#we're like pee in a pod<3< /div> Explore tagged Tumblr posts

[kil9]

i cant believe 5 years ago today i got a rando anon on my (now deceased) kpop sideblog and we've been in love ever since and im about to fly across the ocean to them 🤕🤒

[wirewitchviolet]

Bigots and Bathrooms Part 97

So today I woke up to see someone linking a news article with the bonkers headline Pennsylvania School Covers Surveillance Windows in Gender-Neutral Bathrooms," which aside from bringing up the obvious question of what the hell "surveillance windows" are, got my hackles up because whenever I see anything about gender neutral bathrooms I know some confused bigot who thinks those have something to do with trans people is going to be trying to start something. Here though it was actually a weird variation on this, because rather than a situation like it usually is where confused weirdos think gender neutral bathrooms are some kind of special bathrooms buildings are being forced to set up for trans people because we can't have trans people using normal bathrooms, this actually is a weird case where we ARE in fact, talking about special just-for-trans-people bathrooms and the headline calling them gender neutral is just getting the facts wrong. Which of course makes this way more messed up. Anyway I'm going to ramble about gender neutral bathrooms for a bit, scroll down to the header if you care about the actual contents of the article.

So to once again just try and break down this weird language barrier issue, a gender neutral bathroom is just a regular bathroom. I feel like the vast majority of us have these in our homes. You've got a little room somewhere, and there's a toilet in there, probably a sink, maybe even a bathtub/shower which you'd figure would be more standard if we're gonna call them "bathrooms." If you're really well off, maybe you even have more than one spread around. But the idea is if anyone in your home needs to excrete waste, wash their face, fix makeup, lock the door to a small room and cry, whatever, they can go into these tiny rooms and do that.

Since those are things people often find themselves needing to do quite suddenly while they're away from home, we also make sure to have bathrooms in... all buildings everywhere (ironically without the tubs, generally). Sometimes we even build tiny little buildings that are ALL bathroom, in parks and such, and we even make weird portable little bathroom pods for temporary setup at construction sites. And anywhere that isn't going to have a huge number of people in it, these are usually just normal, or "gender-neutral" bathrooms.

Places big enough to assume they're going to have people in need of bathrooms so often that even placing them in clusters or 2 or 3 isn't going to get the job done though will generally be opt to instead go for this rather industrial public bathroom setup. You make one big long narrow room, you cram as many toilets as you can fit together along one wall, you put sinks along part of the other, and you put these super sketchy partitions up between the toilets with flimsy little doors so you have at least a little privacy while your pants are around your ankles. And if humanity were less messed up in the past, that'd be the end of it. We'd just have these, and these too would just be normal, gender neutral bathrooms.

But we kinda had this weird period in history where people were doing a TON of large-scale urban construction while also being so institutionally sexist that we ended up with all these huge high occupancy buildings being planned out on the assumption that nobody's going to be in them besides cis men, and like... I don't want to generalize or anything, but the subset of cis men who also have this weird thing going on, I don't know if it's part of the whole machismo thing or what, but they REALLY like to pee on the sides of things instead of in a toilet like a normal person. Doesn't really matter what it is. A tree, the side of a building, a field of freshly fallen snow, just out an open doorway into the street if they've had a few drinks. It's frankly freaking gross and a public health hazard, but there were enough of these guys offering up how nah, they totally don't need toilets in this place, if they have to poop they'll just wait until later and if they have to pee they'll just pee on something somewhere and I guess enough people looking to cut any possible corner that they came up with this weird compromise were someone designed these special toilets for special boys where there isn't really a toilet at all, just a slightly indented chunk of wall made from toilet porcelain (or when REALLY cheaping out, a single big wooden trough angled towards a single drain) they can pee all over the side of and have most of it still go down a drain, rationalized because you tend to have to pee more often than poop and all, and hey, you don't need to waste any water flushing it (even if mercifully the compromise did involve hooking fresh water up to a handle to at least briefly rinse the back plane should they bother to flush).

Then when society kinda eased back on the whole rampant segregation thing and acknowledged the rest of us maybe will have to go to the bathroom while we're shopping or working or at a restaurant or whatever, first off I kinda have to assume there were suddenly a lot of horrified complaints about how these public bathrooms have these designated walls-for-gross-dudes-to-just-walk-up-and-pee-on with huge puddles of splashback poolage under them, and definitely because people were still being sexist enough to act like women are too delicate and prone to being "stolen" from their husbands, so we started the whole gendered bathroom thing. Keep most of them as is, and say those are Men's Bathrooms, and take the disgusting walls-you-pee-on out of the rest and say those are Women's Bathrooms. And then you know ideally reclaim that space somehow, and in the future design it out. And of course in a lot of places we build these 50/50 because cis men are what like 47% of the population or something like that?

Anyway, now we have this modern push towards planning new buildings and remodeling old ones around by just not having these weird little Men's and Women's signs on them and just... you know, having all (or at least more normal), or gender neutral bathrooms. Which again, Women's Bathrooms already are. It's just about not having so many gross walls for guys who don't like using toilets, and not creating weird situations where roughly half the people who have to use the bathroom have to crowd into the half of the bathrooms that essentially only have half as many toilets in them because when I say that space got reclaimed I don't mean filled with more toilet stalls, and otherwise just not like, reserving the space arbitrarily. The math is just terrible as it is all over the place.

I cannot stress enough that not one word of any of the above has a damn thing to do with trans people. Like yeah we all go out in public and need to use bathrooms too (trans femmes on HRT in particular are frequently prescribed diuretics making us more frequent visitors), but we are a small enough percentage of the population not to impact the cost analysis of toilets vs. disgusting walls to install. Please leave us out of the conversation.

The article bit about this messed up school on the other hand IS specifically about trans people.

See, what this particular screwed up bigoted school board decided to do a year ago was they "unanimously approved the creation of five different bathrooms." One for cis girls, one for cis boys, one for trans girls, one for trans boys, and one non-public normal just like you'd have in a house or something gender neutral bathroom... presumably because that already existed because school staffs generally don't wanna share bathrooms with the students and I can't blame them. And then they spent $8700 bashing down the walls to the two trans-only bathrooms, with plans to install big glass windows there so everyone in the hall can stand there and watch trans kids go to the bathroom like it's an aquarium exhibit. And someone sensible caught on and freaked out so they are... apparently haphazardly boarding these over now, with plans to actually repair the walls of course not being a thing ever. And this bit's pure speculation on my part but given the standard layouts bathrooms tend to have and these being described as windows, enjoy the particle board where there used to be a nice-ish bank of sinks and mirrors?

That's pretty horrific, take a moment to take it in, then sit back down and let's talk about how this is maybe even more messed up than you realized. From the sound of it, this school only had 4 public bathrooms for students to begin with. Two boy's two girl's. That feels about right for every school I've ever been to. First floor, second floor if it's a two-story building, or like opposite ends if it's single-story. And I'm just gonna go ahead and go out on a limb and guess that the percentage of students at this school who are openly trans is a fair bit less than 50%. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but generally speaking, schools that pass totally screwed up discriminatory policies around trans students tend to have somewhere between like... zero and three trans students on the rolls in total, out of several hundred.

So what we're really saying here is that THE ENTIRE BOARD of this school district as just this completely unmotivated act of pure hate and wanting to send some kind of a message to some boogieman they've imagined after watching fascists demonize trans people so much they completely lost touch with reality, not only decided to just demolish half the bathrooms in this school, forcing the entire student body to go WAY the hell out of their way half the time if they want to use the intact ones, but waste about $9000 of taxpayer money out of a budget that's gotta be a significant percentage of to do it, with maybe one or two trans kids even going to this school for them to point at classic abuser style to shout "look what you made me do!" at, and maybe encourage the rest of the student body to take out their frustrations on.

That would be the South Western School District board of Pennsylvania, headed by one Matthew Gelazela, if anyone happens to live in that area and wants to take the appropriate action to replace, again, literally everyone on this board, with people who aren't going to blow huge piles of your tax money on crap like smashing holes through your kids' schools on a whim.

[michellemisfit]

Weekly Tag Wednesday ✈️ Neeeooow Edition

Thanks for the tag @deedala @energievie @sam-loves-seb @mybrainismelted @sleepyfacetoughguy @guinguin1984

—---------------------------

Name: Michelle

Age: Old enough to know better

Location: My bed, wrapped in a fuzzy blanket

📍where are we going? I wanna say Cape Cod, but it’s -3 there right now, so fuck that. Australia it is! 🦘

📍whats the weather like there right now? 22•C (feels like 24), according to Google

📍are you an over-packer or a light-packer? Over-packer, though I have also been known to pack 12 bras but not bring any pants… though these days I keep very detailed lists and get Ruth to double check my packing multiple times!

📍are we taking a plane or a train? If you can find me a train, I’ll take it! Hahaha but no. Neeeooow all the way! ✈️

📍early morning departure or an overnight trip? If we’re going to Australia it’s gonna be all of it. Loooong travel. I’m gonna watch so many movie and my butt is gonna go so numb!!

📍what song are you playing in the car while we drive to catch our departure?

📍we need to grab something on the way, starbucks or dunkin? Fucking Dunkin’ Donuts. The last time I was in the states we stopped at a Dunkin for donuts and were informed that they didn’t have any donuts… like, wtf? And then we found out that they are phasing out selling donuts. Like, double wtf?!? So yeah, Starbucks all the way.

📍we've made it to the transportation place 🚂✈️! be honest, are we on-time or are we rushing because we're running late? Always early. I’d rather spend an extra 3 hours in an airport McDonalds than be late for a plane. I get travel anxiety.

📍are you taking the window seat or the aisle seat? I like the aisle seat for the freedom to pee when I want, without annoying someone else! (This is gonna be everyone’s answer, isn’t it? haha)

📍we're settled in our seats, are you gonna read or watch a movie/show? Bit of both. I do like getting my money’s worth in beverages and free movies, so I try and watch and consume as many as possible. But sometimes my ears hurt from too much earbud wearing, so I switch to reading for a bit. Then back to movies!

📍what are you reading/watching? Generally all the movies I thought ‘oh, might go and see that’ in the cinema and never did. And then as we get closer to landing I will swap to a movie I know inside out, because it will inevitably cut off before I get to the end.

📍are you using wireless or wired headphones? Wired. I don’t fuck with pods.

📍are you going to take a nap or stay awake? I can sleep pretty much anywhere, but I get overtired and twitchy anxious on planes, so I’m not the best airplane sleeper.

📍do you want a salty snack or a sweet snack? Salty snack 90% of the time. However I also like bringing my own selection of snacks, so I’m not held to the whims of the airplane company! lol

📍we've arrived! are we heading straight to activities or are we gonna rest at the hotel? I actually don’t mind. I’ve gone straight from airports to restaurants, concerts, plays etc and it’s been fine. Make the most of the day you’ve got and all that. Depends on how much luggage I’ve got though.

📍finally, pick a treat to reward yourself for a travel day well done! A nice looooong sleep in a comfy bed!!!

Tagging @darlingian @too-schoolforcool @jrooc @heymacy @heymrspatel @gallawitchxx @juliakayyy @crossmydna @rutherinahobbit @rereadanon @redshirt2 @crestfallercanyon @creepkinginc @captainjowl @the-rat-wins @tsuga-of-mars @ian-galagher @iansfreckles @ohkate @faejilly @palepinkgoat @sickness-health-all-that-shit @look-i-love-u @francesrose3 @vintagelacerosette @gardenerian @lynne-monstr @notherenewjersey @mickeygifs @mikhailoisbaby come travel with me 🥰