Negative Stuff

Gender Segregation in Sports, Bathrooms, and Prisons

This isn't a complaint or anything, but... well, I've placed that sort of thing on here before, and I don't think this quite fits in my "Random (Funny) Stuff" book.

I'd like to have a discussion about gender segregation. As you all are probably aware, I support LGBT+/DGO despite being conservative and Christian. This includes transgender and other gender orientations beyond the typical ones. However, I don't believe it's possible to deny the potential problems from allowing certain people into certain sections.

I'll start with sports. I actually used to strongly disagree that females shouldn't be allowed to compete with males. I saw it as a challenge. (... which is ironic considering that I have absolutely zero physical abilities, but-) But there are indeed male and female differences. This makes the question of gender segregation in sports a lot more complicated. I would be curious about what research would show in people who are completely changed from one gender to another, but at the moment, it is proven that males perform better physically than females. Thus, it's not fair to the women to let a man enter their competition.

Maybe we could implement a new segregation line. But maybe it would suffice to have an inclusive competition of all genders in addition to the male and female competitions. This would mean that people could choose which one to enter: the competition of their gender at birth or the inclusive competition.

In individual sports, you can compare your scores with others if you want, even if you didn't compete at the same time(, and thus, you could have different scoreboards, so although you may not have been #1 in the women's sports when transgender women were included, you may be #1 in the scoreboard of people who were born female). In group sports, that's not possible, but there could be efforts to make the teams balanced in the inclusive competition.

Does that all make sense? What do you guys think? Unfortunately, with all the gender identities in the world, I don't think it'd be feasible to have a competition for every single sort of person.... Even five competitions - male, female, transgender male, transgender female, and other - at this time in history, at least, might not be feasible.

Then we have bathrooms (and locker rooms). Like sports, I think this is a complicated issue. The reason bathrooms are separated by gender is because of sex, simply put - not just to prevent rape but any sexual interactions. To continue this in our world of numerous sexualities and genders would be extremely complicated.

One solution offered is just letting people go into whatever bathroom they want. This does not work. One kid in a school wore a skirt and raped a girl in the female bathroom (and caused other incidents similar to that one). There are people in the world who would be willing to claim they're transgender just to rape someone else. On the other side of the coin, I don't even want to imagine a transgender person in a crowded bathroom of the gender that they're transitioning to. What if the people who were born as that gender took advantage of the transgender person?

Another potential solution would be to have multiple individual bathrooms. This would take more room, and it's possible that people would force others into one with them. In my opinion, I think this points to an important question I have: How successful is bathroom segregation at preventing assaults, and why?

I think a lot of people probably have the experience of walking into the wrong bathroom on accident. I sure do, and I vividly remember immediately screaming an apology and running out of there (into the other bathroom) without looking back. There had been a boy in there, but no one else was around. If I had just strolled in there and raped that boy, what would've happened? What if the boy hadn't made a commotion for whatever reason? It was loud in the cafeteria right outside, and they say a lot of men don't report rape anyway, so if no one noticed and he didn't say anything, what would happen? You can say that people would notice if a boy went into the girls' bathroom (or vice versa) or if two people went into an individual bathroom, but what if no one did?

This brings us to the suggestion of monitoring. We can't have someone monitoring every single bathroom in-person, and some building owners may not be able to afford cameras, never mind a person to watch those cameras 24/7. Even if you do have video cameras outside a bathroom, what about people who think that's an intrusion on privacy? Do you think people would have a problem with cameras outside a bathroom? I think it'd be plenty worth it. With individual bathrooms, it wouldn't even need to have sound: someone walking in with someone else would be a red flag that requires investigation. (Maybe some people don't have problems with people having sex in their building's bathrooms, and I know some people like public sex [I certainly like reading about it], but...)

For prisons, co-ed dorms would probably be a good starting place for this conversation, but you also have to keep in mind that RAPISTS are in prisons. Some may argue that criminals should have no rights, and thus, it doesn't matter if they're raped. I disagree with this, but personally, I wouldn't be strongly against the idea of a rapist prison with all genders and sexualities.

Thus, we come to the conclusion of having prisons for males born as such that are heterosexual, females born as such that are heterosexual, cis-individuals that are homosexual, transgender men attracted to men, transgender men attracted to women, transgender women attracted to men, transgender women attracted to women, and other, we'll say. Then we have the problem that some people would probably have to be far away from their home. Is that okay? What about bisexual or demisexual people, or those who have some other sexual orientation? How the frig are we supposed to solve THAT? Make them take a survey and put them in solitary confinement if they have rapist tendencies? That's ridiculous. I guess if you have enough cameras and/or guards, you would really only need to have them separated for bathroom/shower and sleep, but...

... So basically, it's complicated as frig--