Republicans & Conservatives: Archives

Women’s bathrooms are always nicer, certainly cleaner. Women won’t tolerate this change for very long. I doubt if men’s aim will improve just because women are present and after a brief adjustment period most of their other habits will also return.

Over at the gym where I work out, women have demanded (and got) a separate room where they can be free of the prying eyes of men and don’t have to look at their sweaty bodies or hear their guttural grunts. Bathrooms are worse.

There have been many occasions when I have been grossed out by the sounds and smells emanating from the men’s stalls, even after years of experience. I know this is a stereotype, but in my experience women are less tolerant of the smell of stale urine or the sound of flatulence being rapidly released. They won’t be able to comfortably use the bathrooms anymore. Women at UNH will have to give up drinking coffee and soft drinks unless they live within easy walking distance.

This is a truly stupid idea. I think it is also very interesting (although not surprising) that you are being censored.

“Women’s bathrooms are always nicer, certainly cleaner.”
How do you know Jack? - Cross dressing? ha ha ??

It is my guess that a man is leading this charge. He wanted all the urinals removed due to his own ‘embarrassment’ and had to go about finding a way to do it.
(After all we know a man who chooses to urinate behind a stall door is hiding a ‘small’ problem.)sorry…couldn’t resist
I agree that it would be less humiliating to go in a traditional men/women restroom than one marked for those who are different.

I’m asking for bathroom signs in Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit, and Punjabi for all the Indians at UNH. And there’s one other thing I want. Indians don’t use toilet paper. They use a hose.

That’s awesome, Gandhi.

Don’t be surprised if TNH doesn’t publish this simply because of its length. This is too long as it is, and you said this is a shortened version. (Adding stuff about parking tickets doesn’t help either). Good thoughts, though.

Thanks, Chops. I removed the bit about parking tickets in the shortened version which I submitted for publishing :)

I don’t think TNH is refusing to publish my article for length reasons, or for writing quality. The rule for Op/Eds is they have to be within 600 words; mine was 600 exactly. TNH published another editorial over 900 words last month, on the same subject, by the president of the UNH Alliance. It was one of the poorest pieces of writing I’ve ever seen - the author even conceeded “In conclusion, I admit that I probably rambled a bit”. Big journalistic mistake!

Gandhi,

How can UNH isolate a group of people into separate rooms?

Wouldn’t that be the same as “separate but equal”?

The only fair thing to do (if they’re stupid enough to propose something like that) is to remove all labels off the restrooms!
It should say nothing more than “restroom” on the doors.

Equip them all with urinals, stools,tampon and condom dispencers, and a hose.

That should cover all the bases unless someone thought that a litterbox might be needed?

If that idea didn’t go over well with the majority of students, you might just put a pic. of a “pud” on some and a pic. of a “tweeter” on others?
Nothing about gender there, it would be based on “equipment” and you would save money by not having to print signs in many languages.

Ok, I’m not sure what the big deal about this is. Have they basically made the bathrooms co-ed, or are they trying to designate specific bathrooms for “transgenders” to use? If they have only made the bathrooms co-ed, what’s the problem? I’m a conservative, and I don’t have any problem with that. We had co-ed bathrooms at Amherst College (at least in my dorm) back in 1988, 17 years ago. Amherst had been all-male until the late 1960’s, and therefore no arrangements had been made for separate male and female bathrooms in the older dorms. The dorms were co-ed (something else I don’t have a problem with) and the only alternative to co-ed bathrooms was having some people have to walk to the other end of the dorm to use the bathroom, as there were only 2 on each floor, so if you had a Men’s room at one end and a Girl’s at the other, the girls at the wrong end would have to walk twice as far to go to the bathroom or take a shower, and the men would have to do the same.
As a courtesy, most students knocked before going in, but nobody really had any problems with it. And they did actually allow us to vote on whether to have the bathrooms be co-ed or walk farther, and I don’t remember anyone voting against the co-ed idea.
Now, if the college is trying to designate bathrooms specifically for “transgenders”, then yes, that is stupid. But co-ed bathrooms are no big deal. Not in the 21st Century.

At home our bathrooms are polysexual. But think how nervewracking it is when even you closest friends come over. When they go upstairs to use the bathroom and close that door with a defiant slam, after fumbling with the tricky old lock, I always think oh no what if I forgot to hide “____” insert any mumber of embarassing items here: Medications, false teeth, tampon plastic applicators, raunchy reads, (Liberal Rags— for cleaning the copious glass and mirrors newsprint cant be beat). I cant imagine the amounts of very strange stranger sex this would lead to.

“Womens bathrooms are nicer and cleaner than men’s”
Jack, you’ve obviously never cleaned the bathrooms in gas stations.
I have to agree though that transgender bathromms are a stupid ideda.
I don’t think very many women would appericate a man walking in on them while they’re on the pot. I also doubt very many men (dispite their talk) would want a woman walking in on them.

Beagle - you’re absolutely correct. The new designation isn’t a practical one; it’s a political one, and that’s why I take issue with the signs. A gender neutral bathroom requires no sign other than “bathroom”.

The gay lobby has done much the same thing with trying to include blacks with them as holders of minority status, even though sexuality and race have nothing to do with each other. The same thing is being done here with transgender people, only this time it is much more blatant, since presumably only some 1 in 4000 people are transgender.

Part of the issue is that, as you will notice if you read the original TNH article, that they can’t make up their minds whether these bathrooms are gender-neutral or for transgender people. The UNH Student Senate (which proposed the bathroom changes) and every liberal columnist who has defended the decision has focused on transgendered people, not the issue of gender neutrality. Since that is what the UNH liberals want, that was the primary issue that I addressed in my editorial.

Now, I also have a few issues with the idea of gender-neutral bathrooms. Jack covered one of those issues pretty well. To answer Ron - I haven’t cleaned a gas station bathroom, and I know they’re pretty bad (probably because men use them too), but I do run a men’s residence and we have a women’s bathroom downstairs. The women’s bathroom is almost self-maintaining; the attempts of some guys to clean it actually make it dirtier. The guy’s bathroom is disgusting in comparison. This will never change, regardless of who lives in the house.

The second issue is one of cost. Given a shortage of facilities, especially if the bathrooms are single-cell units without urinals or tampon dispensors, it makes perfect sense to remove gender designation - just as one would do in a house. However, UNH is a bit different:

-There are already plenty of bathrooms for both males and females

-The men’s bathrooms already have urinals, and don’t have tampon dispensors. Vice versa for the women’s bathrooms.

-It is not socially acceptable to desegregate bathrooms in most public contexts.

Changing this status quo in any way from this situation will increase overall cost, therefore it is stupid. (Not as stupid as calling them transgender bathrooms, though).

I remember at my last job, we moved the company to a beaten down building that had been long abandoned. Due to time constraints, and costs (I assume) only one bathroom was ready when the company moved, and the President thought doing an “Ally McBeal” bathroom arrangement would work.

It didn’t. Bathroom 2 (the men’s room) opened in a few weeks. I think the first couple weeks were really unbearable for the ladies.

This is a pretty humourous situation in my opinion. A lot of chatter about potty. =)
IMO, taking care of one’s excretory needs is a plumbing issue. If you’re a pre-op transgender, then I say use whatever makes you most comfortable. Personally, I would never want to use the women’s restroom, or share a public one with them. When I used to clean restrooms as a teenager at a bus station, I learned very quickly that women can actually be messier, and yuckier, than men sometimes.

In this case, trying to acheive tolerance through physical desegregation is probably not the right solution.

This is political correctness run amok. I am very much in favor of equality, but there needs to be limits. Since those that recognize themselves as trans-gender probably constitute the overwhelming minority, I don’t think its fair to everyone else to go and uproot the whole system. Now, instead of one group maybe feeling uncomfortable, the entire student body is. Whatever decision is made it needs to be universal. Either lable all bathrooms “unisex” and abolish urinals from the facilities campus-wide, or leave things as they were. Either way, some students and faculty are going to be less than happy.