Bathrooms with a view: Cutting windows into student restrooms is a new level of weird
www.yorkdispatch.com
These adults want to make it easier for other people to watch your children while they’re in the bathroom. It’s absolutely mind-boggling.

South Western’s elected school board is making some strange decisions.

For the last two years, they’ve fixated on which bathrooms LGBTQ+ kids use. In 2023, officials in this Hanover-area district played musical chairs with school bathrooms in a misguided attempt to appease the loudest bigots among them — ending up with five different types of bathrooms.

After a low-turnout school board election in which several far-right members joined their ranks, they hired a Christian law firm, decided to begin banning books and reopened the bathroom issue. Board President Matthew Gelazela, who was elevated to his post after previously serving as the board’s most vocal bomb-thrower, pointed to Red Lion’s discriminatory policies as something to aspire to.

Now, upon the advice of that law firm — the Harrisburg-based Independence Law Center — the board approved spending $8,700 to cut windows so passersby can look into the so-called “gender-identity” student bathrooms.

  • forrcaho@lemmy.world
    155·
    2 months ago

    You’ve always got to show up for those school board elections now. Every. Single. Time.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      87·
      2 months ago

      Or live in Houston and the governor can just strip your School Board of power, then install an unelected bureaucrat to loot the school treasury.

  • kescusay@lemmy.worldEnglish
    702·
    2 months ago

    “Guys, guys… If we just hurt these kids enough, it will force them back into the closet and we’ll get to pretend LGBTQ+ kids don’t exist!” - These assholes, probably

    • betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.worldEnglish
      341·
      2 months ago

      That’s the plan. Ostracize to literal death and pretend it’s an unfortunate side-effect that following a god (more specifically, their god) will fix.

    • DillyDaily@lemmy.world
      11·
      2 months ago

      I understand it now!

      The window looks over the sink area where you would wash your hands after ensuring you are dressed and decent upon leaving the private stall.

      The idea is by having the window in the wash area, students will be hyperconscious that this is not a private space, and they will be mindful to move into the truly private stall before starting their private business.

      I think it’s purely to avoid the following example;

      The number of times I’ve stepped into a public restroom because I needed to fix something privately - my stockings are rolling down, a bandaid on my upper thigh needs replacing, my bra strap is coming loose. These are things that are private but not as private as using the toilet, so often I’ll just fix these things up while I’m at the sink area, I don’t need a stall.

      But if someone walks in while I’m fixing my stockings, well they didn’t consent to seeing so much of my upper thigh when they turned the corner, and while I personally don’t care that they saw me, I can see how a teenage girl might be deeply upset if this happened because she absent mindedly forgot that the sink area is not truly private.

      Spooky I think it’s to constahtkt remind the students that onky the stalls are truly private.

      It’s a misguided, and potentially harmful way to do this though…

  • The Pantser@lemmy.world
    311·
    2 months ago

    Do all these weirdos have gendered bathrooms in their homes? Just install single person non gendered bathrooms or floor to ceiling stalls and non connected sinks and be done with it.

  • ngwoo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    22·
    2 months ago

    Conservative Christians increase their involvement and within a year the children’s bathroom has a viewport for pedophiles installed.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
    21·
    2 months ago

    Ah, this takes me back to my own high school days back in the 90s where none of the boys’ toilet stalls had doors on them. I assume as some sort of anti-masturbation tactic. I’ve got nervous bathroom issues already so I basically held it in until I got home most of the time.

    • Norin@lemmy.world
      5·
      2 months ago

      I went through 4 years of high school without ever taking a shit at school for this very reason.

    • Sidhean@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 months ago

      I daresay no one thought we needed a law against cutting a hole in the wall of a school bathroom. I certainly didn’t have it on my bingo card for this month.

    • Thebeardedsinglemalt@lemmy.world
      71·
      2 months ago

      They’re so concerned about what’s going on inside children’s pants that they now was to watch them in bathroom.

      Sounds pretty fucking weird to me

  • anon6789@lemmy.world
    20·
    2 months ago

    In case anyone else was wondering how they came up with 5 types of bathroom:

    bathrooms for males assigned as male at birth, females assigned as female at birth, males based on gender identity, females based on gender identity, and private, single-use bathrooms for all students to use.

    Source

    • DillyDaily@lemmy.world
      11·
      2 months ago

      …those don’t even remotely work to serve all genders.

      I still wouldn’t technically be able to pee anywhere if I was a student at that school (other than the single stall room…why not just have a bunch like that?)

  • 2ugly2live@lemmy.world
    191·
    2 months ago

    They go on and on about how they don’t want the dangerous transgenders in the bathroom, but now anyone can peek in to confirm… What, exactly? It’s not like the windows are in the stalls, so just for them assume someone gender? “You look too feminine, no boys room for you. Sorry, too masculine, no ladies room.” What’s next, strip searches? Wtf is it with them and the bathroom…

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      12·
      2 months ago

      What’s next, strip searches?

      Hardly “what’s next”. This has been a fixation by conservatives since since the Obama Administration

      Aimee Toms was washing her hands in the women’s bathroom at Walmart in Danbury Friday when a stranger approached her and said, “You’re disgusting!” and “You don’t belong here!”

      After momentary confusion, she realized that the woman next to her thought — because of her pixie-style haircut and baseball cap — that she was transgender.

    • MimicJar@lemmy.world
      2·
      2 months ago

      It’s to ensure people remain on the outside and excluded.

      If someone’s preferred bathroom in the men’s room, but they are forbidden from using it, they have a special bathroom to use. However we can’t have them privately using a bathroom. We have to put them on display. EVERYONE needs to know they are different. The goal is to exclude, the goal is to make them feel different, the goal is hate. It’s disgusting.

      As students, hopefully, they just start to use the bathroom normally. If all students use it, then it’s not weird. Now that’s unfair to push on middle school students. But it’s an option.

  • WoahWoah@lemmy.world
    15·
    2 months ago

    This won’t help much, hard to tell much just by someone’s face. What we need here is a window specifically for viewing the children’s genitalia. And then we need a dedicated monitor to watch all the children use the bathroom.

    John, the repressed religious fundamentalist, has already volunteered. We’ve designed a room where he can monitor the genitalia from the holes we’ve cut, and we’ve also installed cameras inside the urinals and toilets with a feed that goes to the monitoring room, in case anyone tries to defeat our system.

    The monitoring room has no windows or cameras in it, and the door locks from the inside, so, I think we’ve finally solved the problem. Consider the liberals owned!