The Handbook of the Mount Saint Charles Academy, a Christian school, starts well.
Mount Saint Charles Academy admits students of any race, color, national origin or ethnic background to all rights, privileges, programs and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the school. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin or ethnic background in the administration of educational policies, loan programs, and athletic or other school administered programs.
Notice anything missing? Nothing about sexual orientation, and nothing about transgender…oh, wait. They do have a statement on that last one.
Mount Saint Charles Academy is unable to make accommodations for transgender students. Therefore, MSC does not accept transgender students nor is MSC able to continue to enroll students who identify as transgender.
What special accommodations do you need to make for transgender students? Do they have special plumbing? It seems to me that transgender students are able to use the facilities they already have for men and women in the school, so this is a very strange restriction.
You know, if you lack something you need to support a set of your students, the right answer is to fix your facilities; the easy answer is to kick out those students. But that’s also the wrong answer.
Especially when your handbook babbles about the compassion of Christ
.
And I missed that they left out transgender identification. I noticed that they left out religion. Which shows why Pharyngula is important to me. Once again, hoisted on my own privileged petard.
In slightly better news, South Dakota governor vetoes law on transgender bathrooms. Not that I expect that to stand for long.
But you’re forgetting the ick factor. Many Christians, and not a few non-Christians, think transgender people are icky. Forget that stuff Jesus taught about “love one another” and stuff like that. The transgender ick overrides anything Jesus said.
While what I wrote may be snark, it’s also the way too many people look at transgenders.
Ambidexter @ 3:
Small fix there. Transgender is not a noun, and it’s important that transgender people are identified as people.
Sounds to me like the special “accomodations” which are necessary for the transgendered here involve something called “basic human decency.” The administration cannot guarantee that, if students (or teachers) shun, insult, spit on, or put out their legs to trip someone who’s transgendered, that anyone will be reprimanded for that. That’s extra work and they’ve no time for it.
The so-called “compassion of Christ” is supposed to involve His sighing in pity for the damned. It isn’t supposed to mean He’s going to open the door to Hell and tell the demons to knock off the pitchfork poking already.
In a similar vein, while in Washington state several bathroom bills failed in the legislature, these folks want to put a bathroom initiative on this November’s ballot. You can find the wording here, just scroll down to Joseph Backholm. I hope they fail at the signature gathering stage, but there’s a chance we will be fighting it in the fall. In contrast with the bills that failed in the legislature, the initiative focuses on public schools rather than businesses, and it seeks to force all public schools to enforce regressive gender policies in all bathrooms and locker rooms intended for multiple students at a time.
I wrote:
Oops. Ok, my bad. I’ll correct this to “transgendered people.”
MSC alum here. Hundreds of fellow alums have come together in the past day to criticize this policy. The most powerful criticism comes from this transgender alum who was in the class below mine and is now a postulate for the episcopal priesthood at the Yale divinity school: https://desiringthekingdom.wordpress.com/2016/03/03/from-the-great-eight-award-to-unable-to-make-accommodationsa-response-to-mount-st-charles-policy-on-transgender-students/
The website keeps crashing my browser.
Does MSC welcome people in wheelchairs? They need special toilets, you know.
Here’s a bit more you might want to know about the Brothers of the Sacred Heart. I knew a guy who went to one of their schools and he told me it was a hellhole. The monks used to beat the shit out of the kids, just for fun. He didn’t mention being raped but I suspect he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it, this was in the 1980s. He was obviously badly emotionally injured.
These guys are psychos.
Many Christians also think women are icky. Are the restrooms all men only?
Ya see, transgendered people confuse Jesus because he made them one way and he doesn’t recognise them any other way. When Jesus gets too confused toilets won’t flush because he can’t remember which way to properly have the water swirl and it can force sewage to back up.
Jesus is totally flummoxed when his plan doesn’t come together.
Yes. The slaves can use the woods out back.
@8 Tom Dickinson
Hopefully this will mean the decision will be rescinded and replaced by a statement more inclusive of everyone.
The whole point of having gender-specific bathrooms is so that men don’t have to be exposed to women’s ickiness. If transgendered people are allowed to use the bathroom of their choice, men might have to share a bathroom with a vagina-haver. Ewwwww……
re 15:
or they want to “protect their precious girls from possibly seeing a the icky male “appendage”.
it is always an issue of ick, regardless of which side of the glass one looks.
@15 & @16
Many years ago it was not so much to protect a girl from seeing an icky male appendage but to protect girls from the state in which boys who used the girls’ washroom would frequently leave the toilet seat.
it is always an issue of ick, regardless of which side of the glass one looks.
Ultimately self-loathing.
After all, otherwise they’d be saying “hey, if someone wants to watch me do my business, just ask!“
It’s more a foible of english, that some adjectives have become nouns. A person will not be described as ‘a gay’, yet for whatever reason ‘a lesbian’ is perfectly fine. Transgender seems to hew more closely to gay, in that it is seen as tremendously awkward if used as a noun, but I would not go so far as to say that it is dehumanising.
@17
Ick is big tent–sloppy toilet usage certainly fits right in. Pretty high on my ick list, anyway.
I read the first quote as: “We don’t discriminate in any manner explicitly prohibited by law, but only reluctantly.”
slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) @16: Fortunately, I have written a lovely long piece on why girls are highly unlikely to be viewing a masculine appendage in the standard women’s rest-room (as they’re described over there in the USA) unless the possessor of said appendage is hung like a garden hose. You can find it here: http://megpie71.dreamwidth.org/63990.html.
(Short version: the maximum visible space under the bottom of the door or the bottom of the stalls in the standard women’s configuration public lavatory is about 10cm, or 4 inches.)
Also, take it from someone who’s been there, when I was no longer able to hold it and was forced into using public bathrooms, the thing most constantly on my mind was “please let no one notice me”, not ” please everyone look at this genitalia I loathe”. I didn’t let my partner see me naked until after a particular surgery had happened. The very last thing I wanted was some stranger to know, let alone see anything.
Please fight against this kind of bill where you’re able, cis people. It sets up trans people for potential abuse and violence, for as noted above completely spurious reasoning.
Me, I’m just glad Mount Holier-than-Heck is up front about being bigoted. That’s much easier to deal with.
Meg Thornton@22, Ah but the standard imaginary model cootie-carrier also carries, in her handbag (or purse as it tends to known on the wrong side of the Atlantic) a mirror. When carefully positioned, such as on the floor in the gap, or (for the more cunning) on the ceiling, she certainly might see something icky.
Meg @22: 4 inches? I wish!
I’m a female long-distance truck driver; public restrooms (mostly truck stops and restaurants) are all I use. The most common height from floor of stall walls and doors is 2-5 inches below the level of the toilet seat. Still, though, one would have to be a contortionist – not to mention ridiculously obvious – to see anything.
The stupidity gets me whenever I think: do these men (it’s almost always men) not realize that there’s no such thing as an open floor plan in women’s restrooms? We do ALL our business in private stalls, nitwits! (Which leads me to wonder if it isn’t actually the thought of someone with hidden girly bits catching a glimpse of *them* at the urinal that is the real problem. Overcompensation strikes again.)
@19
Well, I’ll take trans people’s word on it. Since they’re kindly asking people not to use it we don’t need any lay linguistics on deciding whether this is really a bad word
@19
While it’s not really a hill I’d die on, I can confirm that some trans people – myself included – do.
They left out the disabled, too.
I am curious, what would happen if they re-labeled the bathroom, ‘penis-havers’, and ‘vagina-havers’?
Corwyn:
What do you think would happen? Something magically different from the current binary of men/women – boys/girls? You’re sticking a different name on the same fucking thing – binary gender. I’d really like to know why you took the trouble to type this ‘question’ out.
corwyn,
I am curious, what do you think would happen?
And who pays for all the nosy and/or perverted bathroom attendants we’d need?
What about intersexed people? “Tough shit, just hold it”?
Great thought experiment, corwyn, very useful.
@29 corwyn
I think relabeling them all identically would be a great idea and ‘penis-havers and vagina-havers’ would certainly work. Although just labeling them all ‘bathroom’ would require less lettering.
corwyn
People who have vaginas don’t use them to urinate.
The best design I have seen in a public bathroom was unisex. One side of the restroom was a row of sinks with different heights to accommodate different needs. The other side of the room was a wall of full sized doors with a frosted glass pane above them. All of the stalls were completely private lockable tiny rooms. Some stalls had urinals, some had toilets, some were large enough for wheelchairs, and also had baby changing fold down things for family groups.
I like that the Governor of S.D. stated that his research on the proposed bill revealed that it did not address an actual issue, so he vetoed it. It’s a very diplomatic way to tell some members of that government that they are clueless dolts for proposing it in the first place. It is nice to see people with positions of power educate themselves before rendering any opinions. It gives me hope that the current crop of candidate are so outright frightening that the GOP might finally be motivated to rally back to actual conservatism in the Teddy Roosevelt style, rather than it’s current fascist flavor.
Chigau:
Well, now you’re just going to confuse the hell outta them, getting all technical and stuff.
Chris61:
Oh, yes, of course it would, as long as you have someone to do the all important genital check, because what’s under your clothes is the mostest important thing ever, oh my yes, why someone who is a woman who happens to have a penis, or a man who happens to have a vagina, well, fuck them for realizing they aren’t the gender which matches their genitalia.
Caine
corwyn said
‘penis-havers’, and ‘vagina-havers’
chris61 said
‘penis-havers and vagina-havers’
Note strategic location of the quote ‘ marks.
I think chris61 is on our side.
Ah. My apologies, Chris 61. Thanks, Chigau. Teach me to post before adequate tea.
I thought long and hard about the best toilet design and came to the conclusion that there should be two kinds of bathrooms: One for people pee standing up and one for people who pee sitting down.
Giliell @ 40:
But, but…what about women who pee standing up? And what about men who pee sitting down? Oh, why oh why won’t people just fucking conform to binary genital tyranny? Damn rebels.
If you must label the doors, why not just People? Or Toilet (more understandable to non-USAians than “bathroom”)? I can see a point to a symbol / sign indicating “extra” facilities — baby changing table, for instance — but perhaps excepting facilities with exposed urinals (which I really hate regardless of who else is in the room, and I especially despite the “trench”-style or whatever it is called), why the instance on people’s bio-plumbing?