Fears around gender-neutral toilets are all in the mind | Paris Lees

Research from the US reveals that trans women are nearly twice as likely to suffer sexual violence as other women: having reported such crimes, they are also considerably more likely to go on and experience violence from the police. Here’s another fact for you: 48% of young trans people in Britain have attempted suicide. Not “thought about”. Attempted. But who cares about facts and figures on the violence and discrimination trans people face when we could just talk about people’s imagined fears instead? …

The horrible truth is that, if a man wants to assault a woman, he can do so anywhere. The idea that making toilets gender-neutral puts women at risk is a classic “slippery slope” argument. Where’s the evidence? If Flint has proof that gender-neutral toilets put women at risk, I’m all ears. If not, I’m rather bored by people such as her playing devil’s advocate and whipping up unnecessary panic. Trans women like me have been using female toilets for decades without causing anyone any problems whatsoever. If you’re living in Britain in 2016 you have almost certainly used a public toilet at the same time as a trans person and not even realised. It doesn’t have to be a big deal unless you make it one.

Read the whole article here.

7 Ideas For A Gender-Neutral Bathroom Icon

Fastcodesign asked six designers for gender-neutral bathroom icons.

Here are some of them.

More here.

Radical Feminists and Conservative Christians Team Up Against Transgender People

Good write-up by The Daily Beast on how extremist transphobic “radical feminists” (who are neither radical nor real feminists) feed the extremist right-wing attacks on transgender people.

Jay Michaelson writes:

…maybe TERFs [trans-exclusionary radical feminists] and religious culture warriors aren’t that different after all. Both have a rigid definition of what constitutes gender – one based on universalizing their own experience, the other based on a narrow interpretation of religious dogma. Both claim to be protecting women, but do so at the expense of (other) vulnerable populations. And both find themselves on the political extremes, one on the left, the other on the right. Maybe anti-trans theocrats and anti-trans radicals have more in common than it would seem.

Illustration by Kelly Caminero

Cops caught on video harassing lesbian inside womens’ bathroom thinking she’s a man

Artura Garcia over at Raw Story writes about the lesbian woman who where thrown out of a women’s bathroom as the police believed she was a transgender woman.

This is what the transphobic bathrooms laws leads to.

“This is a girl, and you guys are harassing her because she’s a d*ke,” the person filming the encounter can be heard saying, as the footage shows a woman wearing a red shirt, scarf, and black cap being questioned by the officers.
“You’re a man?” a male officer asks.
“I’m a f*cking female,” the woman in the cap replies. “Do I have to tell you again?”
“You have ID?” the officer asks. When she says she does not, he orders her out, then pushes her toward the exit. A second officer is then heard calling her, “Sir,” causing the person filming to protest, “That is a f*cking girl.”