all the trans bathroom bans have this awful tendency to push the overton window of even trans advocacy by trans people to the right
so many trans people now are focused on pleading to let trans women use women’s restrooms and to let trans men use men’s restrooms that I feel like the demand that was much more prominent even 5 years ago to construct non-segregated accessible bathrooms for everyone is almost nonexistent
I remember when trans advocacy around bathrooms involved points like:
- the issue with sexual assault is the sexual assault, and it’s wrong no matter where it takes place and no matter what genders of people are involved
- not every trans person is a man or a woman and they also need places to relieve themselves.
- people of all genders need assistance with relieving themselves and the people who assist them may be any gender. this applies for babies, young children, disabled people of all ages, people who are incapacitated by substance use, sickness, or injury, etc. It is ridiculous to expect people to only be able to relieve themselves if the person they trust to help them is their same gender
- gender segregation of public space tells men that they are not expected to treat women with respect. this does not reduce misogynist sexual violence, it further naturalizes it.
people in the notes are discussing this same trend happening with discourse around sexgender segregated sports and legal sexgender markers on ID. absolutely.
this is also happening with trans healthcare. puberty blockers used to be a compromise! the original demand was for adolescents to have bodily autonomy over what kind of puberty to experience. then cis people fearmongered about kids not being old enough to know their gender, and so there was an effort to be like “okay well for kids who need more time before puberty, we can use this already existing treatment to delay puberty.” now cis people fearmonger about the puberty blockers.
there is no way to meet in the middle and have that result in any move to the left. discourse around every single trans issue has moved to the right. this strategy of compromise is actively failing.