So I was in a genderless loo the other day. There were men, women and kids milling around. Whatever. I’d prefer having separate jacks to be perfectly honest – I don’t particularly fancy sharing the toilets with the lads after a Six Nations match in my local boozer, but in the future, separate toilets will be a fanciful afterthought as they have become the new battlegrounds for gender wars. One minute we’re using the loo, next minute it’s a thing.
Now UCD is to re designate more than 170 toilets across the campus as gender neutral as part of a new policy to welcome trans gender and gender fluid students and employees.
Thats fine. Before this, I was always of the assumption that transgender or transexual people should use whatever toilet they feel comfortable in, and should I encounter any problems, I would most definitely step in in their defence. As just .3 percent of Americans identify as transgender, and less in Ireland, in my long history of using public toilets I’ve never seen anyone having a hard time.
Funnily enough, I first met my transexual friend in a women’s toilet in an early house I used to call home. She said she could sort me with size 9 ‘f**k me boots. It was a scrappy kind of place, you’d get ravers on one side, petty criminals getting defenestrated on the other. The Scissor Sisters were regulars. A fight could break out at any moment and yet I don’t recall her ever getting taunted in the toilets.
The last time I saw her, she walked through a fancy hotel bar in a neon orange bikini in February and did the the splits topless. No one batted an eyelid.
I’m not doubting that transgender people and transexuals don’t have a hard time in situations I take for granted, but for me the toilet thing is largely just another bandwagon that comes with the cult of the victim- to which everyone who isn’t a white male now belongs.
Plus its so much bigger than toilets. What’s confusing me are the words- non binary, cisexual, agender, pansexual, bigender, gender conformity, genderless- my head’s in a spin. Apparently in New York there are 31 gender expressions, which means you have male and female, then 29 other gender labels. On top of that new pronouns have been introduced – ze – instead of ‘he’ for example.
Aren’t we all just people? All this stuff if just isolating us, making us fearful of communicating with others, rather than bringing us together.
Photographer and clear thinker, David LaChapelle recently said in an interview with Channel 4 news, the most leftist bias news programme on TV. “When I lived in New York in the 80s, we didn’t have gay, straight, whatever. We didn’t care -you just had to be cool. All this stuff is a new obsession. If you were cool- creative, had something to bring to the party- or could dance well – that’s all that mattered.” He is so right, even though officially he should be a victim as he’s a gay man who toyed with the idea of a sex change in his early teens. “It’s out of control- so self involved,” he added.
I wish I lived in New York in the 70s and 80s, when LaChappelle with a busboy at Studio 54 before he was taken under Andy Warhol’s wing. Jesus. People were just hanging out in the Lower East Side- geeks, hooker’s, trannies, crackheads, strippers, business people, gays, movie stars, rock stars – all having a really good time together- no hashtags, no witch-hunts, no virtue signalling, no left wing mumbo jumbo which has poisoned public life. Everyone was free to express themselves without fear of being judged by self righteous social justice warriors.
I’m kind of old school- I don’t care if someone identifies as a non binary, genderfluid, aardvark called Jenny, as long as they’re a bit of craic.