@Loren Pechtel,
@Jimmy Higgins, and
@Jarhyn have though. It's the people who insist that sex doesn't matter, genitals are not a problem, and that women should just shut up and accept the risk of having people with penises in their spaces, because hey, what could go wrong? They're the ones hand-waving away concerns.
It's the male born-and-raised people who insist that because penises have never been a problem for them, and because they wouldn't be concerned to have a naked female in their midst, that the same thing should apply to women. They're the ones who see to think that the statistics for rape and sexual assaults are irrelevant, and that women just be crazy hysterical overreacting and all that.
The "woman" sign will keep out the creeps but it won't keep out the actual threats. You have a false sense of security.
It sounded to me like the real problem was the idea that physically unaltered male prisoners ought to be housed with female prisoners, and to me, that is something that I do not have the 25 years' experience in prison administration that I would really need in order to feel confident about addressing. Prisons are very dangerous environments, and I don't even want people that have committed actual crimes to be there if the administration does not take safety seriously. I think that, in a world with predominately mentally well-adjusted and largely law-abiding, mostly educated adults, I would consider the idea of gender desegregation as a distinct possibility in the not-too-distant future, but many people in prisons are from economically and culturally devastated backgrounds. I am sympathetic with the fact that they come from difficult backgrounds, but the management of those kinds of people is not something I would take lightly.
I am sympathetic with a person in an American prison that is transgender, and I take that person's health seriously. That is why I think that a person with that kind of healthcare-related issue ought to be closely supervised by everybody on their healthcare team, including wardens, healthcare workers, therapists, endocrinologists, prison administrators, and everybody that that person interacts with. Like it or not, being a transgender person in an all-male prison is a very complicated healthcare-related situation. I would want latitude given to experienced prison administrators and healthcare workers to figure out the best possible solution to that kind of scenario. I think it is insanity to settle those kinds of questions based on political polls.
I believe that there is a stronger argument for experimenting with total gender desegregation in contexts like, for example, one building at an Ivy League university, where they could be pretty sure of setting healthy precedents for the rest of society to follow. That is something that actually makes sense to try. I believe that the most enlightened and culturally invested individuals in the entire country actually would be able to take leadership on establishing a new set of norms. Even then, I'd poll the students on it.
Cultural norms have substantially more control over people's behavior than laws, so when we are talking about cultural revolutions, I think we ought to be very serious about what kinds of individuals we want lighting the way. It sounds rosy and progressive and enlightened to say that "gender is so yesteryear," but there is a difference, to me, whether we initiate that kind of thinking among our cultural elites or among people that are likely to ruin it.
I mean I half-jokingly and half-seriously call myself a communist, though I don't really adhere to the philosophy. I just kind of like to trigger complete idiots that don't have the abstract thought of a mentally handicapped hobbit. However, I think that the reason why communism went so badly, in Russia, was that Russia was really a terrible country in which to experiment with a major cultural revolution. Russia is culturally dysfunctional, and when you just put dysfunctional people into a new house, they wreck it just like they wrecked the last one. Russia really set terrible precedents for the development of that philosophy. Communism didn't ruin Russia, but Russia ruined communism.
In the Nordic states, on the other hand, they did not just take the Communist Manifesto and make that into their holy law, but they quickly evolved the core ideas contained within it into a substantially more revolutionary system that really works substantially better than either traditional capitalism or a more orthodox interpretation of communism. Finland is one of the easiest countries in the world to start a new business, yet you can work as part of a trade union if you really want to. However, the Finnish already had reasonably strong cultural leadership. They were like that kid that if you threw them an iPhone, they would disassemble it and put it back together in twenty minutes, and they would casually tell you they jailbroke it for you. The Finnish, following similar suit, took the Communist Manifesto, dissected it, and appropriated what parts they actually wanted to use. It was a new idea, and they knew better than to take the first version of it to be a holy gospel. Furthermore, they have a long history of being educated blasphemers. They are going to be the first people in the world to turn sunlight and air almost directly into food. Wait, that's already happened:
solarfoods.fi
Granted, that's a marketing gimmick for being effectively a fucking algae-farmer, but let's not split hairs: that is fucking brilliant.
And please, let's not get derailed talking about either communism or algae-farming.
The point is that I am more excited than anybody about the idea of gender desegregation, but I would be just as alarmed as
@Emily Lake if people came out, with sledgehammers in hand, and started knocking down walls between men's and women's sections of segregated multi-stall bathrooms in random places, not taking into account the cultural conditions of the places where they were doing it. Even though I think it's a worthy cultural revolution, there is a right way and a wrong way to do it.
In order to really change society, at a deep level, it is imperative that we be responsible about what norms and precedents we set for the next generation. Whatever mess we make today, it's going to be the mess that our generation's grandchildren are going to have to live in, not ourselves. What we already have is a mess. I do not want to pass on that mess to yet another generation. However, there is always the risk that you are going to make an even bigger mess by cleaning up the old mess incompetently.
I do not think that we ought to stay with the current system of gender segregation. I think that that system is partly to blame for the dysfunctional sexual ethics that also make some of us reluctant to change it. Sorry,
@Emily Lake, but I don't think the right answer is to keep on throwing good money after bad like an investor that is trying to break even on a bad investment while walking away from more lucrative opportunities. I think that our current system is partly to blame for the dysfunctional sexual ethics that have created our current dilemmas and trilemmas, and we are dealing with a serious trifecta (I just had to do that alliteration) of being afraid to change the current system, not really having a clear idea of how to even start changing the current system, and having too many people determined to push for change without looking where the fuck they are going.
I also think that purity ethics, among the female sex, are just as much to blame as macho-ethics, among the male sex, for our current dilemmas, regarding gender relations. Think of it in terms of economics: Adam Smith--who is almost as much of a historical hero to me as Peter Kropotkin--presented us with the Diamonds v. Water Paradox.
“
The things which have the greatest value in use have frequently little or no value in exchange; and on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange have frequently little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water: but it will purchase scarce any thing; scarce any thing can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any value in use; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it.” (
The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter IV)
So,
@Emily Lake, I think that the continued proliferation of purity ethics, among the female sex, is just contributing to this dynamic. They are enforcing a false scarcity at the same time that reactionary men are promoting fornication and adultery as a necessity for self-validation, and I see this as a serious problem.
Well, Finland is the most gender-equal country in the entire world, yet they have had co-ed saunas and bathhouses for generations. It's normal, there, for men and women to sit next to each other bare-assed in a dark wooden box full of steam, and to them, it's not a sexual thing. They are also the only country in the world that has figured out how to establish near gender-equality in the field of engineering, though. They figured out that the unequal representation of men and women in the field of engineering went back to the standards of education in the mathematics being designed to accommodate for the unique neurobiological advantages of boys, and they changed the way they taught the subject to also accommodate for the unique neurobiological advantages of girls. They have almost equal representation of the genders, in the field of engineering, in the same country that has some of the world's most casually libertarian sexual mores.
The idea that the problems, in gender relations, are somehow insoluble is a lie. It's one of the biggest lies in history.
I think that the place to start, with doing murder on that lie, is to do murder on our dysfunctional sexual ethics. We need to murder the part of macho-ethics where 11 year old boys are literally physically shoved at girls and commanded to be lewd, which is the shit that I went through and which I know is almost as disturbing to many straight boys. Murder it. The kinds of purity ethics where girls talk shit about each other for being perceived as sexually licentious also needs to die. Murder it with poison and fire. Kill it, kill it, kill it dead.
"Murder is forever," said the crow to his kinfolk. Crows of a murder mob predators together.
We are crows of the same murder, even though we were born different sexes. What led to you being sexually harassed or perhaps even raped, during your youth, led to me being put under intense pressure to become a part of that broken system, and when I didn't, I was beaten. Men of violence hefted me up around their shoulders and slammed my entire body down on hard asphalt in a wrestling maneuver that was designed for gym mats and is not even legal in respectable sport. If my muscles were not naturally more relaxed than most, then that maneuver could have snapped my spine and rendered me permanently paralyzed. I was living in a culture where the only way I wouldn't be called out as gay was if I proved my credentials as a straight man by harassing people like you, and when I wouldn't play in that role, I was made to fear for my life.
You have an ally in me, even though we might not always agree on solutions (which I hope we can amend, someday), and I believe that it is overdue for us to get serious about rethinking our sexual and gender ethics right through to the core. I would also agree with you that the right way is not to just unleash a bunch of maniacs to go and break down walls with sledgehammers. The cultural reforms are going to have to go deeper than just tearing down a few walls. The cancer is too deeply rooted to assume that we are going to get it into remission by just tearing down a few walls.
@Loren Pechtel is concerned about the false-positives that can occur due to men being called out for rape. Well, chemotherapy kills healthy cells as well as cancer. Tough titmouse, dude. If you don't like the chemotherapy, then get serious about fighting the cancer. Are you a fan of Adam Smith? If you are, then so am I! Adam Smith himself described the Diamonds vs. Water Paradox. We need deep reforms in the sexual ethics of both genders. The current system is creating an unhealthy dynamic that needs to be murdered. All of us need to be in on it. Just because we can't really stay on chemotherapy forever doesn't mean that the cancer isn't real.
I am saying, as a transgender woman, that we have to seriously rethink everything. Knocking down a few walls is not enough. Once I'm done transitioning, operation and all, I'm going to have to live with the actual reality of being a woman. I don't think that all of my problems are going to be fixed at once by knocking down a few walls, and I think that just blindly knocking down walls is not the right way to fight a serious cancer.
