RE: Gender, Is it a Spectrum? And: What About the Bathrooms?
I would disagree with you, gender is a spectrum. There are such things as honest to God naturally born hermaphrodites. There are men who are very effeminate and women who are very masculine. I'm not going to get into the transgender thing here. BUT there are also hormonal thresholds in order for sperm to be produced and for a woman to cycle and of course one needs the proper plumbing so while gender might be a spectrum I'd say that in order to reproduce you need to be sufficiently at one end or the other in order to match up your gametes. I think what defines gender isn't behavior or culture but rather the ability to reproduce. If you produce sperm and have a XY chromosome you're male. If you produce eggs and have a XX chromosome you're female. If you have both then you're a hermaphrodite. If you can reproduce you are sexually viable and whatever you're doing with your gender works. If you cannot reproduce then you are not viable and whatever you're doing with your gender DOESN'T work. In short the real judge of gender is Darwinism.
As for bathrooms segregating them doesn't really make sense. We seem to want co-ed everything else. Why do we have seperate bathrooms? Or why not just have private stalls within the bathrooms? Urinals on one side and toilets on the other.
Hermaphrodites make up a tiny portion of the population. If you listen to the pro-trans crowd you would think a quarter of the population is hermaphroditic.
Well if we keep pumping artificial estrogen into the water and poisoning ourselves with other chemicals we very may well be but I see your point. Still I don't see gender as a strict binary. However I still think gender should be defined more by the capacity to reproduce than by cultural perception. I don't see anything wrong with being a masculine female or a feminine male or whatever. I don't see anything wrong with homosexuality either. But when you start getting surgery or messing around with body hormones in order to be a "preferred" gender that's crossing a line. When you go from one fully functioning gender to a non functining immatation of the other there's an issue there. As I said it comes down to can you reproduce after you've switched genders, yes or no? After a guy becomes a girl can s/he get pregnant? If no, you aren't a girl yet you're just a castrated guy with cosmetic surgery. When a girl becomes a guy can s/he impregnate a girl? If no then you're not a guy yet, you're just a girl that's been spayed and again had some cosmetic surgery. If a baby is born with both reproductive organs I think it should be left as is and just honored for being the way it is. No gender reassignment, no trying to fit it into either category or make it try to be anything other than what it is. I think that's the flip side of all this. Yes the trans fad is a bit nuts but so is the phobia of not being "normal". Of girls that aren't feminine enough, of guys who aren't masculine enough, of babies and people who don't fit into either gender. I think we need to honor people for who and what they are not try to change them to suit our preferences. But I also think we should respect nature and not try to redefine gender contrary to the facts of biology.