They seem to have pretty strong opinions on exactly which groups of people should be allowed to use which bathrooms.
But to enforce the policy you have to care about precisely this, because there are plenty of transmen who look like men and transwomen who look like women. So in practice you have to go around asking every man/woman in the bathroom whether they have a penis/vagina. If you "don't care" whether someone is genderqueer or not, then simply let men use the men's bathroom and women use the women's bathroom, without bothering to check their genitals first.
If your hypothesis were true and these increasingly precise distinctions of sexual and gender identity are a response to conservatives, why did they emerge only after liberal attitudes became prevalent enough that people could openly embrace these identities? One would expect that if they cared about these subtleties, these differences would have been more important when the conservative viewpoint was near universal.
Also, I didn’t quite say that increasingly precise distinctions of sexual and general identity are a response to conservatives. I said that it’s because of conservatives that these distinctions are thought to be (and in practice are) very important. If we lived in some kind of free-wheeling hippy society, then these aspects of people would be of the same level of interest as, say, their dietary preferences.
As things currently stand, if you are a woman with a penis, there are lots of people ready and waiting to tell you that you're not really a woman. It's hardly surprising that transwomen take their gender identity very seriously when it's constantly under attack. Nor is it surprising that they construct new categories (e.g. 'transwoman') when the existing categories are so rigidly policed.
And in case anybody thinks this is just hyperbole:
http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/self-appointed-bathroom-c...
If you're trying to reason about what social conservatives think, it probably doesn't help to concoct some strawman half-LGBT half-social conservative ideology. A social conservative ideology doesn't have the dilemma you describe because, for them, gender expression should conform to sex.
Any...
> interest in whether any given woman is a transwoman or a cis woman
...was foisted on social conservatives from outside. They don't have an innate interest or need for such finely-graded labels.
Conservatives of the flavor you are talking about consider trans-women to be men. They don't need to differentiate because they are trying to impose a simpler rule than that. In practice, if they wanted to enforce their rule, they could just require ID to use a toilet and require that the ID specify gender at birth (as verified by birth certificate). The current state of the person's genitals does not have to play into it.
Obviously enforcing such a rule (or really any bathroom rule) strictly would be incredibly annoying and basically pointless, and in practice it would be enforced about as intermittently as almost any other rules, but at no point do they actually care whether or not you currently have a penis.
This point is not lost on me. I noted it in several of the posts that you're replying to.
>They don't need to differentiate
To enforce the rule, they need to differentiate between transwomen and cis women, since they do not consider the former to be women, and think that cis women, but not transwomen, should be allowed to use the women's restroom. You acknowledge this yourself in other parts of your post.
>In practice, if they wanted to enforce their rule, they could just require ID to use a toilet and require that the ID specify gender at birth (as verified by birth certificate). The current state of the person's genitals does not have to play into it.
This is a weird and pedantic objection. You're saying that they care about whether or not the person in question was born with a penis rather than whether or not they currently have one. Ok, but so what? Then you have to ask everyone who goes to the women's bathroom whether they were born with a penis.
"The people who think it's most important of all are the people who disapprove of it."
Social conservatives don't want transwomen using the women's bathrooms because they don't think that they are actually women. That's the only distinction that they care about: biological sex. Everything else is fiction to them.
Bear in mind that this is a simplification of the stances of millions of people, all of whom are different. Some will more readily admit to the existence of transpeople and homosexuals.
I'm not saying women are right to think all men are potential rapists or something, but there used to be a system in place to help with that issue. Now, what? I guess women need to hang outside the restroom until it seems safe? Or always go in groups?
Maybe we'll see more single-person restrooms going forward.
Anyway, point being, it's easy and reductionist to boil complex human emotions down to bigotry. I think the "classic bathroom rules" had some good points to them that we haven't replaced.
But that doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. How would preventing transpeople from using the bathrooms that align with their gender identity make anyone safer? Is there a single recorded incident of a cis woman being raped by a transwoman in a bathroom?
Also, the effect on boys is that they'll be sharing bathrooms with transwomen instead of with transmen. From the bigot's point of view, that ought to make boys less safe (as they think that transwomen are "really" men and transmen "really" women, so that transwomen are more likely to be rapists). It's telling that the supposed justification in terms of safety isn't even internally consistent.
The mechanism ("no men in the ladies room") has been removed, so there's no longer a mechanism for the assistant manager of a Target to help his female customers relax and have a safe space to take care of things. That safety may now only provided after some sort of leering, proposal, or assault has already taken place.
Also, for the record, I don't think much of this makes sense. If we were objectively worried about safety, we would focus on driving less and slower and locking up swimming pools. Stranger danger is largely overblown. That being said, I've seen particular things where particular men (almost always men) harass particular women (almost always women) and in most cases there's not much the victim can do about it. This is more about concerns along those lines.
I was saying all strong opinions there come from wanting to protect women, not from a desire to get into other peoples' bathroom preferences.