What's truly ridiculous is that we still live a segregated society. I mean separated bathrooms? What's the point? All that does is serve up the gross stereotype that everyone with a man or woman with a penis is a gross sexual predator who's rampage of raping can only be stopped by a thin layer of drywall.

Its disgusting, archaic, and inefficient. Make the bathrooms bigger; one wall is a urinal trough, the other are stalls. Boom. Equality. And not to mention a faster experience for the vagina bearers.

Lisa Wade, I'm a big fan of this blog, and I think you often have really great critiques and points to make. I am somewhat disappointed by your apparently wholehearted endorsement of this video. As someone with a radical critique of gender, as I think all sociologists and anthropology / sociology-minded folks should have, I recognize that what it means to be a "man" or a "woman" (gender, not biological sex) is entirely socially constructed and performed. Many of the points that John Oliver makes completely reinforce the gender binary, and the transgender people depicted in the video seem to completely adhere to the stereotypes of their chosen gender (ex: the transgender man taking the picture in the bathroom is wearing extremely masculine clothing, and has his own barbecue sauce, also very stereotypically masculine… and if that was a joke, it's still buying into the stereotype). While I recognize that transgender people face extreme oppression in our society, much of the discourse around trans issues takes a lot of things about gender for granted and reinforces that people should behave in one of two sets of ways (masculine or feminine) and this is something I take issue with. People should be able to behave and dress how they choose, regardless of their sex.

I came across a post you wrote on the mythology around prehistoric humans and gender inequality/violence in mating, and I really liked it ("Caveman Courtship and Its Mythology"). Being a nonbinary trans person in the year 2022, I then immediately became worried about your views on "trans ideology," AKA on whether people like me are delusional about our notions of gender (and lack thereof, in some cases), both in terms of personal experience and as a patriarchal institution of social control, and more importantly whether or not we deserve human rights.

That's why I was so happy to find this post, even from as far back as 2015. Thank you for this. It seems like for almost the past decade, more and more feminist thinkers (especially from the second wave or from the boomer and GenX generations) have caught the so-called "gender critical" brain worms, where they denounce the patriarchal gender binary (and blame trans people for perpetuating it, even as it's coercively forced on us), while replicating it and its violence, and just calling their version "[biological] sex" instead. Even back when this was written, you had a GC/TER"F" in this very comment section. Meanwhile, trans people's legal rights and protections have been eroded along with women's rights/protection against sex-based discrimination, not by the dreaded "Trans Rights Activists," but by the same reactionary and conservative forces that have always targeted both women's rights and LGBT+ rights (since queer liberation must necessarily involve the dismantling of heteronormativity, patriarchy, and misogyny). Thank you again, from the future, for not giving in to this hate group and recognizing its bullshit early on in the game.