People being kind is why I had a middle aged large male-bodied person in my unadapted women’s toilets at work and felt I couldn’t challenge that situation. Various posters on here have described the same horrible experience. None of us women feeling able to speak to each other about it, and too scared for our jobs to complain because the HR team clearly are happy with it.
I think it’s hard to understand when you are young and all this is in the abstract for you but it DOES happen to women, and is actuall a real, absolutely humiliating, privacy obliterating, imposition of male domination of you even in the most private of spaces which you have no choice but to use, if you want to continue with your paid employment.
That lack of power as a woman with a body that unavoidably needs to use a toilet space for various reasons, makes it plain to you as a woman employee, that you are worthless and unsupported in the eyes of your employer .because you are a woman.
All this when you are trying to operate in the workplace on a level with men.
Which until you have kids is relatively possible to do in many occupations. But when you do have kids, you are seeing your male colleagues’ working lives being so much freer and fuller of relative advantage to you because they are a father and you are a mother. Male advantage and encouragement of male career participation is everywhere at work- whether they have kids or not. it is infuriating. Female relative disadvantage and discouragement of participation is everywhere overtly or covertly if you are in the reproductive years. Then you also have the humiliation of being made to share toilet faculties with men in the next stall.
I do not want any male colleagues knowing when I am on my period, pissing or shitting, upset or having a leaky period or a miscarriage. I especially do not want men to know when that knowledge may be giving them a sexual thrill.
I want privacy dignity and single sex toileting and showering provision at work. Young people need to understand that in all areas of their lives that they will be giving up single sex spaces- except in practice transmen won’t claim male spaces in the same way transwomen are already doing in female spaces, because biological sex power relations and norms and soxioiasation remain relevant after transition. If it’s not safe for transmen they can use the ladies (which they are more than welcome to do).
It’s not scary to men to have a transman in their men’s toilets. But is IS scary to have men in women’s toilets for lots of us. Trust me I used to jump out of my skin seeing a large male figure looming out of the toilet stall behind me. It is scary to many of us to have men in what are meant to be female spaces and our feelings should be worthy of respect.
Ask your kids if they saw a man hanging about in the women’s toilets, being used by women and children what would they do or say or think of his motives? That is what self Id means. You can’t challenge that man any more. Whatever he looks like or is wearing. His right to be there is more important than your right to object and want privacy.
But: Why should women be scared away from using women’s Toilets? Should women have to leave their jobs and work somewhere else if they don’t like dealing with men in the work toilets. Is that fair? Stay at home all day because they were born in a woman’s body so they don’t have a right to safety control and privacy? Men on the other hand get to do what they want in the face of women’s fear and discomfort and be validated for that as brave and stunning? That’s the world that ‘being kind’ is creating.