Comment by revicon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by revicon | Hacker News Reader

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>(Bearing in mind, of course, that in the extremely >rare event that someone really does stroll into >the wrong bathroom for voyeuristic purposes, >or to sexually assault someone, we already have >laws to punish those people.)

How would this work in your example? What could prevent me from saying I'm gender fluid and walk into the women's showers at the gym?

If we're ready to take the step to say that there is no gender binary then we kind of have to go the whole way and flip to communal showers/bathrooms/dressing rooms etc. Reading your comment reminds me of the obscenity law debates in 1964 when Justice Potter Stewart said...

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it,"

If we aren't ready to make the big leap to no recognized genders (which I would argue society at large is not ready for), then standards need to exist from a legal point of view in the mean time.

I think you're overcomplicating things. If a person walks into a public bathroom and starts leering at people, or worse, this is likely illegal regardless of the person's gender. Just ask Larry Craig. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Craig_scandal (The original charge in his case was for "Lewd Conduct" but he eventually pleaded down to disorderly conduct.)

A person's perceived gender (which will be a function of that's person's subjective gender identity, among other things) will play a major role in determining whether a person's conduct is perceived in this way. A woman in a women's bathroom would likely have to do something pretty overt to get herself in trouble. A person who appears to be a man will, presumably, be on much thinner ice. It seems to me that a combination of this and the prevailing social pressure not to wander into the wrong bathroom should be all we need. And, after all, nobody to my knowledge has ever presented a shred of evidence that there is actually a problem with people using the "wrong" bathroom to warrant the sort of legislation we're talking about--especially when that legislation will indisputably harm an already marginalized segment of the population.

>How would this work in your example? What could prevent me from saying I'm gender fluid and walk into the women's showers at the gym?

How does this law prevent anyone from doing that already?

I'm not sure about this but my guess is that a man who refuses to abide by an establishment's rule of "no men in the women's showers" would be asked to leave. If he does not leave, he could be arrested for trespassing.

But given direction these new laws are taking, I'm further guessing that the Police should refuse to remove the man and instead arrest the proprietor for discriminating against this man based on his protected status of identifying as a woman?

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