Men’s Rights Redditors agree: it’s tough to be a man. Well, a cis man, in any case. And those silly trans people are making it worse.
On the Men’s Rights subreddit, one concerned fellow has discovered a possibly insurmountable obstacle standing in the way of true gender equality: A “Women’s Room” at the University of Queensland that, as a sign on its door notes, is open to “trans*, intersex and genderqueer people as well as cis-females.” The horror!
The title of his post: It’s hard to call for equality between genders when stuff like this is so openly accepted by places like Universities.
Naturally, this being the Men’s Rights subreddit, his post received more than a thousand upvotes, and inspired more than 300 comments. This will give you some of the flavor of the discussion:
![Does cis not mean straight? I can't keep up with the bullshit they make up. permalinkembedsaveparentgive gold [–]lanternkeeper 40 points 1 day ago It means a person who identifies as the sex they were born; i.e. a man who is biologically male or a women who is biologically female aka regular people. I kind of feel dirty writing that. permalinkembedsaveparentgive gold [–]Endless_Summer 44 points 1 day ago So I was born with a penis, but I can identify as a lesbian woman and be free to use this bathroom? permalinkembedsaveparentgive gold [–]ThePunHunter 43 points 1 day ago Sure you can, and if people tell you otherwise, just tell 'em to check their privileges (because you have it really bad)! This world, man. permalinkembedsaveparentgive gold [–]AlphaBetaOmegaGamma 2 points 1 day ago So what are you telling me is that SJWs and feminists make up shit to do whatever they want with no consequences? Damn, I'm impressed. permalinkembedsaveparentgive gold [–]pepe_le_pewpewpewpew 30 points 1 day ago Sure, up until you saw this room, your gender was a social construct forced upon you by society, once you saw this sign you realized you were actually a woman all along. As soon as you left, evil social conditioning got the better of you again and you were socially obligated to identify as a man again. Damn you patriarchy! permalinkembedsaveparentgive gold [–]Odz2427 1 point 1 day ago Fuckin' cissy permalinkembedsaveparentgive gold [–]krudler5 6 points 1 day ago Isn't "cis" a recently-coined term? I can't recall having heard anyone use the term "cis-gender" before the last 3 or 4 years... permalinkembedsaveparentgive gold [–]Elvick 11 points 1 day ago As the "opposite" of transgendered, it certainly is. I learned about Transgendered people in my early teens, I'm 26 now and I only started to hear "cisgendered" because feminists were using it to dismiss and insult men with it. lol The term should die, it serves no purpose other than to shame people.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/cis1.png?ssl=1)
The lovely DavidByron2 — one of the subreddit’s most, er, colorful commenters — gets nearly 300 upvotes for suggesting that the poor beleaguered cis man who posted the picture should sue the school for sexual harassment. Naturally, this brilliant legal mind doesn’t actually know what cis means; he thinks it means “straight.”
Elsewhere in the comments, one fellow suggests that a cis man should make a point of going into the room and telling anyone who wants him to leave that they’re not allowed to discriminate against their gender identity.
Naturally, others are enthusiastic about this idea.
![jimmywiddle 13 points 2 days ago Me too, I would real world troll the shit out of that room. I would turn up in an elf costume once and claim I identify as elf kind and therefore don't even qualify as human. permalinksaveparentgive gold [–]mariners77 -3 points 1 day ago And that's why people like you shouldn't be allowed. Nothing wrong with what the parent comment suggested. Go in there, be quiet, and tell people not to assume gender. But trolling just creates more hostilities between sides and makes things worse.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/cistroll.png?ssl=1)
Yes, that’s right: the person suggesting that it might not be such a good idea to put on an elf costume and crash a room intended as a “safer space” for women, trans, intersex and genderqueer folks is the one that’s voted down — though even he thinks that invading the safer space would be just peachy.
Yet another commenter tells someone who identifies as a “gender fluid male,” that he “should go and see a doctor if your genitals are leaking fluid.” The jokester gets upvotes; the gender fluid male, who says he goes to UQ and that he “understands why [the room] exists,” gets downvoted below zero.
And Men’s Rights activists wonder why so many people think of their little movement as a hate movement.
H/T — r/againstmensrights
That’s about right. The people that are consistently most dangerous to me as a trans woman are fucks like this who are so insecurely married to their fragile notions of masculinity and femininity that they see my existence as a threat or some sort of joke.
So much posturing, but if they had to go through even a minute of what people like me go through everyday, they’d be bawling on the floor. After all, these are the people who think women not sleeping with them or a feminist critiquing sexism is some personal attack against them.
Woah, the University Of Queensland? My state, the single worst for LGBT+ rights in Australia in every possible metric? That is fuckin’ cool. Massive props to the UQ staff.
It’s almost funny; every time I think that MRAs can’t get any more insipid and asinine, they say shit like this. Somehow it’s a personal affront of the highest order that this room exists. Ugh
This is why I have such a hard time letting go of using “dick” as an insult because these dicks are just so caught up in the narrative that “men have penis, women don’t” it’s just…it’s just…dickish. So centered around the dick they become the dick.
Just…dicks.
Men’s* Rights Activists:
*Except:
Trans men
Gay men
Men of color
Insufficiently masculine men
Feminist men
Men that disagree with them
Straight, white, cis men that find short hair or tattoos attractive
etc, etc.
“And when you gaze long into the dick, the dick also gazes into you.” – Nietzsche, possibly.
It’s time to scrap separate toilets and just make sure the cubicles are reasonably private. And yeah, you can put the urinals in cubicles while you’re at it, it’s a bit weird peeing in public, isn’t it?
These guys remind me of a small, ill tempered and very flatulent dog I used to have. Whenever the other dog found a stick, this dog would go berserk running around in circles, whining, wailing, sounding like he was in pain. He’d howl, throw himself to the floor in a tantrum, wordlessly ask humans to intervene in this great injustice. He didn’t actually even want the stick. He just didn’t want the other dog to have something that he didn’t. One time he found a banana (something he didn’t want to eat) and guarded it with his life for days. He had no use for it but there was no way he was letting anyone else have it, because then they’d have something he didn’t.
Yeah. That’s the level these guys are operating on.
Uh… do they not realize that cis-men already have a safe place to go potty, and that would be called the MEN’S RESTROOM.
If transwomen, genderqueers, and ciswomen were able to safely go to the bathroom without fear of the violence, there would be no segregated bathrooms to begin with.
End male supremacy, masculinist ideology and the violence that follows it. Then we’ll talk about you going in and using the bathroom in an elf costume.
@Nameless Wonder:
I don’t actually think this is a bathroom, it’s just a “safe space”. Basically a room for women (or in this case, anyone but cis men) to be able to relax, hang out, study or do whatever they like in what’s intended to be a safe environment.
So unless there are also washroom facilities in there, I’d imagine “going potty” is probably politely discouraged.
Yeah, this brilliant legal mind also thinks US law applies in QUEENSLAND.
Come to think of it, I don’t know George W’s handle…
I’m pretty sure I’ve shared public washrooms with trans women, but never given the matter much thought, because they’re women, and women don’t “real world troll” each other regarding toilet rights. We just get in there, do our business, wash our hands, run a mirror check, and leave.
We also don’t “real world troll” men’s johns by claiming to be trans men, even if the ladies’ room DOES have a dozen-blocks-long lineup outside. At worst, one of us might have an emergency (meaning, one must get to a toilet RIGHT NOW or have a terrible accident) and barge in there quickly to use one of the stalls without stopping to look around. But I’ve never heard of a woman busted for breaking into the men’s room just to spy on the urinals and hassle the guys trying to pee.
These guys, on the other hand, sound like bathroom perverts just spoiling for a fight. And miffed that they’re not allowed to start one. They remind me of those stupid boys in middle and high school who used to dare each other to barge into the girls’ washrooms and report back on what they saw. (I hope they were disappointed that all they saw was stalls and sinks!)
Yeah, marginalized groups, you have a WHOLE ROOM at one university all to yourselves. A room that dudes on Reddit could be using! Look at this preferential treatment, this opulence. You’re obviously the most privileged people in the world. Why are you asking for ridiculous things like the right to walk down the street without being harassed or assaulted, or a safe place to live, or a chance to keep your job? You already have a ROOM.
On a more serious note…
Cheezus, these bitter dudes. They really do view equality as that much of a zero-sum game, don’t they? Any reason someone has for claiming space or time or resources has to be dismissed if it doesn’t meet their narrow worldview. Any single thing that another group has is an affront. They want every advantage that they’ve already got, and then a portion of the scraps that everyone else has scrabbled together.
And then they have the gall to call women, feminists, racial minorities, and LGBTQ groups self-centered? Just the icing on the jerk cake, that is.
Oh yeah, and I’m pretty sure that this place is not a loo, but a meeting/reading room by the looks of it? Well, in that case, same thing applies. One doesn’t go in there to “troll” anyone. That’s what’s known as not respecting gender diversity or the individuals in the room.
Anyway, it’s not as if cis men don’t have tons of space all over the damn place. Why do they have to horn in everywhere they’re not wanted? Because PENIS? Boooooring.
I haven’t heard of that either, but when I was doing street activism with the Lesbian Avengers there were certainly times when one of us walked into a men’s room, used the toilet, washed her hands, and left with it not being an emergency. As far as I know, no men fainted, or lost their jobs, or were divorced losing half their income to alimony, or were drafted into the armed forces as a result.
The only time I did it was late at night when my girlfriend was doing it and was urging me to come along … so we could put up informational stickers on the insides of bathroom stalls (which we had been doing in women’s rooms). The stickers related to an upcoming election, and though we were placing them in public places that were *not* bathrooms, she made the case that it was discrimination to provide this info in women’s stalls but not men’s, right?
So, um, yeah, we went into a public men’s room that was unoccupied at the time, and had only 2 or 3 stalls, and it was rather late so it wasn’t terribly likely someone would come in (though it was busy enough it was a real possibility). But we did do it for a political purpose.
Not trolling. Not lurking to sexual assault. Not peeping.
But, yeah, we weren’t supposed to do that.
Now all the MGTOW will know the terrible truth: if you saw a political sticker inside your bathroom stall round-about 20 years ago, it’s just remotely possible that a woman’s hand placed it there!
[Cue shockhorror.]
Here we go. This seems like as good a place as any to post this:
http://youtu.be/NCfmKvw7u-s
So, I know that the MRAs think that trans people just choose to be trans, but do they now also think that intersex people just chose to be born with ambiguous genitalia?
I can sort of feel the theoretical sting of being barred from a place as a cis-het guy who tries to be an ally, but I’m also mature enough to realize that people can’t read my mind and know my intentions, that they have no obligation to give me the benefit of a doubt, and that the entire world is effectively a safe space for me.
But MRAs can’t just let it be. I don’t think they believe a good chunk of what they write either. They just hate being excluded from anything because a Penis should be a do-anything card. The hilarious part is that pretending to see everything as a threat to masculinity makes it seem like it’s a week and flimsy thing, easily toppled by four walls at an Australian college.
You’d think that with how absolutely obsessed these kind of shitbuckets are with being MANLY, I MEAN THE MANLIEST STRAIGHTEST MOST MASCULINE MAN EVER, NO HOMO BRO, that they would avoid this room like the plague. I mean, if someone saw them going in there or saw them inside it, they might think the dudebro wasn’t a MAN, gasp! Even getting too close to the room might end up making them catch the gay by osmosis or something (because gender identity and sexual orientation are totally the same things and the only settings are ‘normal’ or ‘bizarre abomination’ in their minds.) Better not go anywhere near that place, bigoted dudebros!
This reminds me of a Reddit TIL thread where they learned that a black man during Jim Crow in the South eventually got rich and established an all-black beach for people to relax. The man had been harassed and barred from white beaches and wanted a place where black people could simply swim without being attacked for it. The consensus for a lot of the people was that the man was just as racist as his white neighbors. Making a beach for black people in a society where the vast majority of beaches were hostile to them was just contributing to the racism. The idea that in an oppressive society, the oppressed have to explicitly make their own spaces, and that this is not racist, was utterly Greek to these people. It was truly pathetic.
The maturity level is on par with the time Beavis was Cornholio and he burst into the girls room to say “I am the Great Cornholio!” Except it’s worse because Beavis is 14 years old. These guys are probably adults mostly. And Beavis was motivated by impulse control, not hate. And is a cartoon meant to depict how stupid our culture is.
I don’t want “gender equality,” which can’t possibly exist any way because it lacks a basis in reality. I want organic sexual hierarchy, the system that evolved through evolution and got us here.
For some reason secular progressives who insist that they believe in evolution think they can just throw it away and apply creationist principles to the human mind, where they can shape the mind arbitrarily like clay.
I think he’s called Cryonicist because his beliefs are frozen in the 1850s.
http://41.media.tumblr.com/d54e8dbeaaf899faceb4dadc83640d81/tumblr_n6l777uNuU1qawfreo1_500.png
Sorry, let me try that again.
http://i.imgur.com/oy3EWmos.jpg