Toni
Contributor
- Joined
- Aug 10, 2011
- Messages
- 22,372
- Basic Beliefs
- Peace on Earth, goodwill towards all
You are right. There will never be a perfect locker room.I think we need to take a step back from ideological generalizations. The real issues surrounding locker rooms and restrooms are far messier than the binary narratives we often impose. Before even bringing trans identities into the conversation, we should ask: What assumptions do we make about safety, comfort, and identity in shared spaces? Too often, we fall back on a simplistic rule—penises here, vaginas there—but that framework erases the wide and complex spectrum of lived realities.
Consider just a partial list of individuals who might occupy these spaces:
- Gay, straight, or intersex minors (male or female)
- Adults across all those same categories
- Survivors of sexual assault (male and female)
- People with body dysphoria, trauma, or anxiety
- Individuals with developmental or psychiatric conditions
- And yes, trans men and women
Do we really believe that every person in these overlapping groups will feel safe, comfortable, and unthreatened simply because they’ve been sorted into one side of a binary?
Speaking personally: I'm a cisgender male, I go to the gym almost every day, and I still don’t feel fully at ease in locker rooms. I’ve witnessed behavior that crossed boundaries, individuals lingering who clearly aren’t just there to change, and others visibly uncomfortable but silent. When I was younger, there were moments I genuinely felt afraid. I’m older and stronger now, less likely to be intimidated—but that doesn’t mean other cis men feel safe. Our identities don’t erase our vulnerabilities.
Fear, discomfort, and vulnerability in intimate public spaces don’t follow neat gender lines. A straight woman might feel uneasy around lesbians. A gay teenager might fear harassment from other boys. A trans person might worry about mockery or violence from both cis men and women. A Black man might feel watched or judged in a predominantly white locker room—and the reverse can also be true, where white individuals harbor unjustified fears about sharing space with Black people. These dynamics are real and shaped by personal history, culture, and context. They cannot be solved by rigid identity rules or simplistic bathroom policies.
And once we start excluding people based on perceived threat or discomfort, where exactly do we draw the line? If trans individuals are singled out today, will lesbians or gay men be next? Will racial minorities face renewed exclusion tomorrow? We’ve seen this slope before—where fear is used to justify segregation under the guise of safety, morality, or tradition. Again and again, political actors seize on these anxieties not to address real issues, but to manufacture outrage, divide the public, and distract from systemic failures. It’s a pattern we should all recognize—and refuse to play into.
We have to stop pretending there’s a “perfect” locker room arrangement that will eliminate all fear, discomfort, or risk. There isn’t. People are complicated. Public spaces are messy. If we truly care about both inclusion and safety, we should be expanding privacy, rethinking spatial design, and acknowledging individual variation—not drawing harder lines between groups. Honestly, the more I think about it, the more it seems the best solution may be a return to individualized facilities. Maybe the 18th-century outhouse had one thing right: a private space, used one person at a time, avoids a lot of these modern identity battles.
But in the meantime, there’s little serious effort to redesign public spaces with privacy or inclusivity in mind—because solving these problems isn’t the point. Too often, those in power gain more from fueling cultural division than from pursuing practical solutions. By turning deeply personal issues into public battlegrounds, they deflect attention away from structural inaction and redirect public energy toward infighting. What we’re left with is a cycle of manufactured outrage, where fear is weaponized but never resolved. This isn’t about protection—it’s about control. And the longer we accept this kind of political weaponization, the further we are from anything resembling safety or peace of mind.
But barring males—or rather, continuing the bar of males in female only locker rooms WILL prevent almost all women from being raped in the women’s locker room. Because some male will violate that ban. Moreover, it doesn’t put girls and women in the position of having to evaluate/perform an instant risk analysis for every single person who enters the locker room.
Girls and women are not afraid of being raped by lesbians in the locker room. Girls and women do not start out being afraid of being raped by men in the locker room.
Men teach us that fear.
#NotAllMen of course but given that most rape victims know their attackers and indeed, most don’t believe there is any reason to be afraid or even cautious around their neighbor, teacher, coach, doctor, father, stepfather, brother, friends of brother, uncle , cousin, grandfather. Until they find out.
Unfortunately that’s not a small number of girls and women.