Bathroom Blues
A female shopper in a Ross’s Dress for Less store in Mesquite, TX is upset to find a man in the woman’s dressing room. A woman in Cleveland walks through a Target store yelling “America, when are you going to wake up? It’s time to take a stand and have a voice.” She is protesting Target’s new bathroom policy which allows anyone to use any bathroom based on their gender preference of the moment. The protest was captured on video and uploaded to YouTube where it has gone viral. In Washington D.C, a female security guard was charged with assault when she physically prevented a transgender woman from using the woman’s restroom at a Giant grocery store.
20 years ago this would have been a Saturday Night Live skit. Today it is horribly real and coming to a dressing room, restroom, or school locker room near you. How did this come to pass? Well, it’s a “civil rights” issue.
Once upon a time, there were certain things that were immutable. One was that when you were born, you were labeled a “boy” or a “girl,” based on the type of plumbing you were equipped with when you came out. It has been this way, worldwide, since Adam and Eve, when the equipment design was first finalized. There have been exceptions to that general rule; hermaphrodites come to mind; but this is a relatively rare condition and for the most part, if you had an “outie” you were a guy, if you had an “innie” you were a gal.
But of course, this is the “progressive” 21st century in America, a time where we are readdressing all the wrongs of the past perpetrated by bigots (usually Christian, usually male, usually white) on people who were just innocently trying to live their lives. It is a time where apparently anything goes and the only form of tolerance that is not permitted is tolerating what is now fashionable to term a “traditional” viewpoint on anything; including where one “chooses” to change clothes or eliminate bodily wastes.
Even the President has chosen to weigh in on the issue, bringing the coercive weight of the Federal government, in the form of “guidance,” to bear against public schools who dare to restrict male and female restrooms to those with the appropriate plumbing. “There is no room in our schools for discrimination of any kind, including discrimination against transgender students on the basis of their sex,” announced Attorney General Loretta Lynch. “This guidance gives administrators, teachers and parents the tools they need to protect transgender students from peer harassment and to identify and address unjust school policies.”
“No room for discrimination of any kind,” she says. So what’s next? The fact is, we “discriminate” every day, including in the nation’s schools. Any decision you make is one of “discrimination," choosing one thing over another, sometimes for quite arbitrary reasons. In schools, we discriminate on the basis of grades; those who do better on the test get a higher grade. Should we do away with grades?
I am sure that doing poorly on tests is bad for someone’s self-esteem - it could even lead to suicidal thoughts and PTSD. Perhaps we should assign grades based on a lottery system, or do away with them all together. Maybe we should do away with tests; they are after all, quite stressful, and some people are better at them than others. Is that "fair?"
George H. W. Bush once famously got into hot water with the nation’s Broccoli growers because he “discriminated” against eating the stuff. There was a minor kerfuffle as the “injured parties” got all in a huff about how he was setting a bad example for kids. Today they would probably move for impeachment.
The government’s decree at present lacks teeth, but the implications are plain; toe the line or else your federal school funding may be at risk. It is a game the federal government has long played to keep the states in line. Decades ago it was the national 55 mph speed limit, put in place in response to the Arab oil embargo of 1973.
The law, which quickly morphed from “saving gas” to “saving lives” once the crisis was over, was despised by most drivers, who flagrantly violated it, and opposed by most states, particularly in the west, who wanted to overturn it. States that tried to reassert their traditional rights to set their own speed limits were hammered by the Federal government, who informed them that if they did, they would lose all federal funding for highways in their state. As a result, the law stayed in place until a Republican congress finally repealed it in 1995 without, I might add, the massive carnage on the nations’ highways that was predicted by critics.
So it is today with the bathroom issue. North Carolina overturned an ordinance, passed by Charlotte, NC, which gave individuals the “right” to use the bathroom that they “identified with” as opposed to the gender they were born with. The state legislature then went further and passed legislation banning other cities within the state from passing similar ordinances in the future. This has been portrayed in the press as prohibiting cities from passing “anti-discrimination ordinances that protect gay and transgender people.”
What about protecting the 99% of the population that is not transgender? What about their rights? Do they have any?
I am really not concerned about being attacked in a restroom by a transgender person. The percentage of transgender people is quite small; I could live most my life and, considering how infrequently I use a public rest or dressing room, probably never knowingly encounter one. I would expect as well that the percentage of transgender people who might sexually assault me is probably as small within that population as in the population at large. So my risk is quite low. My problem isn’t with transgendered individuals per se.
My problem is with sexual predators in the population at large.
It isn’t like “real” transgenders have a card that identifies them as a “true” transgender. It isn’t like you can necessarily tell that someone is “really” transgender and not someone who has just decided that for this particular trip to the restroom they want to have a voyeuristic adventure (at best) or a hankering to commit rape (at worst), and “self-identify” as the opposite gender. How would you know? You have to take them at their word. And who would even dare ask, anyway?
Most guys probably don’t care. If a woman, calling herself a man because the lines in the woman’s restroom are too long, decides to use the men’s room, I bet few men will complain. On the other hand, why should my wife or daughters, who do care if a man is in their restroom, be forced to subject themselves to such for the sake of, at best, 1% of the population? Why should they have to put themselves at risk? Does anyone care about protecting them?
The left would have you believe that it was the Republicans who have declared a “war on women,” yet it is the left that first, deliberately exposes women to potential sexual predators under the guise of protecting the rights of the transgendered and then wants to take away their guns so that they are less able protect themselves if they do encounter a situation.
As this becomes more common, and pressure to make “gendered” areas essentially “gender neutral” increases, the end result will be people no longer using public restrooms or changing rooms; the latter giving yet another reason to shop online rather than at a brick and mortar.
The woman shopping at Ross’s felt uncomfortable with the man (who was "representing" himself as a woman that day) in the changing room with her. She should feel uncomfortable. Instead however, she is going to be stigmatized as "intolerant" and a bigot. "What about me? Or my feelings" she asks. Lady - no one cares about you or your feelings. What is important these days is that the man who thinks he is a woman today gets to change in your changing area and defecate in your restroom so he/she can feel good about his/her self. You can wait until he leaves (and hope another such individual doesn't enter while you are in the stall), or you can take your poop or your business elsewhere. No one cares how you feel; what, you think you are special or something?
Ross’s isn’t the only store with this type of policy. Target too has a "gender identity" policy when it comes to restrooms.
"In our stores, we demonstrate our commitment to an inclusive experience in many ways. Most relevant for the conversations currently under way, we welcome transgender team members and guests to use the restroom or fitting room facility that corresponds with their gender identity."
That’s nice for Target, who in reality only wants to sell us stuff and doesn’t want to become embroiled in any kind of negative publicity painting them as “bigoted,” which is why they established their policy in the first place. They don’t want a nationwide boycott like the one that is being pushed against North Carolina. Target knows that they will get more pushback and media angst from not allowing “gender identity” to prevail in their bath and changing rooms than they will by pre-emptively kowtowing to political correctness. Anyone objecting will be treated exactly like the lady in the article as some sort of loud-mouthed rightwing bigoted wingnut and they will come out smelling like a rose for being so “progressive.”
So Target wants us to have an “inclusive experience.” For many of us, having a person of the opposite physical sex in our changing room or restroom while our drawers are down around our ankles is a bit more inclusion than we desire.
Not only is this policy showing up at public rest and fitting rooms near you, it is showing up at public schools in your neighborhood as well. In fact, it is becoming wide spread, even here in Texas. And not only bathrooms, but anywhere that gender separation used to be enforced, such as sports locker rooms. It seems that not only has common sense (which is less common than one would like anyway) left the room, but any sort of rationality has fled the scene as well. Someone want to tell me why this is a good thing? And don’t tell me about the poor confused guy or girl that has been traumatized their entire life by having to use the “wrong” restroom.
It is particularly silly when one realizes that the solution to the (non)problem is blindingly simple; why can't there be three types of restrooms: one for men who only want to poop with other men, one for women who only want to poop with other women, and one where anyone who wants to poop can poop regardless of gender. I am not sure why that would be so difficult to implement. There would be a cost of course. But clearly, what is "fair" to one group is grossly unfair to the other groups as things currently stand. If we are going to try an placate everyone (which probably won't work anyway), we are going to have to do something other than what we are doing, unless of course, the needs of the 1% outweigh the needs of the 99% and we just tell everyone too bad, get over it, which seems to be what we are doing now.
Restrooms of this sort already exist of course. They are called “unisex” or “family” restrooms. Our church has two of them in addition to the “traditional” male and female restrooms. They each have one toilet, one sink, a changing table, and a lock on the door. They can be used by either sex, or the entire family if needs be. There is no reason the concept couldn’t be expanded to larger restrooms, with stalls if desired, for larger scale applications. This solution should be acceptable to everyone – if the issue is simply about pooping - which of course it isn’t, any more than the gay marriage issue was really about ensuring that gay couples had the same benefits married hetero couples enjoyed. That was the rationale used, but it wasn’t what the issue was really about. What it is really about is forcing everyone to submit to the whims and desires of a very small minority of the population that really gets a kick out of twisting society into a pretzel. It’s about “fundamental transformation” of America. It’s about “social justice” and so-called “civil rights” and “fighting for a cause.”
It never ends. When this cause is “won” it will be off to the next; because like so many other things going on around us today, it is difficult to see where this ends. Today it is "presenting" as the opposite sex. Tomorrow it will be "presenting" as a different race, age, you name it to get whatever perceived benefit that grants at any particular time. Hey, if I can “feel like a woman” any time I like, why can’t I be black if I feel like it so I can benefit from race based quotas? Or 12, so I can get into the movies cheaper? Or 65 so I can eat cheaper?
When I was young, my mom told me I could be anything I wanted to be. Somehow, I don’t think this is what she had in mind.