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Comments
Hm, right. Let's just gloss over that.
I repeat.
Men have to put up with the same thing.
Seems kind of... unfair, to expect men to put up with it but oh no not women, right?
Maybe it's just a good idea to carry around a bedpan and do your business when no-one's looking
Or just forget about the whole separate bathrooms thing and just deal with people occasionally peeing on seats.
Your solution does not involve the possibility of flinging shit at people. Therefore, invalid.
Aaand this is the point where I groan in disgust and leave the thread.
But seriously, I see now that maybe I was a bit too dismissive of the concept of unisex restrooms.
Sorry for acting so condescending towards it...
Aw hell, I just regret this entire exchange. I said a lot of things I'm not too proud of.
So, this thread is about toilets now, or did just cease to be? BTW it gets me thinking: how lucky our world is, if the biggest problem is that... hold on, SEXISM AHEAD... the toilets ARE SEPARATE. I mean, if you can convince me building separate toilets is big enough an expense that it's cheaper to just tell everyone to get used to the idea of unisex toilets, that would be some reason. I mean, I know I am a reactionary crazy evil fundie exploiter of the people rabid wacko, but really, is it that much of a problem that toilets are separate and some people probably don't mind it? It's, like, that time at TVT when some guy tried to argue that having kids (just the fact that they're born, mind you) is an act of oppression, except that time it was only he fighting the oppression, and everyone else, trying to wrap their minds around his ideas.
@Eelektross: saying things you're not too proud of? Heh, I know the pain. And yet, here I am, jumping in for a chance to have everyone piling up on me. Or whatever. Pfffhht.
The main reason I'm against the actress category is that we can just have them be in an actor category and a female category at the same time.
But first, an admission: I was lying to most of the userbase. Let me be very clear as to exactly who I am. I am not a Mexican-American user from Seattle, Washington. I am a Filipino man (a Filipino boy at the time of this thread’s creation) from the Philippines and have never held American citizenship in my life. I lied about my personal details all those years ago both to keep myself safe from sexual predators as a minor and to not be condescended to for my country of origin. The latter reason, however, is not the story I want to discuss.
What I want to discuss is the throughline that ended up defining this thread, which admittedly was a slight digression from the original topic. See, at the time, I was studying at a Catholic all-boys’ school, and we were taught as a matter of religious dogma and scientific truth that boys and girls were inherently different. Thus, both needed to be treated differently on every conceivable level – physically, psychologically, and societally. Being a Catholic schoolboy and growing up in the Philippines does not expose one to a diversity of opinion regarding this subject, especially considering that my school was an especially right-wing sect of the religion.
This thread was a formative moment in that regard. Someone saying that “all segregation between boys and girls should be abolished on principle” was utterly alien to me at the time, and was the reason for why I gave such a sputtering and weak defense of single-sex bathrooms. It was just…utterly alien to me that someone could think that way, much less repeat it as a matter of principle.
I came back here because on another forum that I won’t link here, someone (an adult, no less) expressed sincere and good-faith ignorance of trans issues regarding bathrooms. Predictably, he was treated similarly to how I was treated in this thread. I honestly don’t know what the fuck my views would look like right now, if it weren’t for the discussion in this thread.
Which brings me to the other reason I came back here in the first place. In the time intervening, I’ve (obviously) grown into an adult and have started a career as an essayist of some repute. Part of my job is looking back on the moments that formed me, even if doing so is painful and embarrassing to me personally.
gosh i have never really dived into my post history on this site or elsewhere
probably an oppo researcher's dream if i ever ran for office lol
Just taking these few sentences into account alone, it sounds like something one would do to try to appear cool on the internet in reverse. Feels like folks like to pretend being some sort of exotic. You know, the standard mid-2010's Tumblr thing of claiming you're trans-Asian or something. The joke is, Mexican-American from Seattle is quite exotic already from a point of view of a Filipino boy.
lol iunno what im talkin bout
If you don't mind me asking: do Catholic all-boys' schools have a reputation as gay as Catholic all-girls' schools? Although on my end the Catholic all-girls' schools do actually rather have a reputation as a breeding ground for avowed atheists.
Also, hi there, welcome back! It's good to hear you've become an essayist of some repute. Sounds like the sort of job one's more successful old buddy might have.
Any excuse to necro a >10 years old thread is a good one.
As for the thread's topic, the whole actor/actress thing does seem like a distinction without a difference... well, sort of, the thing about different roles isn't irrelevant, but if anything that seemed like a reason to have three categories for (male) actor, (female) actress and a general person-who-acts one, at any rate having one category makes more sense to me than two.
Man, it feels like antinatalists fell off the face of the earth (you could say they stopped reproducing).
(edit: I guess I could've just called them the blackpills.)
lol'd
I don't remember them having such a reputation? Then again, I wasn't the most socially adept person at this age, as you can probably tell. I think we had a few people that were in retrospect likely gay (and one definitive case that came out of the closet years after the fact), but I wouldn't say that we had an especially high rate of gay people showing up.
I specifically did it for the two reasons I listed previously, but especially the self-defense one. Even at fifteen, I knew already that chat forums tended to be full of predatory creeps, and I wanted to protect myself from any unwanted advances.
Also IIRC the transethnic person turned out to be a troll.
You learn something new every day. Now, if only every stupid one on the 'Net could be reliably counted a troll...
Um, sorry. But why? I'll admit to lacking all optics on how Filipinos seem to appear online but I don't see how claiming to be one makes you less vulnerable than the other?
Also, chiming in slightly on what this thread seemed to have been about...it's really common to see all three here. There'll be a male public restroom and a female public restroom and a unisex restroom right in the middle. Granted, it's not a guarantee - some places will just have a unisex restroom, some places will lack one altogether- but that generally seems to be the pattern down here.
To be Filipino is to be constantly bombarded with how corrupt the government is and how much of an embarrassment we are on the world stage. I didn't want that perception of us to affect how I was perceived here.
Also I was "vulnerable" in the sense that I was a minor, not in the sense of my nationality.
Yeah that's the trend here as well, at least in government buildings.
deep breath
There’s a popular adage that every lie told (or written, in this case) incurs a debt to the truth – and that sooner or later, that debt is paid. Well, I suppose this was my attempt at paying up. As I said previously, I lied about my age and created an entire false persona for two reasons; to protect myself as a minor and to hide the stigma of being born in a so-called “third world” or “poor” country. I even feigned ignorance towards Filipino culture to keep this affectation up because I didn’t want people to look down on me for my origins. And yes, I know that was sucky of me.
Not that the views I expressed in this thread were any way insincere. On the contrary, they represent exactly what I believed at the time; that sex segregation in public spaces was necessary to keep predatory men away from vulnerable women. This was the rhetoric foisted on me by my Catholic upbringing (in particular, my school). I had no idea at the time that the issue of single-sex spaces would become so heated in recent years.
In many ways, I think the push for sex segregation in categories and public spaces has been made more visible in recent years, and is now widely recognized as problematic propaganda. But that’s the thing, it’s propaganda now and not a basic assumption of society. When I was conscientious of this issue back in 2012, sex segregation was nothing so crude or obvious; it was a basic assumption of the milieu I grew up in.
I'm not sure what else to say.