I hate using men’s rooms because there is usually piss all over the floor. Doesn’t matter if it’s a bathroom in a fancy place or a dive bar, the floors usually have piss all over them because men don’t aim properly. Even the stalls have piss all over the toilet seats because nobody will pick up the seat.

I vastly prefer gender neutral bathrooms.

I have absolutely no problems with non-gendered bathrooms and they are getting more and more common. The one exception in my opinion is the troth-style arrangement that are common at larger venues, because of superior throughput. Especially sport venues where everyone rushes to the bathroom at halftime. If all toilets were individual, the queues would get enormous or the number of toilets would have to be at least tripled.

And admit it guys, you’d miss having the opportunity to compliment someone’s dick without it being weird.

Otherwise I see no point in gendering bathrooms.

Slovak and Czech too (definitely even more languages). Both languages have all nouns, adjectives, numerals AND verbs gendered. You could theoretically refer to a non-binary person as a you (in plural form) - that is however used mainly for speaking/referring to someone more respectable. Then you have the they form, which is not recommended to be used in singular due to it being used during feudalism to refer to the aristocracy), and then it (which is terrible too, as it seems like you are speaking to an item, not a human being). If you want to invent a different pronoun, good luck with making it not sound weird, as we use 7 grammatical cases and declension; in general, the grammar is incredibly complex.

I agree that anyone should be able to wear any style of clothing, but I must admit that clothing typically needs different measurements for men versus women (hips, chest, shoulders). T-shirts and sweat pants are pretty neutral, but a busty bosom won’t fit in a men’s button down shirt and a little black dress will have too-tight shoulders on many men. There’s a fair amount of women’s-cut clothing that looks like men’s-style, but the reverse is sadly lacking.

Honesty when it comes to lingerie I think there’s just a very small market. I had a drunk conversation with my former roommate and her gay BFF many many years ago and I got this piece of gold from her BFF (paraphrasing) - “it’s not about the wrapping, it’s about the package” (not penis)

Just heard an interview with a person who is intersex (meaning they were born with DNA and physical characteristics that don’t match). Intersex people are also caught in all the anti-trans legislation. The quote that stood out the most to me:

I think society understands at this point that sexuality is a spectrum. Some people are gay. Some are straight. A lot are in between. And society is also starting to understand that gender is a spectrum, that you’re not just a man or a woman, but there’s a lot in between there, too. What society hasn’t quite learned yet is that sex is also a spectrum. You’re not only male or female. Two percent of the world is born somewhere in between those two poles on that spectrum. src

Interestingly, the common name for a step-through bike with the handles pointing towards the rider is Mama-chari in Japanese.

Step-thru is best for city biking. When I have some local errands to run on bike I usually just take my daughters schwinn.

Is there actually a widespread benefit to forcibly upholding the gender roles?

it’s complicated but given that they’re a near-universal phenomenon (despite what those roles are not being universal), i do think it logically follows that humans collectively derive some social value from their continuation―although i think opinions would vary heavily on what that social value is. in any case it doesn’t seem likely we’d spontaneously invent and almost universally adopt a social construct with no intrinsic benefits.

Maybe not for you or I but capitalism thrives off of exploitation and gender is but one of the many levers that can be used to promote division.

I’m not going to go off listing everything that feminists have studied in that regard, but some of the major ones that come to mind is the wage gap and glass ceiling.

Of course there’s more than a financial aspect to sexism, namely power. And it’s up to you to decide which aspect you think contributes the most.

Chess is an interesting case study. For this whose don’t know, it’s not separated by gender, rather there are some competitions open only to women. At the same time, everyone knows Women’s GMs aren’t “real” GMs (they may even have killed off the Women’s GM title by now for this reason, I can’t remember), so it’s not clear that women’s chess isn’t at this point suggesting women are second class chess players. I’d expect women’s chess to disappear at some point (or for a few tournaments to stick around for historical reasons)–I’m pretty sure it’s less of a thing now than when I was a kid.

The value of women’s competitions is that it increases participation in sports where women were historically excluded (women were literally banned from FA football grounds in Britain) or where women’s participation was under-resourced (see… Little League softball, probably, which came into existence after a Supreme Court ruling saying Little League couldn’t bar girls from participating, so they made a separate competition to steer girls to). In some utopian future, that becomes unnecessary. However, over time, the women’s game sometimes develops a distinct flavor (men’s and women’s lacrosse require decidedly different skills, even if the difference in rules presumably originated in sexism) and then we have the problem of merging them back together without defaulting to losing the women’s game. There are sports where it wouldn’t be too hard–the ones where there’s little/no drift (shooting sports, maybe cricket) and the ones where everyone thinks the games are distinct (see baseball and fast pitch softball)–but others that are much harder. On the other hand, we manage with the fact there are two totally unrelated sports called “handball”, two lacrosse variants can’t be harder.

And the German language! Mark Twain has a whole essay about it.

“Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print – I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:

Gretchen: “Wilhelm, where is the turnip?”

Wilhelm: “She has gone to the kitchen.”

Gretchen: “Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?”

Wilhelm. "It has gone to the opera.”

Acceptable counter-argument: “The English language isn’t gendered enough.”

I actually paid the blue tax and got a pack of dude wipes to see what they were like. I expected them to smell like axe body spray or something. They just smelled like normal flushable wipes. They didn’t make any attempt to masculate them. 🤷

YES my husband uses these and one smells minty, the other smells like something…unremarkable. Bless his heart anyway I guess.

Recently in my city’s university there was a computer seminar for free, only for women. No men allowed. So a friend of mine who is cyberdumb couldn’t attend.

So not so ubiquitous.

And don’t tell me that was fine, discrimination is wrong whoever does and receive it.

Isn’t there a general consesus in sports that testosterone makes a big difference?

I see where you’re coming from (I heard from a friend who heard from a friend) but I guess that depends on who you’re asking and what the sport is. Golf is hand-eye coordination, practice and skill. Balls or ovaries, it shouldn’t make any difference when it comes to golf.

Fun fact: bowling, pool and darts are also gendered in many leagues. Pretty sure testosterone wouldn’t be the deciding factor in the winner in those.

Isn’t there a general consesus in sports that testosterone makes a big difference?

No, there’s just a pervasive, misogynistic, and deeply hateful idea that men will always defeat women in sports, no matter what, no matter the skill level. Just that men are so much stronger and more capable, that they’ll trounce women 100% of the time. It’s the idea that a man who has never picked up a tennis racket in his life can walk onto the court with Serena Williams and win, based solely on the fact that he’s a man. And people try to hide behind faulty, flawed, and wildly incorrect understandings of science to try to justify it.

And it’s just not true.

The reality is, so many male egos are so incredibly fragile, that the idea of losing to a woman is simply inconceivable. So they just never allow the situation to happen.

But since it actually is all skill-based, then there’s no reason to have separate gendered teams.