Guest Post: Go Where? Sex, Gender, and Toilets
by lisa, 4 days ago at 10:07 am
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2010/09/02/guest-post-go-where-sex-gender-and-toilets/ (http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2010/09/02/guest-post-go-where-sex-gender-and-toilets/)
Please welcome Guest Blogger, Marissa. Marissa has a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Toronto, with minors in sociology and history. She is currently finishing law school, and hopes to practice family law. She has been blogging at This Is Hysteria! for two months, where she writes about social justice issues, politics, culture and working in call centres.
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Women's and men's washrooms: we encounter them nearly every time we venture into public space. To many people the separation of the two, and the signs used to distinguish them, may seem innocuous and necessary. Trans people know that this is not the case, and that public battles have been waged over who is allowed to use which washroom. The segregation of public washrooms is one of the most basic ways that the male-female binary is upheld and reinforced.
As such, washroom signs are very telling of the way societies construct gender. They identify the male as the universal and the female as the variation. They express expectations of gender performance. And they conflate gender with sex.
Another example of the revivalism of 70s femininism?
QuoteThe first is men-have-penises/women-have-breasts. I believe that these are indicative of the degree to which breasts have been sexualized in our society as, like the sign below, they seem to be oblivious to the fact that women have genitalia, and hence construct breasts as the female equivalent of the penis.
Sexualised breasts? How dare they.