> Do you believe a horny teenage guy would be willing to lie and say he identifies as female, if that means he gets to see all of his female classmates naked?

No, I don't. Living out that type of switch for any length of time is an enormous investment, which will change the way your peers view you forever. It is worthwhile if you're actually trans, but anyone else would be so much better off just browsing the internet.

That said, I also think single-gender spaces are in need of an re-think. Same-sex locker rooms inherently assume that people of the same gender can't be attracted to one another, which is simply not the case. So what's the point?

> Same-sex locker rooms inherently assume that people of the same gender won't be attracted to one another, which is simply not the case. So what's the point?

Same sex locker rooms don't only assume people of same gender are not attracted to each other, but also that women are disproportionally exposed to potential sexual abuse from men than the other way around. Protecting women from men specifically is very central to the idea.

> Living out that type of switch for any length of time...

What "switch" are you talking about? The trans-rights movement frowns on requiring trans people to make any sort of "switch" beyond a mere declaration. The whole concept of self-identification is that a man need do nothing more than declare that he's now a woman, and he should promptly have access to spaces and resources reserved for women, such as girls' scholarships, women's bathrooms, women's shelters, women's sports teams and athletics, women's prisons, women's healthcare, women's dating websites, etc. Requiring any sort of physical transition is said to be a violation of trans people's human rights, and thus men-- biological males with penises-- should be allowed access to these spaces by simply "checking a box".

Getting self-identification enacted in laws is a primary goal of the most prominent and powerful trans rights lobbies:

https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/09/22/gender-recognition-act...

You don't need surgery, but you do need to come out as trans. Everyone around you is going to take such a declaration very seriously, as they well should.

Unless someone really really commits, it's going to be terribly obvious who is acting in bad faith.

Do you know of any examples when this became a problem in practice?

Yes, and too many examples to adequately list. A small sample:

- Lesbian dating sites are facing an influx of men-- biological men with penises-- who have declared that they are lesbian trans-women, and are angry when they don't get any attention from the females on the site. This has become a significant controversy in these communities, because apparently many lesbians on lesbian dating sites are attracted exclusively to other females. Now, I'm sure some of these guys actually are earnest trans-gendered women, who are honestly and in good faith seeking to fully transition. But others are just incels trying a new strategy.

- The English and Canadian prison systems are currently dealing with the ramifications of allowing men into women's prisons-- biological men with penises who declare they are women, and demand to be placed into women's prisons. In many cases these guys have assaulted women in prison. These cases are easily googleable.

- 18 male candidates from the The Force for Mexico party registered as women for this year's municipal elections in Tlaxcala, in order to get around quotas requiring equal numbers of female candidates. These are men, just straight up men, who declared themselves women just for the registration, and defended by trans rights activists saying that self-identification must be respected with no questions.

- This guy: http://www.daniellemuscato.com/. This is a biological male with a penis who has no intention of transitioning (he has a medical excuse it seems). In legal trouble and homeless at times, he demands to be let into women's shelters and placed in detention with women. He works diligently and successfully to folks critical of him banned from twitter.

Jessica Yaniv (I know, an easy target, but he's a huge influence in Canada).

Etc.

I have long wondered why unisex bathrooms are not the standard now.

Easily implemented for newly built places, can be retrofitted to some, hard to retrofit for some.

But make it a new standard and let time solve the rest.

I visited nude beaches regularly because there are some in my vicinity. Although not for quite some time anymore since smartphones became that prevalent. Denying feelings of shame often is an indicator that there is a problem.

Any bathroom wouldn't be able to accommodate everyone. For these exception there can be single cabin room or something else.

There are a lot of bathrooms for both sexes, mostly in places where space is limited. But having segregated bathrooms is in no way a problem anywhere and I think many people are happy with that.

Not sure what your "feelings of shame" lines are about.

Also, I agree that any bathroom won't accommodate everyone. But no current bathroom does that either.

For unisex purposes it depends on the bathroom design surely.

People have this idea you have some semi-public space because people might see each other in a state of undress.

But almost all westernised bathrooms contain a bunch of toilet stalls.

If everyone is going into a toilet stall to do their business - standing or sitting - then the only shared space is for washing hands or preening in front of a mirror. And if that's an issue, optionally put that in the stall too.

If security is a problem - many toilet stalls have limited doors/walls around them - then make it secure. This effort would benefit everyone.

Then humans - whatever their persuasion - could simply do their business in peace and get on with their life.

Considering that one of the key arguments for gun legalization in the US is self defense - due to the argument that a criminal will find a way to get a gun anyways - is an interesting parallel to the lack of unisex bathrooms. Creeps will find a way to violate the privacy of bathrooms regardless, so why don't we just simplify things for building codes.

Granted, I really appreciate urinals and I feel like they might be a casualty of switching over to unisex bathrooms in a lot of cases.

Exactly why make everyone wait in one line when half the group goes way faster?

I doubt that's coming anytime soon. Would be big dumb and have no real support

So if I had a series of heavy processing tasks to run - your approach to optimizing them would be to divide the tasks by whether they're above or below the median and then execute each half of tasks on separate equally equipped computers so that half of your computing resources are sitting idle for a good portion of the time?

Huh? I dunno, but I do believe no guy wants to wait 4x as long to be politically correct or for whatever marginal perceived benefit there may be for some tiny population. Nevermind the cost

Your example is way off because they are not equal processing tasks obviously and resources may not be mostly idle you just made that all up

And even if there is an inefficiency or inequality that doesn't mean the answer is unisex bathrooms I could come up with an equally contrived example for how inefficient that is

Large venues can trivially have one large room full of urinals and another large room full of cubicles.

Ok...What are you talking about? Don't they already? How does changing that help anything? It would certainly still be a massive slowdown for half the population and certainly not "trivial" to change them all

While it would be a slowdown for half the population - it would equally increase accessibility for the other half of the population and society would more efficiently utilize the bathroom facilities we have. If we get unisex bathroom out of trans rights I'll be happy both to see their rights respected and for society to drop an outdated prudish concept.

When I'm out at the theatre with my partner - we don't go back to our seats until both of us have taken care of business - I'd be happy to accept a bit of a personal delay in order to speed up the process overall (and I'd be even happier if an appropriate amount of urinals still existed - I don't know what that ratio is, maybe a quarter of the floor space or so, but eliminating them would likely make restrooms less pleasant for everyone).

... of course this is so redundant but urinals are an obvious solution for half the population and already in place... Like I said there would be a massive cost this is nowhere near trivial like someone stated. I also mentioned there may be other solutions (like redistributing the resources in another way, while probably similarly expensive for little utility imo). unisex bathrooms is a separate idea. Most of the time there aren't huge discrepancies anyway it's not like men's bathrooms are always idle while women's are always out of control so the efficiency isn't really an issue 99% of the time. If we are just moving urinals inside a shared area why are we doing it at all? We're just making one big line. It's nice that you don't mind waiting for your partner but try selling that to the guy who takes 15 seconds and has to go to the back of this new line. It doesn't make any sense

Intelligent building would forecast demographics and optimize for the future I guess if you really just want "max efficiency" I assume this is already being done to an extent, but changing things already built sounds expensive af for little to no value in my opinion.

I've been in unisex bathrooms with urinals. The people who can't use them just, well, don't use them.

This comment alone shows that HN suffers deeply from not having many women participants. If y'all had more female commenters, you'd know that you don't get to see a bunch of girls naked in a high school or college locker room. Everyone is so insecure about their bodies that they change in the toilet stalls or take their bra off under their shirt then shimmy the sports bra up under the shirt and hook it then change shirt, or put on a towel to keep it all out of view. Being a teenage girl really sucks in a lot of ways. Of course one would have gender dysphoria if it has a glimmer of a way out of the trap of having to be look perfect, act perfect, get perfect grades, be a perfect friend, be perfectly sexy but not a slut, be perfect but not stuck-up etc that teenage girls face every day. (I understand that teenage boys face another set of pressures that can also be crushing -- as a teenager though you always think that someone else has a more-perfect life or a greater set of freedoms, right?)

As for the headline "Teenager finds way to push parental buttons: this never-before-seen act is the fault of liberals" yes, can confirm that toddlers start practicing early.

Reading a comment like this I mainly think "wow TV and social media have really f-ed up young people these days".

Back in my high school days, we had some bathing events and also shared sauna. One could either voluntary use the nude beach, or walk a bit and go to an outdoor pool with proper changing rooms and dressed people.

I think the split was roughly 50/50 and there also wasn't much gender skew.

But that was a time before smartphones. When people still walked over to each other's house to hang out.

When I was a teenager on the swim team in the early 00s, the school had to ban 'deck changing' [changing into or out of your swimsuit in view of the public] because, in a game of one-up[wo]manship, it became overtly sexual with towels falling "by accident." The sort of prudishness described above surprises me.