I'm calling my senator. We need a law that says that it is perfectly legal for a pregnant woman being blocked from a restroom to shock the offender with a stun gun.
How bout never block any woman from using the men's bathroom? When a woman's gotta go, she's gotta go. I have used the men's several times, because there was a long line at the women's, and one time a man checked it out for me and stood guard. That's a man-- kind and thoughtful.
I for one already support the hypothetical “Hey beta, your lazy transphobic talking points count as fighting words when used to obstruct a pregnant person from the restroom act”.
Please, wise one, tell me how not to be an idiot. Does it involve buying into fake culture war bullshit long enough to vote for a dude who eliminates your job and your savings?
I make my own job, because I can actually produce something. Yeah, consumers like you are probably concerned. Turns out that liberal arts degree was a poor choice.
Positive personality traits don’t really need to be gendered. Nonetheless, “be a man” could mean; work hard, be brave, be stoical, be honest, protect others. These are all good things. My father did those things and that’s what being a man meant to me, growing up.
When I encountered people for whom being a man seemed to mean be dominant, be aggressive, be cruel; I thought “you don’t know what a man is”.
The older version of masculinity - strong, stoic, disciplined, keeping your word, defending the weak - is being replaced in the “manosphere” by the ideas that 10 year old boys have about masculinity.
It is frankly pathetic how right wing men don't realize the degree to which we've benefitted from modern gender norms. If my Dad had lost his job, he would not have had the option of lying around all day in sweatclothes playing videogames while his sugar mommy went and picked up the kids from daycare on her way home from work, then asked him what he wanted for dinner.
My father joined the army after college to get ahead of being drafted into Vietnam (didn't work, he had to go anyway). Remember that? Of course they don't. The draft was ended the year I was born. That's how lucky *my* ass is. Can you imagine some of these Joe Rogan obsessed, red-pilled manosphere incels actually being thrown into basic training?
They talk about how the "neoliberal" left has abandoned working class men, depriving them of the "meaningful" work they once had. Yes, once upon a time real men proudly worked 10 hour days performing dangerous, menial, low-paying, exploitative drudge-work so they could ultimately be deprived of the pensions they were promised, and wasn't life so much better then? I'm sure all of these Andrew Tate-worshipping MAGA keyboard warriors can't wait to start working in factories and coal mines again, especially without all of that pesky federal government workplace safety regulation and labor law enforcement getting in the way.
And I'm glad you brought up what a bunch of whiny complainers these guys are too—because these arrogant utopian tech/finance bros actually adhere to this peculiar philosophy of not giving a shit how much disruption their self-styled plans for humanity cause in real people's lives, and guess what they call it? "Stoicism"! No assholes, stoicism means to remain firm, resolute, and uncomplaining in the face of *your own* pain, not everyone else's! A stoic doesn't cry when all the mean people in the world stop buying his cars because he's destroying society. You're confusing stoicism with sociopathy.
In all fairness, I acknowledge that we have a crisis of masculinity in this country that needs solving. I even concede that those of us on the liberal side of things have helped compound the problem by persisting with a Manichean, zero-sum framing of the gender divide that has prevented us from seeing how boys are falling waaay behind in school, and we're seeing its effects in adulthood.
But the American far right is the principal driver of this problem, because they are the ones who give feminists on the left quite understandable reason to believe that male success comes at the expense of women, as they continue to insist that the answer is to roll back most of the gains women have made over the years so that men can reclaim their rightful place.
In truth, the answer is to go in the direction Ginny talks about—we need to stop being so singularly focused on women occupying male spaces and look to encouraging more men to occupy women's spaces. I have doubts as to whether things will ever completely even out given that there do seem to be differences of preference and ability between male and female minds, but we absolutely need more male teachers and more male stay-at-home dads, for a couple of prominent examples.
Men need to be more involved in their children's lives than they are today, so we can stop raising so many of these confused, ill-informed, maladjusted misanthropes who are so easily exploited by vampiric, right-wing elites, who con them into serving the interests of the wealthy with the false promise of an obsolete model of masculinity.
Oh, and good luck with your delivery! May it be short and complication-free. And may you not miss your old life *too* much! 😄😏
Spot on. I realize this is one of the things that has been bothering me about all of this. I do see it as whiny, and therefore contradictory of everything these men claim to believe. And that point about the 50s being better/easier (for some very particular members of society)? Absolutely had to do with the tax structure. Brava, incisive and entertaining!
This was also when “particular” households were receiving the full benefits of the GI bill. Free education, low cost home loans, etc. Studies pretty much affirm that this was what really built the middle class.
It’s telling that the ones screaming the loudest about returning to “traditional masculinity” are the whiniest bunch of fragile, lying cowards—who treat women poorly—that this country has ever seen. A man from the 1950s would tell them to their faces that they’re honor-less pieces of shit.
I firmly believe that those most confused about their masculinity are Republicans,especially those in office, they seem to equate masculinity with the abilities to bully,spew hate, lie, and seem to be more obsessed with sex, both theirs and others, than a teenaged boy waiting for his first sexual encounter. They also seem to have the most sex scandals yet want to regulate everyone else's sex life.
You're right. But you can't just ask people to split the difference between two stark concepts. You have to admit the existence of, and help define--as you are doing here, but you have to NAME it--POSITIVE masculinity. And not the way we've been doing for 10 years, listing out positive FEMININE traits as the masculine ideal. If you make men choose between femininity and toxic masculinity, you will not see any positively masculine men left, because you did not frame that as an option. Positive masculinity is about a fathering role: empowering, emboldening, strengthening, debating, competing, inoculating against life's arrows with small darts... and protecting the physically weaker wnd more vulnerable. Positive femininity is about a mothering role: comfort, pure safety, creating a space of literal and figurative feeding, beauty, pleasure. Toxic masculinity is a misuse of male strength and risk tolerance to crush the weak, ignore the small, mock the powerless--rule by debateless fiat enforced by violence, roar, termination. Toxic femininity is a misuse of female persuasion and strategy to gaslight, rush to false consensus, paint ugly realities as beautiful, use social exclusion and rumor and backchannel talking as a weapon, etc.
Only when we start to agree on these four general notions will you see a resurgence of positive masculinity. You cannot expect people to hit a mark you don't define. And people do have some innate tendencies to be masc or fem based on gonadic hormone mix and brain structure.
While I agree that a pregnant woman should be able to pee anywhere (well, not quite anywhere…), I doubt if most women appreciate men, trans-identified or not, using their facilities. And, it is not only rightwingers who object to minors undergoing dramatically life-altering treatments whose consequences they cannot fully understand, and whose value has never been demonstrated.
Leaving aside the thing about life-altering treatments for teens, which I don't think she was trying to address here, I have to say I am sooo confused by the notion that women are all scared of trans women using the same bathroom as us. Oftentimes I think it just reveals male cluelessness about women's experiences. Anyone who's lived in a city, attended a crowded high school, been to a concert or a club, or worked certain blue collar jobs has had to navigate spaces with men and women in close proximity -- and all the groping/harassment/ickiness that goes with it. I don't think that many of us are scared of sharing a public bathroom -- like, with individual stalls -- with a biological male, let alone one who's rejected their own masculinity. (Men do know that our bathrooms don't have urinals, right? We're all hidden from each other.)
I don’t really know what this was referring to: “Men who complain about trans kids. It’s not merely that it’s transphobic, though it is. It’s that it’s whiny. It’s that it’s embarrassing to have your masculinity threatened by a tiny number of teenagers.” But the main complaint about “trans kids” concerns the ongoing medical free-for-all on them, something that will be looked back on with horror and astonishment.
As to whether women care about trans-identified men using restrooms, well, I know of some that do. And as an empirical question, the growing support of laws against it, not only in red states, is at least some evidence that it isn’t a no-brainer for women. Even if the polls were not broken down by sex.
I agree that providing medical treatments for minors is deeply wrong in most cases. I saw that passage as referring to the issue of sports, which MAGA and MAGA-courting guys like Newsom have been so vocal about lately. I'm old enough to remember when these same types were arguing that Title IX had robbed boys' sports of funding, and that girl's and women's sports were basically pathetic and embarrassing. I don't believe for a second that the main impulse here is to protect girls from unfair competitions or injury. It's to guard our beliefs about male dominance. ("What kind of man am I if I let my daughter get tackled by a boy [even if said boy hasn't gone through male puberty and is pretty evenly matched with her]?" -- or worse, "How am I supposed to feel watching a biological male lose to a biological female?")
As for the second question, I’m not “blasé” at all. I’ve been harassed more times than I can count, and assaulted a few times — but never by a trans woman. Trans women are, however, known to be assaulted disproportionately, and I don’t want them to have to use spaces where they’re at risk. As for women who say they want trans women banned from their spaces, I wonder whether they’ve ever knowingly shared space with a trans woman, or whether it’s more the principle that bothers them?
Your response on this is a bit ambiguous, so to be clear: Puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, double mastectomies and castration done on minors are not “medical treatments”, they are robbing a child of a future in a way they may not, in most cases cannot, give informed consent to. Especially with zero reliable evidence that the interventions are helpful.
Whether protecting girls and women from unfair competition, injury, and indignity in the locker room is the main impulse or not, keeping trans-id men out of female athletics does have those effects. You may be interested in hecheated.org , tabulating thousands of cases where such men took top places in women’s sports.
I completely agree on double mastectomies and castration (though these cases are rare) - it’s indefensible. Otherwise, we’re kind of talking past each other, so let’s wish each other well.
About 5000 “gender affirming” surgical amputations were done on minors from 2019 to 2023. Is that “rare”?
Why is it that women should bear the burden of protecting trans-identifying men? And at least, the teammates of Lia/Will Thomas were naked over and over with a non-castrated man, at every meet; the sisters of Kappa Kappa Gamma could see that their “sister” had an erection while watching them undress; etc.
I'm calling my senator. We need a law that says that it is perfectly legal for a pregnant woman being blocked from a restroom to shock the offender with a stun gun.
How bout never block any woman from using the men's bathroom? When a woman's gotta go, she's gotta go. I have used the men's several times, because there was a long line at the women's, and one time a man checked it out for me and stood guard. That's a man-- kind and thoughtful.
I for one already support the hypothetical “Hey beta, your lazy transphobic talking points count as fighting words when used to obstruct a pregnant person from the restroom act”.
A real man would have allowed her in and made sure she was safe
Required even.
You're an idiot.
Please, wise one, tell me how not to be an idiot. Does it involve buying into fake culture war bullshit long enough to vote for a dude who eliminates your job and your savings?
I make my own job, because I can actually produce something. Yeah, consumers like you are probably concerned. Turns out that liberal arts degree was a poor choice.
Liking your own comments is so weak.
Nothing weaker than this thread
Maybe he should get stung in his manhood. Actually, a single penis should be called a peni, I think.
I dunno. Lacks . . . what was it Kegseth called it? Oh, yeah “lethality” - can’t make the world a better place with half measures, right?
Positive personality traits don’t really need to be gendered. Nonetheless, “be a man” could mean; work hard, be brave, be stoical, be honest, protect others. These are all good things. My father did those things and that’s what being a man meant to me, growing up.
When I encountered people for whom being a man seemed to mean be dominant, be aggressive, be cruel; I thought “you don’t know what a man is”.
The older version of masculinity - strong, stoic, disciplined, keeping your word, defending the weak - is being replaced in the “manosphere” by the ideas that 10 year old boys have about masculinity.
OMG Yes! Thank you Ginny!
It is frankly pathetic how right wing men don't realize the degree to which we've benefitted from modern gender norms. If my Dad had lost his job, he would not have had the option of lying around all day in sweatclothes playing videogames while his sugar mommy went and picked up the kids from daycare on her way home from work, then asked him what he wanted for dinner.
My father joined the army after college to get ahead of being drafted into Vietnam (didn't work, he had to go anyway). Remember that? Of course they don't. The draft was ended the year I was born. That's how lucky *my* ass is. Can you imagine some of these Joe Rogan obsessed, red-pilled manosphere incels actually being thrown into basic training?
They talk about how the "neoliberal" left has abandoned working class men, depriving them of the "meaningful" work they once had. Yes, once upon a time real men proudly worked 10 hour days performing dangerous, menial, low-paying, exploitative drudge-work so they could ultimately be deprived of the pensions they were promised, and wasn't life so much better then? I'm sure all of these Andrew Tate-worshipping MAGA keyboard warriors can't wait to start working in factories and coal mines again, especially without all of that pesky federal government workplace safety regulation and labor law enforcement getting in the way.
And I'm glad you brought up what a bunch of whiny complainers these guys are too—because these arrogant utopian tech/finance bros actually adhere to this peculiar philosophy of not giving a shit how much disruption their self-styled plans for humanity cause in real people's lives, and guess what they call it? "Stoicism"! No assholes, stoicism means to remain firm, resolute, and uncomplaining in the face of *your own* pain, not everyone else's! A stoic doesn't cry when all the mean people in the world stop buying his cars because he's destroying society. You're confusing stoicism with sociopathy.
In all fairness, I acknowledge that we have a crisis of masculinity in this country that needs solving. I even concede that those of us on the liberal side of things have helped compound the problem by persisting with a Manichean, zero-sum framing of the gender divide that has prevented us from seeing how boys are falling waaay behind in school, and we're seeing its effects in adulthood.
But the American far right is the principal driver of this problem, because they are the ones who give feminists on the left quite understandable reason to believe that male success comes at the expense of women, as they continue to insist that the answer is to roll back most of the gains women have made over the years so that men can reclaim their rightful place.
In truth, the answer is to go in the direction Ginny talks about—we need to stop being so singularly focused on women occupying male spaces and look to encouraging more men to occupy women's spaces. I have doubts as to whether things will ever completely even out given that there do seem to be differences of preference and ability between male and female minds, but we absolutely need more male teachers and more male stay-at-home dads, for a couple of prominent examples.
Men need to be more involved in their children's lives than they are today, so we can stop raising so many of these confused, ill-informed, maladjusted misanthropes who are so easily exploited by vampiric, right-wing elites, who con them into serving the interests of the wealthy with the false promise of an obsolete model of masculinity.
Oh, and good luck with your delivery! May it be short and complication-free. And may you not miss your old life *too* much! 😄😏
Pretty pissed the asshat wouldn’t you use the bathroom YOU ARE PREGNANT.
This ended up being a really beautiful & nuanced piece and I really enjoyed this. Thank you for writing it.
Aldi now have unisex bathrooms. Maybe that will become a trend
Someone quite rightly pointed out the other day, what do these morons do on aeroplanes where all bathrooms are unisex? 😁
Unisex. And one at a time.
Sigh...
Spot on. I realize this is one of the things that has been bothering me about all of this. I do see it as whiny, and therefore contradictory of everything these men claim to believe. And that point about the 50s being better/easier (for some very particular members of society)? Absolutely had to do with the tax structure. Brava, incisive and entertaining!
This was also when “particular” households were receiving the full benefits of the GI bill. Free education, low cost home loans, etc. Studies pretty much affirm that this was what really built the middle class.
My father received seven years of higher education who paid about 10% of my
You might have peed on his feet.
It’s telling that the ones screaming the loudest about returning to “traditional masculinity” are the whiniest bunch of fragile, lying cowards—who treat women poorly—that this country has ever seen. A man from the 1950s would tell them to their faces that they’re honor-less pieces of shit.
I firmly believe that those most confused about their masculinity are Republicans,especially those in office, they seem to equate masculinity with the abilities to bully,spew hate, lie, and seem to be more obsessed with sex, both theirs and others, than a teenaged boy waiting for his first sexual encounter. They also seem to have the most sex scandals yet want to regulate everyone else's sex life.
Overcompensating? That's a safe bet.
You're right. But you can't just ask people to split the difference between two stark concepts. You have to admit the existence of, and help define--as you are doing here, but you have to NAME it--POSITIVE masculinity. And not the way we've been doing for 10 years, listing out positive FEMININE traits as the masculine ideal. If you make men choose between femininity and toxic masculinity, you will not see any positively masculine men left, because you did not frame that as an option. Positive masculinity is about a fathering role: empowering, emboldening, strengthening, debating, competing, inoculating against life's arrows with small darts... and protecting the physically weaker wnd more vulnerable. Positive femininity is about a mothering role: comfort, pure safety, creating a space of literal and figurative feeding, beauty, pleasure. Toxic masculinity is a misuse of male strength and risk tolerance to crush the weak, ignore the small, mock the powerless--rule by debateless fiat enforced by violence, roar, termination. Toxic femininity is a misuse of female persuasion and strategy to gaslight, rush to false consensus, paint ugly realities as beautiful, use social exclusion and rumor and backchannel talking as a weapon, etc.
Only when we start to agree on these four general notions will you see a resurgence of positive masculinity. You cannot expect people to hit a mark you don't define. And people do have some innate tendencies to be masc or fem based on gonadic hormone mix and brain structure.
Very important story. Pee on sister!!
Wish you’d peed on his shoes
I loved reading this! Patriarchy harms men as much as it harms women. In case it’s of interest I wrote about my thoughts on masculinity here: https://open.substack.com/pub/unpopularopinionbymelania/p/if-girls-can-do-everything-where
While I agree that a pregnant woman should be able to pee anywhere (well, not quite anywhere…), I doubt if most women appreciate men, trans-identified or not, using their facilities. And, it is not only rightwingers who object to minors undergoing dramatically life-altering treatments whose consequences they cannot fully understand, and whose value has never been demonstrated.
Leaving aside the thing about life-altering treatments for teens, which I don't think she was trying to address here, I have to say I am sooo confused by the notion that women are all scared of trans women using the same bathroom as us. Oftentimes I think it just reveals male cluelessness about women's experiences. Anyone who's lived in a city, attended a crowded high school, been to a concert or a club, or worked certain blue collar jobs has had to navigate spaces with men and women in close proximity -- and all the groping/harassment/ickiness that goes with it. I don't think that many of us are scared of sharing a public bathroom -- like, with individual stalls -- with a biological male, let alone one who's rejected their own masculinity. (Men do know that our bathrooms don't have urinals, right? We're all hidden from each other.)
I don’t really know what this was referring to: “Men who complain about trans kids. It’s not merely that it’s transphobic, though it is. It’s that it’s whiny. It’s that it’s embarrassing to have your masculinity threatened by a tiny number of teenagers.” But the main complaint about “trans kids” concerns the ongoing medical free-for-all on them, something that will be looked back on with horror and astonishment.
As to whether women care about trans-identified men using restrooms, well, I know of some that do. And as an empirical question, the growing support of laws against it, not only in red states, is at least some evidence that it isn’t a no-brainer for women. Even if the polls were not broken down by sex.
https://www.prri.org/spotlight/states-have-become-more-polarized-on-transgender-civil-rights/
And do you have the same blasé acceptance of trans-id men in rape crisis centers, female locker rooms, female prisons, female athletics?
I agree that providing medical treatments for minors is deeply wrong in most cases. I saw that passage as referring to the issue of sports, which MAGA and MAGA-courting guys like Newsom have been so vocal about lately. I'm old enough to remember when these same types were arguing that Title IX had robbed boys' sports of funding, and that girl's and women's sports were basically pathetic and embarrassing. I don't believe for a second that the main impulse here is to protect girls from unfair competitions or injury. It's to guard our beliefs about male dominance. ("What kind of man am I if I let my daughter get tackled by a boy [even if said boy hasn't gone through male puberty and is pretty evenly matched with her]?" -- or worse, "How am I supposed to feel watching a biological male lose to a biological female?")
As for the second question, I’m not “blasé” at all. I’ve been harassed more times than I can count, and assaulted a few times — but never by a trans woman. Trans women are, however, known to be assaulted disproportionately, and I don’t want them to have to use spaces where they’re at risk. As for women who say they want trans women banned from their spaces, I wonder whether they’ve ever knowingly shared space with a trans woman, or whether it’s more the principle that bothers them?
Your response on this is a bit ambiguous, so to be clear: Puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, double mastectomies and castration done on minors are not “medical treatments”, they are robbing a child of a future in a way they may not, in most cases cannot, give informed consent to. Especially with zero reliable evidence that the interventions are helpful.
Whether protecting girls and women from unfair competition, injury, and indignity in the locker room is the main impulse or not, keeping trans-id men out of female athletics does have those effects. You may be interested in hecheated.org , tabulating thousands of cases where such men took top places in women’s sports.
I completely agree on double mastectomies and castration (though these cases are rare) - it’s indefensible. Otherwise, we’re kind of talking past each other, so let’s wish each other well.
About 5000 “gender affirming” surgical amputations were done on minors from 2019 to 2023. Is that “rare”?
Why is it that women should bear the burden of protecting trans-identifying men? And at least, the teammates of Lia/Will Thomas were naked over and over with a non-castrated man, at every meet; the sisters of Kappa Kappa Gamma could see that their “sister” had an erection while watching them undress; etc.
Trans women are women
Stupid people are stupid
Wonderful. Thank you.
God I wish I had been there to govern that creep who blocked your way a bollocking!