Simple version:
- If it is functional, you probably have no reason to refuse it, as it likely isn’t even economically effective for you, let alone concordant with your other agendas such as “only use force when you have to”.
- If it is aesthetic, using a counter value system, it’s going to be a one-for-one, so probably the answer is no.
- If someone does something one way or the other on these, if there is no significant functional consideration, you let it slide.
Longer version:
We first should start by noting what is a small minority. As a normal minority notionally tends to be in the 20->30% range, a small minority is in the less than 10% area. In the case of transgender issues, you are talking about even smaller numbers, 1% or less, so an extremely small minority.
This 1% threshold has a larger significance. When we talk about the types of numbers we reliably can get out of polls, at typical sampling rates, you usually talk about margins of error like 4% of the notional census. If you take a true census or some approximation, you still could be talking about 1->2% error. So when we assess the larger impact, we likely are beyond a meaningful macro assessment capability, so our assessment tends to be on the anecdotal or small-study/microcosm basis.
Do you want to make policy on anecdotes? Maybe, if your considerations are clear cut. Despite the low percentage of people injecting their bodily fluids via syringe into others by force on the street, we would wish to ban/punish this behavior. If, however we have pros and cons, based upon the opinions of a diverse set of individuals, our task becomes considerably more difficult – and in the case of these small minorities randomly scattered about different cliques, may approach the level of non-generalizable treatment and non-reproducible results.
Let’s start about transgender bathrooms. In general you could choose to provide:
- Unisex toilets
- Unisex toilets, but individual rooms
- Partitioned by sex (e.g. 50/50, by the relative abundance of each sex in the workplace…)
- Partitioned by some other characteristic e.g. the colored drinking water fountains
There are functional differences amongst these: if there are locking doors on all entryways, then clearly the risk of rape or other sexual assault is decreased by this configuration. There also are differences in regards to the “suspiciousness” of the entrants to and presence in these facilities; having rules could give an indication as to something being amiss.
We also need to be somewhat more exacting about the use of the word “transgender” (which is nasty because a lot of times, people should really be using the word, transsexual). As a more general term it can mean:
- People who, with appropriate preparation can pass as one sex, the other, or both, and actually do so as the opposite gender from their original sex
- Male, female, or possibly intersex individuals in some stage of transition (trial, hormones, sex reassignment surgery), during which they might not be able to pass (e.g. deep voice, large or small breasts), or with difficulty e.g. a lot of makeup work that they won’t always have
So when we talk about “transgender bathrooms” vs. the option of restricting to sex, essentially there are three possible options:
- Unisex facilities, anyone can use any of the facilities
- “Passing” facilities, you can use any sex facility for which you currently pass
- Combination “passing” and sex assigned facilities, meaning you always can use the restroom of a facility indicated for your current sex, and additionally you can use the restroom for a sex if you currently pass for that sex
- Rarely if ever seen: sexual orientation bathrooms
Usually a proposal of this sort either means unisex or combination passing, because you easily can wind up in situations where people either will be challenged because of their appearance or intersex status, so they actually would wind up having no restroom options at all.
Regardless, you lose all of your suspicion criteria for unisex and most of it for combination passing. This is the biggest functional distinction in the strict transgender sense vs. a facilities upgrade sense; men already rape women in sex-segregrated bathrooms as it is. (The facilities upgrade sense is for example a big problem in Africa e.g. the outdoor defecation at night.)
What is the actual impact of this in reference to increased sexual assaults and other crimes? It is very unclear and, without doing a large scale social experiment, it’s not obvious that there will be a statistically significant detectability. The other issue here is that the “passing” facility criteria already isn’t enforced. No one checks your body parts on entry, use, or exit (even in male urinals). So the only change is some very modest additional risk in combination passing and a somewhat larger amount of risk for unisex (but in common restrooms, the increased traffic may actually decrease crime, very unclear). In other words, combination passing bathrooms in large part, already exist. We only are talking about restroom usage for people who don’t pass, or whose sex is notorious (e.g. in public schools or workplace settings where someone is transitioning). We also should note that under any of these systems, homosexuals already are using the bathrooms and violating the privacy.
With the functional state unclear, and the combination passing bathrooms already in play, and practically not a priority for/not effectively enforced by law enforcement as it is, most of this debate is about aesthetics. Here is where the small minority issue really comes into play.
Assume that all transgenders will feel significantly better about having transgender bathrooms. The feelings of this notionally 1% population, then are balanced against the feelings of the larger population which now has to deal with more people (there already are certain sex assigned who don’t pass) who aren’t passing in their restroom. Trying to get a survey of the “homophobic” or “privacy conscious” or whatever tag we want to put on this population, isn’t likely to give a precise number, because being “homophobic” and “bigoted” isn’t socially acceptable in many situations, including the polling context. We only can SWAG based on the reaction to the introduction of such legislation, the general mood we hear anecdotally, and so on. However even given such coarse measures, we still easily are talking about 5, 10, or 20% of the population that feels less comfortable about the additional non-passers. Moreover, we also should consider the feelings of the population that likes the policies or wants additional non-passers in their bathrooms.
You easily can see that this boils down to a counter vs. royalist aesthetic values question. How much worse does it have to be for a non-passing transgender person, to not have access to the bathroom of their affinity gender, vs. the likely less frequent (but possibly as frequent in some cases) and less intense, but far more numerous, disgust and privacy violation of those who prefer sex-assigned bathrooms? Now you are stacking the unclear size of the population on top of the very unclear and hard to compare individual aesthetic valuations. Given that the extremely small minority is 10->20x smaller than the opposing value system, that implies a transgender individual’s value in society could be anywhere from 10x to 20x that of the gender conformists. If you remember that only non-passers really matter in most of these proposals, now you could even be talking 40x or more.
As a counter, I therefore find the concept of the transgender bathroom compulsion extremely unappealing. There is a very dicey functional argument and the aesthetics clearly weigh against, and using the force of government or functional business on an aesthetic is essentially arbitrary policy.
The pronoun issue implicates a number of different considerations. Again we remember it only matters when an individual isn’t passing, otherwise the default assumptions would fit. In this case you have the .1%? of the population that has insufficient passing capability and no salutations or other presentation to offset, against the 99.9% of the population now having their time wasted, and having to engage in politically correct rituals that have nothing to do with functional business. So now the value of the time wasted, and all the HR related consequences and business damage that comes out of this conflict, has to be weighed against the aesthetics of the non-passing individuals, and their continued employment by the organization (e.g. because they feel they belong). Bear in mind also that we speak about specific interactions, usually only in the context of employment in business (because in interpersonal you would not tend to be hostile, and in ordinary retail you never even use the pronouns anyway). Hence, when we make the decision of HR value of one policy vs. the other, not only do we have to judge how good/necessary the non-passing transgender employee is, and whether they can be helped/persuaded to do a better job of passing, we also are making this decision in a context where you may only see, in practical business networks averaging 100 persons, a non-passing transgendered individual in roughly 10% of them. So 90% of the time, this is completely, and superficially (because you can look at your workforce and assess whether they pass) wasted effort. In the other 10% of the time, we have to say is the benefit to the organization of keeping this transgender person happy, more than the time wasted and hostility fostered by the pronoun policy and its punishments. (Note I do not consider the discount that everyone is OK with the non-passer because it’s a 100 person network, not a 10 person, although the existence of such work networks is a reality.) From a productivity perspective, in the 100 person network, you are talking about the Mendoza line, so whatever amount that non-passer’s replacement is a penalty, vs. the productivity penalty of the pronoun policy and its rituals. (That is, it is not a 1% penalty to lose the average worker, it is rehire + training + baseline new productivity.) In industries like sales or financial trading, it could be a massive penalty, the non-passer could be a superstar. In most operations companies, you’re talking a fixed cost that may be offset by benefits of no pronoun policy, and in smaller networks where you have clear resistance to transgenders, you are looking at a clear benefit from no pronoun policy.
To summarize, in the case of the pronoun policy, in order for it to be correct to implement it, the population of non-passers in your industry or competency has to be clearly better (2x or more) than the population of non-passers. That implies you have productivity metrics to justify that claim, which usually (some businesses are aesthetics based) means you are talking about a functional, and not an aesthetic.
These cases both point to a more general consideration: anytime you have a special case (does not matter minority or not) in an organization, you are going to pay a penalty to handle it, and as your organization gets larger/the benefit of handling the special case gets smaller, it gets harder and harder to justify it.
Finally we come to the last assertion: that if the ordered policy leads to no significant functional impact, you go along with it. If there is no significant functional impact (people just use different bathrooms, put a one-time e-mail signature mod), then we are talking about aesthetics, and given any number of unresolved functional issues, spending the effort to fight the aesthetic wars is not worth it (censorship or taboos, because of their ripple to free speech, would not quality). If there is repeated time-consuming virtue signaling required, or your customers/business associates are getting annoyed with the time-consuming ritual, then you have a justification to push back.