Against Unisex Facilities
What is wrong with unisex school bathrooms and the like?
The sexual revolutionaries have been in bed with governments for some time now, forcing an unwilling populace to accept all sorts of radical policies which are decidedly NOT in the public interest. Ramming down our throats radical transgender policies is a major part of this.
In the latest move by the sexual state to impose radical leftist agenda items on our children, we now read that “students will share gender-neutral toilet facilities at Brisbane’s new $80 million vertical high school.” Yep, the coercive utopians of the left are intent on stripping away the privacy and wellbeing of our students in the interests of further promoting radical gender bender ideologies.
Thankfully the LNP education spokesman Jarrod Bleijie called the plan a “recipe for disaster,” while others warned about the dangers of such a move. Sadly many Western jurisdictions have been turning our schools into laboratories for activist sexuality. So this is simply the latest in a long line of such social engineering episodes.
But it is a perilous direction to be moving in, and it must be resolutely opposed. Let me here outline some of the reasons why unisex toilets in our schools and the like must be resisted. Safety is one obvious reason. As an alarming news item from earlier this year had warned:
Schoolgirls are too afraid to use unisex toilets over fears of ‘period shaming’ from boys and sexual harassment, campaigners warn. A growing number of schools are ditching separate-sex loos claiming they are not inclusive to transgender children and are a breeding ground for bullying. But some girls are avoiding going to the toilet during school hours because of cruel taunts from boys and a lack of privacy, according to the Daily Express.
And some girls even avoid drinking water so that they will not have to use the toilet. A parent of a secondary school girl told the newspaper that ‘boys are always speculating on whether girls are having their periods according to how long they take in the toilet.’ Feminist campaigners Women’s Voices Wales claim that the ‘safety and dignity’ of girls at school is being neglected. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6714753/Unisex-toilets-schools-leaving-girl-pupils-afraid-use-loo.html
But to further make my case, let me draw upon three experts. The first is Ryan Anderson. Last year his very important book on transgenderism appeared. You can see my review of When Harry Became Sally here: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2018/02/21/review-harry-became-sally-ryan-anderson/
In the book he spends a fair amount of time on this matter, and is well worth quoting from. He writes:
Gender identity policies are not just about allowing citizens who identify as transgender to live as they choose, but about coercing the rest of us to go along with a radical ideology. Schools are a major front in this campaign…. The transgender policy agenda entirely ignores competing interests and considerations, including the privacy and safety of others, particularly girls and women, and it disregards the requirements of true equality….
Sex-specific intimate facilities exist in order to provide bodily privacy. This is something that people on both sides of the political spectrum once understood…. Many courts have defended the bodily privacy rights of people in a variety of settings….
It is entirely reasonable not to want to see persons of the opposite sex in a state of undress, even if they “identify as” the same sex. Likewise, it is entirely reasonable not to want to be seen in a state of undress by persons of the opposite sex, even if they “identify as” the same sex. This is why laws mandating sex-segregated restrooms and changing rooms in the workplace appeared in the late 1800s, as women began to enter the workforce….
In addition to guarding privacy, sex-specific intimate facilities exist to serve the related purpose of protecting girls and women from male predators. The concern is not that people who identify as transgender will engage in inappropriate acts (as some activists have mockingly said), but that predators will abuse gender identity policies to gain easier access to victims. Law enforcement experts have given testimony on precisely this problem….
Many women worry that the original purpose of Title IX – working toward women’s equality in education – is threatened when “sex” is redefined to mean “gender identity.” The law was intended to remedy a history of disadvantages, and this aim is necessarily compromised by policies that make the category of “woman” ambiguous and fluid. Allowing anyone who identifies as a woman to be regarded as a woman in public policy erases the very meaning of womanhood in law.
My next expert witness is Nancy Pearcey. Her very significant volume, Love Thy Body also came out last year – see my review here: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2017/12/31/review-love-thy-body-answering-hard-questions-life-sexuality-nancy-pearcey-baker-2018/
She has a chapter on transgenderism and looks at some of the broader concerns with SOGI (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) laws. She writes:
What this language implies is that scientific facts do not matter. SOGI laws are being used to impose a two-level worldview that disparages the physical body as inconsequential, insignificant, and irrelevant to who we are. As O’Donovan writes, the transgender narrative suggests that “the body is an accident that has befallen the real me; the real me has a true sex” apart from the body. “The body is an object set over against the personal subject located in the thinking-feeling mind.”
Consider a recent case in the Fourth Circuit Court, in which a girl who identified as a boy named G. G. demanded the right to use the boys’ restroom. The judge ruled that G. G.’s birth-assigned sex, or so-called ‘biological sex,’ is female, but G. G.’s gender identity is male.”
Her “so-called ‘biological sex’” – in sneer quotes? This is a judge writing a formal ruling for a federal court, and he treats the very existence of biological sex with suspicion and disdain. Apparently he thinks the facts of physiology, anatomy, chromosomes, and DNA are less real or knowable than the girl’s subjective feelings about her gender.
I ran across an internet forum discussing transgenderism, where a commenter wrote, “What does some little bit of flesh between the legs matter?” Why should that make a difference to your sense of who you are?
This is a devastatingly reductive view of the body. Young people are absorbing the idea that the physical body is not part of the authentic self – that the authentic self is only the autonomous choosing self. This is ancient Gnosticism in a new garb. Policies imposing transgender ideology on children as early as kindergarten are teaching them to denigrate their bodies—to see their biological sex as having no relevance to who they are as whole persons. The two-story dichotomy causes people to feel estranged from their own bodies.
Finally, let me quote from a brand-new article by constitutional law expert Gerard V. Bradley. His article, “Compelled Sexual Affirmation in the School Bathroom,” goes into some detail on unisex policies and their harmful impact. He writes:
Courts engulfed by misguided sympathy for gender-dysphoric students sometimes also rely on what they say is the very exceptional nature of transgendered students. They ask: what is the big deal about just one kid—a “Gavin” or an “Ash”—who will quickly go, or shower, and be done with it? But this dodge won’t do. It is true that only individual plaintiffs appear in the lawsuits. But plausible estimates of the number of self-identified transgender students in high schools across the country range anywhere from two to three percent up to nine percent of the total student body. And there is good reason to expect that, as “compelled affirmation” policies and the wider elite-cultural promotion of transgender identity proliferate, so too will the number of confused high-school students. Copy-cat sexual identity questioning is already a documented phenomenon.
More importantly, wherever school officials buy into “affirmation,” every student’s understanding of himself or herself as embodied, as male or female in body and mind, is threatened. Where the school promotes “affirmation,” each student’s self-understanding as an integrated unity is contradicted. If anyone’s true sexual self is trapped in the wrong body, anyone else’s could be. If anyone’s could be, then everyone possesses a gender identity that might be different from his or her natal sex. Everyone is then transported to a world of body-self dualism. Besides, everyone in the path of even just one trans classmate is at serious peril of having to lie about that person’s sex. https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2019/12/58498/
Much more can be said about all this. Suffice it to say that the leftist social engineers who are using our vulnerable children as guinea pigs in their radical social experiments need to stop – and stop now. How dare they assault our children to push extremist ideologies. Shame on them.
And I hope that all concerned Queenslanders write to their state members and complain about the gender madness in this new PC high school in Brisbane: https://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/members/current/list
[1471 words]
“Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.”
Benjamin Franklin
Quite right Louise.
Words Fail Me.
As they should Barry!
Lamstream Meeja will just run with it, & shout down any opposition to it, including ours! 🙁
This is absolutely degrading. I’m sure young students virtually forced to use unisex toilets would suffer from personality disorders. It’s a disgrace and a malignance upon those that championed such a bondage over our young people.
I wonder about the mental state of transgender advocates that thought unisex toilets in schools are progressiveness.
When I worked in the bush, Jackaroos and Jillarooswe went behind their own different trees.
Robbing our kids of their dignity and innocence. Totally degrading
Quite right Gill.
Public toilets in shopping centers and other places are Male and Female, transgender people have the choice to use either of those or the unisex handicapped toilets.
So why are our teen girls being forced to use a unisex toilet at the risk of possible or most probable harrassment etc from teenage boys sharing the same toilets because of a possible transgender student.
Bathrooms for all – scientific facts irrelevant. Biology: male physical, chromosomal/hormonal recorded science including empirical obvious differences is fact. Female physical, chromosomal/hormonal recorded science including empirical difference is fact. Along with the fact that there is no reproduction of the human race without this scientific factual difference. There cannot be diversity in fact. Otherwise when we jump off a tall building gravity will not take us to our death. When we start diversifying math, i.e 1 + 1 does not equal 2, lets see how a multistory building will stay up upright!! and so on. We are made male and female for good reason substantiated by science. There can be NO diversity in this. Diversity and inclusiveness as political or pc policy to allow this dispensation of lies to achieve the breaking down of our society ought to be challenged in our courts of law. The fear and repulsion of teenage females to have testosterone hyped males in the same room as they deal with normal body function (urinate, defecate, menstruate) and to have male genitalia confronting them is beyond comprehension. The only inclusiveness is for the male gender to take advantage of the situation, and please tell me when a teenage boy has the self discipline to subvert his sexual desires. In the main, this is allows predatory behaviour without restraint. And if I was a girl now, I certainly would be holding on so as not to expose myself and attract attack, and so my health and ability to enjoy my school days are obliterated. Why” Certainly not to stop someone who is sexually confused (1%)to feel good about themselves so that 99% cannot feel good about themselves.
I wrote this to my representative. it might provide ideas for others:
I’m writing to ask you to speak against your Party’s decision to have “Unisex” toilets in the new vertical school. Teenagers have enough difficulties with their developing self-image without having this social engineering foisted upon them. Let’s keep the system that works for the vast majority in place- segregated sex toilets. If, as it appears, there are some young people who are gender-confused, then by all means incorporate some unisex toilets for them so there can be no accusation of discrimination or disadvantage. If they claim the provision of the unisex toilets is in itself discriminatory, then that might be an aspect of the choices they have made but it will affect far fewer students than a blanket change for everyone.
… and, as expected, not the slightest whisper of a mention of the controversy on the ABC web page:-
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-07-16/high-rise-schools-coming-to-queensland-to-ease-pressure/9995738
… because, as far as the ABC is concerned, queer ideology and the Labor Party can do no wrong (unless they disagree with the Greens). If you rely solely on the ABC for your information you are both uninformed and misinformed as well as deliberately asking to be indoctrinated.
That’s right Michael.
I am as academically accomlished as some of your other contributors, but I have to put forth my reaction to the intended changes to Uni Sex Toilets. No one has even mentioned the older citizens who will not manage this change at all. Taunts by young to the old would be absulutely unbelievable and their effects devasting. Emphasis is mainly on the young at the moment and the placing of these facilities at schools but the way the system has run over many years has worked well with none of the problems that are arising from even the prospect of the introduction of these socially evil innovations. If was of the younger generation I would rather go out in a field behind a tree than to enter one of these mixed toilets.
Typical Labor policy. They could not care less about the addition costs of creating these facilities and the addition costs of cleaning them, not to mention the additional burden on the cleaning staff, having to clean individual booths and toilet seats etc. instead of simple urinals (so much for supporting the workers), or people having to sit on seats that have been urinated on, etc., just as long as they can provide as many opportunities as possible for students to have privacy from parental and teacher supervision for their sexual encounters and drug taking.
Of course, with adult access to these facilities, there will be much greater opportunity for private adult/child sexual interaction as well. A high priority for both homosexual and heterosexual pedophiles so, of course, all of these things are high on the Labor Party’s list of priorities.
When, of course, there will be the inevitable legal stoushes their Labor colleagues in the legal industry will be able to make vast sums of money from the public purse, which, of course, Labor is more than happy to provide. Of course their supporters in the abortion industry will also be very happy that labor has provided so many opportunities for young people to have private sex after their very stimulating sex education classes.
Ours is a fallen world: Something the advocates of multiple-user, unisex simultaneous toileting facilities appear to be in denial about. Even the old fable has the sense to tacitly admit that an emperor’s new clothes had jolly well not be invisible to his adoring subjects when he parades, wearing the garments in question in public… It seems to me ours is becoming a world where modesty and decorum are fast becoming shameful in the eyes of those who self-righteously deem themselves to be in the vanguard of human progress.
Strongly opposed to unisex restrooms
Lost in all this is the natural problem of boys and girls in the same bathroom – hook-ups. Put these in and nine months after school starts your first ‘unisex toilet babies’ will be born.
Same problem can exist in allowing access to restrooms based on identity a girl could go to th bathroom with her boyfriend who say he is gender fluid and feels like a girl and they get together then nine months later she give birth to the kid conceived at school thanks to that bathroom policy.
It really is incumbent on the Church to testify to the Truth in this present time. I was reading from Revelation 11 and I was thinking that the “two witnesses” could refer to the Church in her prophetic witness to the world. It is interesting that they are killed yet ultimately vindicated. In the same way we need to be prepared to stick our necks out and speak out now and, like our Lord, entrusting ourselves to Him who judges justly (1 Peter 2:23) knowing that the world is wrong big-time – with ridiculous proposals like this one!
Yes quite right Thomas.