good (and enthusiastic) players will find their opportunities constrained and even the great female athletes will be stymied. Again.
Just the way they were back in the day, when if you wanted to compete at a high level in just about any sport, you pretty much had to be male. When it comes to the utopian visions of the social justice crowd, notice who ends up with the short end of the stick?
My husband might be disconcerted to find himself sharing a bathroom with a woman, but he wouldn’t feel threatened. Our daughter would feel threatened, for the very good reason that she might actually be threatened. But guess who is expected to take one for the team? The co-ed team, that is. The one she would not have been able to play for in the high school of progressives’ dreams because, although she was a good soccer player, she wasn’t as strong and fast as even the merely pretty-good boys.
Is it “unconscious sexism” that makes the advocates for social justice fail to notice that women are already being victimized by all the virtue being slopped about? I thought about this when reading of the recent sharp increase in sexual violence against women in Europe.
Though the governments of the affected countries did their level best to conceal the fact, the perpetrators of these crimes were overwhelmingly foreign-born men; members of the wave of migrants that has washed over the continent in the past couple of years. Contrary to popular impression, most of these migrants were not refugees or legitimate asylum seekers. The majority were economic migrants, mostly unattached young men. This may or may not make a difference in how you feel about whether the welcome Europeans extended has been a moral necessity or an act of continental suicide.
But what we might want to notice is that it is women and girls — along with LGBTQ and Jewish Europeans — who have been put at risk; women and girls who have been asked to sacrifice their own well-being in order to provide a refuge for men who might not even have been endangered.
Helpful authorities have offered women and girls paternalistic advice about, you know, dressing more modestly so as not to provoke the rapists. Why does that somehow sound familiar?
Young women might not know this, but anyone my age or older knows that it took a long time, and a lot of effort to gain the power and possibilities that American and European women now enjoy. Does it strike anyone else as odd and ominous that new calls for social justice seem to require compromising women’s basic safety without which it shall be difficult for us to enjoy the rights and responsibilities we fought so hard for?
Published in Culture
Note, the split of transgenders favors about 80% male-to-female transgenders over female-to-male. The Men’s Bathroom and All-Gender Bathroom is a glossed over demonstration of that.
Kate,
Truly blind leftwing ideology is the fount of stupidity. Everything they touch they screw up. Thanks for this prime example.
Regards,
Jim
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
Let me be the little devil on your shoulder, Kate.
Do you want to get your revenge on those who stole your bathroom? Get your hands on one of these bad-boys and plaster it over the “all-genders” sign:
The term “Unisex” is now considered irredeemably benighted; it’s mere presence will drive them into conniptions! Mwa-ha-ha-ha!
I find it interesting that supporting transgenders wholeheartedly as their supposed feelings say is touted as science, yet little study is actually performed. A disparity like this should call for deeper study, but instead it’s not even addressed. It would imply to me in part that this is less to do about science and more about issue advocacy. But that’s me.
They really haven’t thought it through. If you point out that this endangers women’s sports, they’ll say that there’s nothing to worry about. They think that no men would claim to be trans just to get to compete in women’s sports. But why is it that a man wouldn’t do that? Because of the stigma associated with being trans. And what are they trying to get rid of? The stigma associated with being trans. If they are successful in getting society to believe there’s absolutely nothing wrong with switching genders at any time, there’s absolutely nothing to stop a competitive male from deciding he’s better off as a female, at least until the season is over. And if they think that men aren’t that competitive or that women will be able to hold their own athletically? The reality of it will be a brutal shock to their worldview.
Yet how many times have we ‘witnessed’ a very slender woman beating up a man on NCIS, etc.? I don’t care how much she has studied martial arts, the scenes I’ve seen are just not plausible. Are we being conditioned to think the impossible is really commonplace?
You see you are trying to use logic when the only thing that counts is how he/she feels. Bigot.
I’m not sure I believe they are thinking even that far ahead.
Nice article. I held a door this morning and the lady thanked me. Just like old times.
I have read (but I don’t have a citation to back up the claim) that single-sex washrooms were one the very first victories of the early feminist movement.
Prior to World War I, single-sex washrooms were a rarity, especially in workplaces. Separate washrooms were one the primary demands of the suffragettes.
Mis,
Stupidity is the primary demand of the SJW.
Regards,
Jim
FIFY James…
I doubt it. I suspect they will simply claim it happened the way always thought it would, regardless of reality.
Having their own bathrooms in public buildings was a major event for the women’s movement. Those first ladies’ rooms were in Selfridge’s department store in London:
I think women of all ages should have a private space to retire to when they need one.
Without that security, women will experience unnecessary anxiety.
Public restrooms, if they cannot be built in sets of threes instead of twos, should have floor-to-ceiling stalls within them.
Really good observation, a glimpse of the underlying absurdity of the extreme feminist or whatever they are now, position, but the whole thing was just off base even when most women were highly sympathetic to feminist issues. American women were among the most privileged people in the history of mankind. Of course nothing was perfect, thats kind of the point of freedom under good law, everything is always changing and with freedom eventually in positive directions. What those changes are is seldom obvious but the things these modern gender warriors want are obviously warped if not down right sick.
I hereby suggest that whenever someone provides the citation for something another Ricochetter has only “heard about somewhere”, that we call it Marcisplaining.
;-)
Gold,
Not to argue the point too finely, but when raw virtue signaling is transformed directly into government policy the results invariably are pure stupidity.
Regards,
Jim
This is what no one has ever been able to explain. All the changes and confusion about bathrooms doesn’t actually solve anyone’s problem or protect someone’s neglected rights. What it does is further radicalize everyday life. It’s a foil against which a new form of bigotry can be defined and publicly denounced.
I have been trying to figure out a way to make this point delicately for months now.
Sigh.
What I am really worried about is a return to the days of toxic shock syndrome (TSS). I am surprised that the western world’s pediatricians and gynecologists have been mute on this problem that will surely make a comeback with unisex bathrooms.
Three cheers for Marcisplaining!
Excellent post, Kate.
Two observations. My daughter plays varsity soccer, so I’ve watched a lot of high school soccer games. The performance level of the boys versus the girls is amazing: the field looks smaller when the boys play, the speed is far greater, and the impacts are more numerous and more intense. I can’t imagine my daughter, who is as tough a little brawler as a 5’2″ 104 pound 17 year old girl can be, going head to head with the boys — nor anyone else on her team doing so.
Regarding the modern feminism movement, and in particular its view on sexual liberation, I think it’s telling that the message was, essentially, that girls think of sex the way boys think of sex. The call was never for men to discover the emotional investment in sex that women experience; never for guys to elevate sex to a higher plain of responsibility and respect. That wouldn’t have made sense, because men simply aren’t wired that way and couldn’t sustain it. Rather, it was for women to begin treating sex the way men do.
“Feminism” is the best thing that ever happened to men — so far as sex alone is concerned.
The question of what will happen when the second, third and fourth order consequences have made themselves manifest is an interesting one.
I think the present-day #BLM movement is, in part, a reaction of middle-class young black Americans to what are in fact the unrecognized sequelae of previous attempts to create racial justice.
Johnson (et al) pass the Great Society explicitly so as to make up for the hobbling effect of racism and Jim Crow on the ability of black Americans to compete with whites for the good things of modern American life.
The immediate effect is, presumably, that hungry poor people were less hungry…maybe? But the almost-immediate effect is that the black family began to fall apart, and large numbers of black men became unmoored from the civilizing effects of mother-and-fathering and then husband-and-fatherhood. A second-order effect, uneasily explained away (contra Moynihan) as yet more of those nasty effects of white racism.
Public housing projects became cesspools of dysfunction and misery as poor women, paid to be unwed mothers, were unwed mothers. Because unsocialized and uncivilized young men were prone to criminal activity, young black men became strongly associated with danger in the public mind.
So middle-class black men, were then treated with more suspicion by just about everybody—cab drivers, employers, women of all races entering a subway car or an elevator, store detectives, police officers…
And their conclusion was that white people (and non-white people, if they were honest about it) are racist. Are we up to a fourth order effect yet?
Anyway, the response isn’t to go back to the orginal cause and say “Hmmmn. Maybe that wasn’t such a hot idea.” Instead, middle-class black people (all the leaders of #BLM can be so described) decide that the effects are actually the causes, and so their solution is to somehow force people not to be racist.
Hence, my 98% white denomination supporting #BLM and earnestly attempting to make their lily-white selves Not Racist because once that happens, inner city, fatherless black sons of drug addicted mothers will somehow, magically, become happy, functioning American citizens.
So, okay. We change all the women’s rooms in America into “mult-gender” bathrooms. Women (actual ones) react by avoiding public restrooms, going into men’s rooms instead, carrying weapons, coming down with bladder infections and Toxic Shock because they try to hold everything ’til they get home…female police officers, deprived of even the relatively clean safe bathrooms will quit the force… what will the Movement Du Jour be clamoring for at that point? Nothing so simple as Mens Rooms and Women’s Rooms, of course.
We really do get suckered, don’t we? Why were the suffragettes so much smarter?!
I think men and women vary quite a lot from one individual to the next, but in general you’re right. And men do discover the emotional investment in sex …through their relationships with their wives. Women develop their racier side via intimacy with men. At its best, this yin-yang-y dynamic helps both become more fully human.
It has, however, from time immemorial, required accepting and working within the limitations imposed by biological reality. Men don’t get pregnant. Really, that’s pretty much the whole shebang right there (never noticed how sexist the word “shebang” could be in the right context!). It ‘splains (though not Marcisplains) just about everything—why separate bathrooms are a good idea, why a transgendered woman’s problem is upstairs not downstairs, why it is better for women to have strong boundaries around sexual activity even if we sometimes find them too constricting, why fathers are important, why…
well, you get the idea. Or rather, you already had it. Preaching to a baritone choir, here.
As I like to put it: the differences between men and women are explained mostly by gestation.
Kate! Kate! Snap out of it! You sound like one of the most racist agents of the patriarchy — a conservative!
There are (apparently) about four times as many gay men as lesbians too. There was a theory about that—something to do with fetal development that makes males more prone to difficulties and differences, shall we say?
Omigosh!
Thanks, Phil.
Deep breaths. Listen to Cat Stevens. Drink some Kombucha…
I’ve looked for that ratio — of who seeks sex-changes more often — and hadn’t found it, but I assumed it was more often male-to-female than the opposite. I think that makes sense, for reasons having to do with the male sex drive. I suspect cross-dressing is similarly male-dominated. Basically, pretty much every behavioral quirk having to do with sex I would expect to be male-dominated.
That’s probably not a politically-correct observation.
By the way, is it actually true that men think about sex at least once every five minutes?