Hello,

First I want to say that this post is intended to be as respectful as possible. I come from apparently one of the most accepting communities in the world when it comes to LGBTQ people, and I've generally been all on the side of the LGBTQ community for each issue that's arisen. I am also new to this reddit so if I misname or misunderstand some things, please correct me so I know for the future.

Let me also make it clear that I'm someone who cares pretty much entirely about logic. In fact, the entire reason I'm making this post is because I'm hopeful that someone can offer a good enough explanation to reveal the flaws in my current stance. I don't take a side in an argument and hold it to my death. This means that I can easily be swayed from my current stance on the transgender bathroom issue, but also that I'm not going to automatically agree with the LGBQT community on it just because I've agreed with them in the past.

Anyway, to the question itself. I didn't hear about the transgender bathroom issue until about a month ago. When I thought about it, my intuition came to the conclusion that the acceptance of transgender people being able to choose the bathroom they identify with is equivalent to the acceptance of unisex bathrooms. And, since I doubt that everyone who is pro transgender bathrooms is also pro unisex bathrooms, it seems to me that the people holding the viewpoint are logically inconsistent, which is preventing me from agreeing with them.

This was the off-the-top-of-my-head interpretation with no information taken from outside sources. Since I want to be on the right side, it's important for me to understand my opponent's side. However, whenever I found someone who was pro transgender bathrooms, all they really gave on the issue were phrases like "It's sad that transgender people are being denied their rights," without actually giving me the logical reasoning being their argument.

This is the main reason why I'm here, asking this question: What is the argument for transgender choice in bathrooms, and why is my argument against it wrong?

So that you know what to argue against, here was the logic that lead me to my conclusion:

In order to change the existing rules of the bathroom system, we have to first ask why those rules exist in the first place. As in, why are there gender separated bathrooms, anyway?

One reason is that people of the same gender probably feel more comfortable around others of the same gender in a place like the bathroom. Is this rational? Not that I can really see. But is it true? I think, probably.

Another reason is that it protects people from sexual assault or other similar things. I don't really agree with this one as much, since given that a rapist is already breaking a huge law, they wouldn't be bothered much by going into the opposite gender's bathroom, which is such a small rule to break by comparison.

The last reason I can think of is simply that different genitalia require different facilities in order to fulfill the main purpose of bathrooms: To empty waste from your body. I think that this reason is probably the most likely to be true out of the three, even though it matters the least, since the only difference is that a penis can use a urinal while a vagina can't.

So, I will think about transgender bathroom choice relative to the first and third reason, since I don't think the second one is valid.

For the first reason, let's take a hypothetical situation of a women's bathroom. According to that reason, which I assume is at least somewhat true, they are comfortable because they are around other women. If a man were to walk into the room, they would become uncomfortable. Now, let's say a transgender woman walks in, who is visibly a biological male. The women, judging only by appearance, would be uncomfortable. However, the transgender woman says she's a woman. The question is, does that actually relieve the discomfort? From my knowledge of what it means to be transgender, a transgender woman is someone who is born biologically male, but every aspect of them except for their body is female, most notably, personality. However, in a situation like a bathroom where you're strangers only seeing each other for a brief period of time, things like personality that aren't visible on the surface don't come into play. This means that when using the women's bathroom, a transgender woman who is visibly a biological male would have to make it clear every single time that they're a woman, and that probably wouldn't even help the situation. Regardless of whether this comfort idea is rational or not, it's shared by most humans. Allowing transgender people the choice of bathrooms would, in the best case, remove all the discomfort felt by them in the bathroom. However, it would then give discomfort to many of the cisgender people who use that bathroom. Given that there are more cisgender people than transgender, it would seem like overall more discomfort would be introduced by allowing the choice. That would lead me to conclude that, unfortunately, the minority of transgender people would have to be uncomfortable to prevent the majority of irrational cisgender people from being uncomfortable. I know that this argument sounds cruel, but at the same time, it sounds cruel to give a smaller group of people better treatment than the larger.

For the third reason, the argument is a lot simpler. Take the example of a transgender man in a men's restroom. Since he has a vagina, he can't use half of the facilities. That would slow things down by increasing stall demand, although probably only slightly. The main issue is that this man can only use half of the facilities in the men's restroom, whereas he can use all of them in the women's. When looked at from a purely functional perspective, that bathrooms exist only for humans to excrete waste, it seems impossible to justify that the one designed for the opposite genitalia is the correct one to choose.

However, this viewpoint can be made logically consistent. The way to do that would be to show that reasons 1 and 3 are actually not valid reasons. This is where unisex bathrooms come into play. If someone accepts a unisex bathroom, it means that 1. They don't care about seeing people of the opposite gender in the same restroom and are not uncomfortable and 2. The different facilities required for men and women can be reconciled. This means that, if unisex bathrooms are considered acceptable (and I mean ones that are designed for more than 1 person at a time), then reasons 1 and 3 are not really true and thus I have no issue with transgender people choosing whatever bathroom they identify with. However, again, I doubt that all of the people who are for transgender people choosing their own bathrooms would be for unisex bathrooms. That means that there's a large group of people supporting this argument that are logically inconsistent, and that's what's stopping me from agreeing. I honestly don't really care either way what happens, whether we accept transgender choice AND unisex bathrooms, or we accept neither. For me, as long as people are consistent, I don't mind.

So that's my take on this issue. I really don't want to be the villain, so can someone explain the flipside to this? There are a lot of ways I could be wrong that I don't have the information to know if they're true:

• My reasons for the purpose of the existence of gender segregated bathrooms are incorrect.
• The discomfort of transgender people in the bathroom opposite to their identity is greater than the combined discomfort of cisgender people seeing someone who appears to be of the opposite gender in their bathroom.
• People who are for transgender bathrooms actually happen to be universally or almost universally okay with unisex bathrooms.
• Somewhere in my argument, my logic is wrong.
• There is another argument which is powerful enough to overturn mine.

I appreciate anyone who took the time to read this, and again, I'm trying to be as respectful as possible. If I offended anyone I'm really sorry, but I'm posting this because I want to be enlightened so that I don't have to take this perspective anymore.