Trans man uses women’s restroom to follow the law. Police detained him for it anyway.

It's not about bathrooms, it's certainly not about "protecting" anyone. They do not give two shits about actual assaults against women and children.

It's about sending a political message, a threat against a marginalized group that can be demonized for not fitting social norms, but is also not strong enough or connected enough to push back and rile up public support. Something like saying "You're not allowed to use the bathroom" is a deeply personal and sensitive topic that will absolutely crush someone of any group and it's prone to not getting the public attention that it needs. I mean, who wants to talk about how they need to shit?

It's been wildly successful too, because the people who actually care spend all their time in social-media echo-chambers, even like this one, instead of doing community organization and activism. Even suggesting it will probably draw in opposition here from people who feel helpless. And yeah, they'll be right, it's much, much harder now because we didn't do this shit back when the playing field was more level and this was just 4-chan trolls and reddit communities and there wasn't billions of dollars invested in the success of the of the distraction-campaign.

We can still turn this around but we can't do it the same way. We have to fight far, far dirtier, we have to make bot-armies, troll accounts, we have to put ourselves at risk, we have to directly target efforts towards libs and neo-libs who maybe, sorta, kinda care about issues that impact other citizens, but need a swift kick in the ass to realize they're on the wrong side of history. We have to project the image of mass-support at any opportunity. When you are talking or arguing about these issues, you have to do the same thing they did, which is play up that your movement is gaining support and momentum broadly, not withering under blistering hate and capitalist efforts. We have to be less afraid of wild rhetoric and playing uncivil. Be less afraid of negative attention. We have to call people bad words and be less afraid of offending our own side, because there are a lot of people on our side who aren't really.

We have to actually argue with our shitty uncle and not "let it go." We have to make friends in real-space and we have to hang out in public and be seen and stand united against hateful monsters.

We have to be that group of San Diego citizens who SHAMED a bunch of modern klansmen (ICE agents) into retreating from their neighborhood.

All the hard shit. You have to do that. You have to get real social real fast. Yeah, it does suck.

Yeah! It’s why a lot of the times when I think about leaving the house, I just don’t! The stochastic terrorism has worked!

Gonna guess not having a stall is against ADA laws also. Sounds like that bar needs to go.

The American obsession with bathroom segregation is weird. In other countries, women will sometimes use the men's bathroom when there's a long line in front of the women's and not the men's. Fathers needing to change a diaper on their kid sometimes use the baby changing station in the women's bathroom if that's where it's located (though that's increasingly being fixed).

This is not something that requires excessive legislation if you can avoid obsessing over other people's genitals.

He was going out of his way to do everything “right” too.

He couldn’t use the men’s, because it was a trough set up. He talked to an employee, made sure that no one was in the women’s.

And then the cops had the gall to accuse him of being drunk and disorderly?

A men's bathroom without stalls? How is this even a thing? Where are they supposed to poop in that establishment?

Regarding (1), he also got verbal permission from the bartender before entering the women's restroom

Because you might be a sexual predator, and a law banning trans people from bathrooms will definitely stop a rapist.

In other words, irrationality.

In the US, bathrooms didn't used to even have gender.

Yeah and it's not just about how easy or hard the case is, lawyers know how to follow the rules, procedures, regulations etc. You're honestly just wasting your and the courts time even if you win.

There have been so many cops everywhere the past fucking week where I live. I am so terrified.

I started using men’s restrooms in 2013. No one ever cared. No one has ever cared.

I used to travel a lot across my state - I like going to wonky small towns, dragged ex’s to places like the Spiro Mounds, wanted to explore the ghost town of Picher, had adventures with foster children in Arkansas…. but I have to stay in a city now.

It’s like a video game map now. Hubworlds are safe, the cops will be noticed if they do something and are at least dimly aware of that. But travel could cause a random encounter, with multiple deeply unpleasant outcomes.

That is why they do that shit. It’s stochastic terrorism. At least when I was a kid crying in terror over 9/11, the world was telling me that it was happening and it was real.

Now that the corpos dumped us we have exactly 0 reason to hold back. It's team to return pride to it's roots

Many people I know with kids feel like the line is crossed when children are involved. Without kids it doesn't matter but once kids are involved in the bathroom then things get more sensitive

So stupid. There's a good stand up bit that covers it - https://youtube.com/shorts/jrBlC3q0Fwo

On a different side of the coin, the virtue signaling also bothers me. I was at a fast casual restaurant and went to use the bathroom and the sign on the door said "Gender neutral bathroom" and I was like "oh word, that's pretty progressive I like this place" and then I walked in and there's one toilet and a sink and the door locks. Motherfucker, that's just a bathroom. You don't need to specify "gender neutral" when it's a one-person bathroom. Fuck outa here.

I was at a George Thorogood concert and opened the door on a woman taking a shit in a portapotty. There were no lines so I just walked up and picked door number 2.

What I'm saying is I do care a little bit who's in there.

That is the general goal yes.

They're making it unlivable for themselves, but instead of fixing the problem, they're just making things as bad as possible for the scapegoats.

Yeah - my understanding was that there was a carve out explicitly for trans men with that UK ruling, which effectively meant its illegal for trans men to piss in either bathroom? We aren’t men, but we also can’t use the women’s.

My state doesn’t have bathroom laws yet - except for in schools (and my dumbass thought - science teacher shortage! if I’m needed and doing something good I get to be a human being right?)

Just look to one of the biggest "small government" states, Texas. They're becoming an absolute nanny state pushing so many stupid regulations in the name of "Oh won't someone please think of the children!"

Freedom, my ass. They never cared about freedom.

It has always been like that. The only difference now is that the crazies (racist, bigots, zealots, white Christian conservatives and strait up mentally ill) have open platforms to voice their preference and ideas and people in power who agree / benefit from those points of view, have normalized it. There is no bottom at this point.

Freedom to hate, freedom from reasonable safety or healthcare. Freedumb.

We’re like a bucket of idiot crabs being boiled alive, and those of us who are too poor/disabled to leave and have been screaming for the past decade are suffocating at the bottom 🫠

I've got some thoughts on this.

When I was learning about the world, some time in the early to mid 1980s, I learned something that was interesting to me. There was roughly 1 person for every year Earth existed. I also learned that that number was likely too high, and our life was about to get more complicated because too many of us were too hungry for the resources Earth had to offer.

But now, 40 years later, there is now almost TWO people for every year the Earth has existed. Now, every rare resource has two pops chasing after it. What's worse is everyone wants what they had in the 80s (a house, a car, a large yard, etc) without being willing to give up on any aspect of the dream. People who have houses fight against higher density housing. Cars get bigger, not smaller. And thus every individual consumes more than they did in the 80s.

What happens when supply goes down (because NIMBYism and rampant consumerism), while demand goes up (because there are now twice as many people chasing resources)? Look around you. Everything is expensive. Housing. Fuel. Food. Education. Healthcare. What could be done with a single income in the 80s now can't be done with two incomes today. World-wide, even. Japan, China, South Korea, Germany, Italy, Poland, Ukraine, and even China are suffering population growth rates falling below replacement rate because it's too fucking expensive to have a kid in this world. House ownership is a forgotten dream for young people these days, and even for me. I'm earning 6 figures these days, but even that's not enough to afford the down-payment on a house, especially with rents as crazy expensive as they are. Car ownership? In 2005, we looked at the costs of a car (not just the cost to own it, but the cost to maintain it, the cost to keep it fueled, the cost to drive it responsibly -- insurance, and the cost to store it) and decided it was too expensive to own a car or even lease a car. When we need a car these days, we rent one, and give it up gladly at the end. We don't run the AC in the heat of the day because electricity is too fucking expensive. And I don't know if the 15kg I've lost over the past 2 years was due to being disgusted with how expensive everything is, but...well, I am disgusted with how expensive food is. That's the one thing I can't escape.

I hear ya on the whole 'why did I bring kids into this world?!' A fun (?) thought exercise I like to do is consider what life would have been like had the wife and I had kids. Back in 2005, we were in a good place for having kids. She was working for CompUSA and I was working for Qwest, and our total income was 5x our rent, easily. We were finally settled down, and things were looking up for us. Then Hurricane Katrina hit.

Let me be clear. We were thousands of miles away from where Hurricane Katrina hit. New Orleans flooding did affect my wife as she has family down there, but even had Katrina made it to where we were, it'd just be a moderate rain event for us. But that didn't stop the massive corpo I worked for cashing in and cutting its workforce. We went from "you guys are doing a great job, we're going to hire you as regular IT guys" to "pack up your desks, you're done here" in less than a week. We went from on top of the world to filing for bankruptcy in 3 months. Had we had a kid in that time period, we'd likely have had to move back to Louisiana so the Grandparents could help with the kids while we went and worked minimum wage jobs just to try to keep a roof over our heads. I'm so glad we didn't, but that's a shame to poor 'Victoria', our hypothetical daughter who I would have liked to me. On the other hand, she'd likely have a touch of AuDHD like her mom and dad, meaning the next 4 years would have been hell on Earth thanks to Junior and his merry band of miscreants over at Dept. of Health. :|

None of this is to excuse the shitheads in the world. It's just...when you have twice the pops chasing half the resources, even the most well meaning of governments will be fighting rampant instability, which makes Authoritarianism look appealing.