patrick.net

socal2 says

lets spend billions and billions of dollars

may be that is the point, more money for contractors.

In principle there is nothing wrong with unisex bathrooms if they put in urinals (more space-saving than seats), but I doubt that in prudish USA they will do that. In Israel schools younger kids do have unisex bathrooms and no one seems to suffer from it.

Having said that, socal2 brings up an excellent point - why waste money for bathroom rearrangement in schools if education is underfunded according to nearly everyone? It would make sense also to poll parents in respective school districts as to what they want as they are ultimately footing the bill.

Now all these bathrooms need are complementary strap ons and racks of chewing tobacco to round out the elementary school education.

dr6B says

why waste money for bathroom rearrangement in schools if education is underfunded according to nearly everyone?

Still waiting to hear which schools wasted money rearranging. The OP was new construction.

bob2356 says

Still waiting to hear which schools wasted money rearranging. The OP was new construction.

Kansas City school district is going fully gender neutral at two new elementary schools, opening on Wednesday, as well as in a few renovated restrooms in North Kansas City High School and the sixth-grade centers.

In any case, were parents polled?

dr6B says

why waste money

California has good legislation on this point. If a single occupancy bathroom is already built, then it is now unisex. I have seen the same elsewhere, while traveling. They don't require a whole new facility; at most, managers change the signs, which costs almost nothing. Instead of different toilet rooms segregated by sex, they have only one or two, for whoever needs them.

The OP article is mainly about "two new elementary schools," i.e. new construction. It does mention "a few renovated" facilities. For new construction, or already necessary renovations, it doesn't cost much or anything to design better.

dr6B says

were parents polled?

Good question, but the ones quoted in the article seem happy about it. If any have strong feelings about it, they can comment at the PTA.

mell says

Similar to glass offices.

I hope the concern over bogus accusations will not result in glass toilet rooms.

curious2 says

Good question, but the ones quoted in the article seem happy about it.

Given that article was positive towards unisex bathroom idea, it is likely they quoted only parents who were happy.

dr6B says

that article was

...from the Kansas City Star, which has won 8 Pulitzer Prizes. AP style would require them to try to find at least two sides, if they can. Considering how many of these children share bathrooms at home with siblings of the opposite sex, most parents are probably not worried.

bob2356 says

Which school was that? Care to post some articles about where and why?

Not hard to find.


http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/education/sdut-gender-neutral-restrooms-carlsbad-dearie-2015may31-htmlstory.html

Little girls should have wedgies and toilet head dunkings, too! Lord of the Flies has gone co-ed.

curious2 says

hare bathrooms at home with siblings of the opposite sex, most parents are probably not worried.

Siblings usually do not use bathrooms together and are not that interested in each other in general. If these new gender-neutral bathrooms have many stalls, kids will be using them together. If they are one-stall bathrooms, they are extremely space-inefficient and will be more expensive than usual bathrooms.

I do not have any problem with joint bathrooms (the only problems there are in heads of potential users of bathrooms), but I somehow think that relatively prudish American public will have different attitude towards those than French or Israelis. And ones who pay for bathrooms should decide everything.

dr6B says

space-inefficient

IDK who disliked that comment (and I have never disliked any of your comments), but I wonder about the space efficiency. For example, in airplanes, where space is at a premium, all toilets are unisex.

In contrast, I remember an office tower in NYC, designed as part of what I consider the war on privacy: the sex-segregated shared toilet rooms were enormous, with a few stalls and a giant common area. It was a conspicuous waste of space, despite the high cost per rentable square foot. Most of the employees worked in cubicles all day. The senior executives had private offices, each with a private washroom en suite. The design seemed to be a hazing or punishment process, so that low level employees had no privacy at all, while senior executives lived comfortably unless they were cast down to lower rank.

Single occupancy facilities are best all around, and I hope the trans/unisex issue will result in more of that. Sharing with strangers is like living in a train station: if people really preferred that, then everyone would live in train stations. Most people prefer privacy, which is why they pay extra to live in a home rather than a train station. Most people can tolerate train station facilities, but it isn't the first choice for anyone other than Larry Craig types.

dr6B says

education is underfunded

What passes for "education" is over funded by 50% when you consider the layers of bureaucracy and paper pushing.

curious2 says

mell says

Similar to glass offices.

I hope the concern over bogus accusations will not result in glass toilet rooms.

Good one! I hope so too but you never know...

P N Dr Lo R says

What passes for "education" is over funded by 50% when you consider the layers of bureaucracy and paper pushing.

It costs alot of money to pay for all the administrators and counselors pushing SJW nonsense on our children.

Single use toilets with lock-able doors have been around forever. I had an office with a single bathroom, unisex, with a single toilet, sink etc. and a door that could be locked. Nobody ever complained.

Multiple open stalls and urinals in a public access bathroom without a locking private door are a different matter.

Ceffer says

Single use toilets with lock-able doors have been around forever. I had an office with a single bathroom, unisex, with a single toilet, sink etc. and a door that could be locked. Nobody ever complained.

That should be the standard. The giant communal facilities don't really save space. They don't usually save time either, except in rare circumstances like a stadium where a huge number of people are on exactly the same schedule.

it was a joke.
it was a joke.
it was a joke.
it was a joke.
it was a joke.
it was a joke.
it was a joke.
it was a joke.
it was a joke.
it was a joke.
it was a joke.
it was a joke.
it was a joke.
it was a joke.
it was a joke.
it was a joke.
it was a joke.
it was a joke.

curious2 says

BlueSardine says

98% of bathrooms the sink serves as the bidet.

I have never heard that anywhere else, but please provide a link?

Meanwhile, I won't be brushing my teeth at your house, if that's how your sinks are used.

SilversSurfer says

BlueSardine says

98% of bathrooms the sink serves as the bidet.

Maybe in India. I've never seen a sink used as a bidet in the US.

socal2 says

Thankfully Betsy Devos rescinded the Obama era guidance instructing schools to allow children to use the bathrooms of their choice. Otherwise more and more financially struggling schools would have to once again put leftist politics in front of education.

With the passage of AB2166 (in effect since 2014) Calfornia Education Code Section 221.5(f) says that “a pupil shall be permitted to participate in sex-segregated school programs and activities, including athletic teams and competitions, and use facilities consistent with his or her gender identity, irrespective of the gender listed on the pupil’s records.”

bob2356 says

Still waiting to hear which schools wasted money rearranging. The OP was new construction.

UC Berkeley just spent $2.7 million dollars on a non-binary locker room at the RSF. Total area for the facility, which provides a non-gendered access point to the pool, is 4,500 sq.ft. (partially carved out from the existing men's and women's locker rooms). From drawings, it looks like there will be seven private shower stalls, with 16 changing rooms and five toilets. It was (partially) paid for using the Campus Fee which is charged to every student. About 1/3 of the Campus Fee ($727 per year) goes to various equity initiatives (Ethnic Studies, Recruitment and Retention Centers, Educational Opportunity & Equity, Campus Climate & Equity, and the Wellness Fund). .
That said, there is also a generational trend toward more privacy in locker room facilities. From the New York Times:
“Old-timers, guys that are 60-plus, have no problem with a gang shower and whatever,” Mr. Dunkelberger said. “The Gen X-ers are a little bit more sensitive... And the millennials, these are the special children. ... They expect certain things. Privacy, they expect.”

EBGuy says

there is also a generational trend toward more privacy in locker room facilities.

That is true of related facilities as well, and overdue IMO. Apart from Larry Craig types, I never understood the geriatric insistence on gang toilets.

curious2 says

IDK who disliked that comment (and I have never disliked any of your comments), but I wonder about the space efficiency. For example, in airplanes, where space is at a premium, all toilets are unisex.

Thx, I also tend to avoid disliking comments - if I dislike something, it is better to argue.

Urinals are the most space-efficient, and I doubt they will be used in unisex bathrooms. Welcome to long lines in men's bathrooms...

IDK about that, as long as there are plenty of stalls.

HOWEVER, at sporting events, Men's bathrooms are absolutely necessary, otherwise people will piss their beer all over themselves waiting an hour for gals to finish putting on make up and waiting 10 minutes after shitting to flush a second time so "Nobody Knows" they dropped a big bomb.

socal2 says

bob2356 says

Which school was that? Care to post some articles about where and why?

Not hard to find.


http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/education/sdut-gender-neutral-restrooms-carlsbad-dearie-2015may31-htmlstory.html

Since I'm overseas right now and the web site doesn't allow overseas access yes it is hard to find. Why don't you qoute the part where they tore out a bathroom and remodeled it just to make it unisex with money that would have been used to keep the library open.

EBGuy says

UC Berkeley just spent $2.7 million dollars on a non-binary locker room at the RSF

Socal said grade school not university and I don't see the part where UC berkely can't keep the library open or run buses because of lack of funds. Did I miss it?

Men's bathrooms tend to be more puke and stagger-proof, but not completely puke and stagger-proof, just as the Founding Fathers and Distilleries intended.

This is just the first salvo in moving to unisex showers and changing rooms. Maybe those will move to single-person stall style as well?

Gay plague was in late 70s, early 80s.

But I was metaphorically referring to his “just because it was” doesn’t mean it was good. Black Plague was btw caused by poor sanitation.

Liberal hippie stupidity lately in LA brought lots of Hepatitis with it... another win for unsanitary crowd.

SilversSurfer says

FortWayne says

Bob and his 1960’s had nothing and it was fine comments.

Society progressed, less people die due to better sanitary conditions. There isn’t a need to go through Black Plague twice just because liberals object to it.

Lol. We had a black plague since the 1960's? Care to enlighten us when that was?

Well, the stalls are completely enclosed and lockable, so it's really only by the sinks that the students will see each other.

OTOH, it does feel like creeping denialism of the very significant and inherent biological and psychological differences between the two (exactly two) genders. Blurring that distinction is a very bad thing for our long-term survival. We evolved the two distinct gender identities for good reasons. As Jordan Peterson points out, gender is so incredibly old that even lobsters have very clear binary genders, male and female.

The funny/ironic thing about this is, conservatives are probably the main driver for this transition to unisex bathrooms. Years and years of kicking and screaming over which bathroom a person in a dress uses because they're concerned the "wrong" set of genitalia are underneath. Response then becomes, "Fine, we just won't have mens' and ladies' rooms then!"

Certain Republicans have made this a big deal, while claiming it's the liberals driving this.

WHY are you paying so DAMN MUCH ATTENTION to the other people inside a RESTROOM?

mmmarvel says

"I think it is great,” said Melanie Austin, whose daughter will be a first-grader at the district’s Crestview Elementary and in gifted classes once a week at the innovation center. “You just don’t know what gender a kid might identify as.

Why did you leave SF, Melanie?

Are Republicans going to protest the closure of their favorite tea rooms? How are they going to get off with their stodgy, withholding, frigid Christian wives?

Hey cool, the poop character is visible. Took me a while to get those things to display right.

FortWayne says

Gay plague was in late 70s, early 80s.

But I was metaphorically referring to his “just because it was” doesn’t mean it was good. Black Plague was btw caused by poor sanitation.

Liberal hippie stupidity lately in LA brought lots of Hepatitis with it... another win for unsanitary crowd.

This is great stuff.

So letting girls use the same bathroom as boys results in boys having more anal sex with other boys and getting aids. I's really like to see the research on that one.

Black Plague was carried by fleas not from poor sanitation. There are very few people today in the US with fleas. Not an epidemic threat even if boys and girls use the same bathroom. It's true.

The whole 12 homeless people out of 10 million in LA county that got hep A is from liberal stupidity of letting grade school boys and girls use the same bathroom. You learn something new on patnet every day. I never knew liberal stupidity made people homeless. I always thought it had more to do with mental illness, drug, and alcohol abuse. Silly me.

ROFLOL.

Patrick says

the two (exactly two) genders

Gender is a grammatical or social construct, i.e. masculine or feminine, although you can create intersex pronouns, e.g. (s)he, s/he, etc. Biological sex is a fact of nature, subject to the enormous diversity of life:

"How Many Sexes Are There?
***
For biologically speaking, there are many gradations running from female to male; along that spectrum lie at least five sexes -- perhaps even more.

Medical investigators recognize the concept of the intersexual body. But medicine uses the term "intersex" as a catch-all for three major subgroups with some mixture of male and female characteristics: the so-called true hermaphrodites, whom I call herms, who possess one testis and one ovary (the sperm- and egg- producing vessels, or gonads); male pseudo-hermaphrodites ("merms"), who have testes and some aspects of female genitalia but no ovaries; and female pseudo-hermaphrodites ("ferms"), who have ovaries and some aspects of the male genitalia but lack testes.

It is difficult to estimate the frequency of intersexuality; it's not the sort of information one volunteers on a job application. John Money of Johns Hopkins University, a specialist in the study of congenital sexual-organ defects, suggests that intersexuals may constitute as many as four percent of births.

However, few intersexuals maintain their natural sexuality. Medical advances enable physicians to catch most at birth. Such infants are entered into a program of hormonal and surgical management so that they can slip quietly into society as "normal" heterosexual males or females.
***
In some true hermaphrodites, the testis and the ovary grow separately but bilaterally; in others, they grow together within the same organ, forming an ovo-testis. Not infrequently, at least one of the gonads functions well, producing either sperm cells or eggs, as well as functional levels of the sex hormones: androgens or estrogens.

In contrast with true hermaphrodites, pseudo-hermaphrodites possess two gonads of the same kind along with the usual male (XY) or female (XX) chromosomal makeup. But their external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics do not match their chromosomes. Thus, merms have testes and XY chromosomes, yet they also have a vagina and a clitoris, and at puberty they often develop breasts. They do not menstruate, however. Ferms have ovaries, XX chromosomes and sometimes a uterus, but they also have at least partly masculine external genitalia.

No classification scheme could more than suggest the variety of sexual anatomy encountered in clinical practice.
***
The most frequent form of true hermaphrodite encountered by the French doctors -- 55 percent -- appeared to have a more masculine physique. In such people the urethra runs either through or near the phallus, which looks more like a penis than a clitoris. Any menstrual blood exits during urination. But in spite of the relatively male appearance of the genitalia, breasts appear at puberty.

Intersexuality itself is old news... The Talmud lists regulations for people of mixed sex.

In Europe, a pattern emerged by the end of the Middle Ages that, in a sense, has lasted to the present day: hermaphrodites were compelled to choose an established gender role and stick with it... Society mandates the control of intersexual bodies because they blur and bridge the great divide; they challenge traditional beliefs about sexual difference. Hermaphrodites have unruly bodies. They do not fall into a binary classification: only a surgical shoehorn can put them there."

Does this first-grader have a father in her life? My guess is no.

On a somewhat related story, when I was working in the UK many years ago, we would have female cleaning personnel clean the men's bathroom while it was in use. It kind of startled me at first, but I got use to it. But then we were all adults in the office building where I worked.

http://www.edinahigh70.org/woking/

Good times. It was like being paid to have a vacation.

www.youtube.com/embed/zM1P0oc2-es

curious2 says

It is difficult to estimate the frequency of intersexuality

No, it's not very hard. The frequency is near zero in essentially all species, including humans.

This is necessarily so, since it's generally fatal to reproduction to mess with gender. Every one of us has exactly two parents, one male and one female.

curious2 says

Society mandates the control of intersexual bodies because they blur and bridge the great divide; they challenge traditional beliefs about sexual difference. Hermaphrodites have unruly bodies. They do not fall into a binary classification: only a surgical shoehorn can put them there."

No, the traditional beliefs remain obviously correct and essential to our survival. Birth defects do not change the norm. If someone is born without one arm, they are not normal, and less likely to have descendants.

I know the desire to contradict reality comes from a place of pain, and don't want to make light of anyone's pain. It's not about society "mandating" anything. It's about it being the end of the line for individuals who are at war with biology itself, and the end of entire societies which fail to reproduce.

Cultural memes vs. biology and its variations. The war will never end.

Patrick says

I know the desire to contradict reality comes from a place of pain, and don't want to make light of anyone's pain.

I am sorry to have caused you pain. I had thought that you were simply misinformed. I did not realize you had such an intense fear of this issue:

Patrick says

the end of entire societies which fail to reproduce.

That sounds very similar to this comment:

FortWayne says

epidemics that can wipe out populations.

Neither of you has presented any evidence to justify your stated fear.

Evidently, you missed the part of the article that said, "Medical advances enable physicians to catch most at birth. Such infants are entered into a program of hormonal and surgical management so that they can slip quietly into society as "normal" heterosexual males or females." Many intersex persons do reproduce. You choose not to see the data drawn from physicians' clinical observation, and instead to assert your "theory" (doctrine, really) contrary to data. I could cite additional data from marine species, e.g. intersex fish that have evolved the ability to change sex, but I don't want to cause you any more pain. I don't know who can have originally hurt you in this way, nor even how, but you aren't really helping the situation by denying the existence of millions of people. Perhaps it might help to remind you of something you know already, as I have already pointed out: the "celibate" Catholic clergy have never caused the end of Catholics, much less "the end of entire societies." In fact, in Catholic schools, "celibate" priests and nuns are actually in charge of children all day, as role models, and yet we observe no shortage of Catholics, nor "the end of entire societies." I have already cited the existence of transgendered persons documented over 1,000 years in Hindu tradition, and native American berdaches, and the article above cites the Talmud; most of those societies have not ended. In land species that don't change sex, 100% reproduction is not the norm at all, especially for males, and yet the species continue. So, please take heart, the existence of people who disprove your doctrine has never caused the end of society, just as males and females using the same toilet facilities has never wiped out entire populations.