And The Bathroom Debate Continues

And now the same friend (see earlier blog) posted this:

Scenario:
Your 12 year old daughter goes to the bathroom at the restaurant by herself. Your daughter doesn't return for a bit and you go to check on her and hear her crying in a bathroom stall. She runs to you and says a man just touched her privates. You call the police and they come to investigate.
Just outside the bathroom is security cameras that records everyone coming and going from the Restrooms.
(Cameras aren't allowed inside the bathrooms) duh!!
Your daughter enters the bathroom and just behind her enters what according to the camera appears to be a man. The man is identified later in the investigation and is interviewed by police but says he is transgender and he was just using the bathroom and the little girl is lying.
If people of both sexes are able to enter the bathroom of their choice the little girls statement holds no credibility.
"Her word against his"
Now with the "Bathroom Law" in place, preventing a person of the opposite biological sex from entering the bathroom of their choice the little girls statement is credible and the offender has to explain why he entered a women's restroom when knowing it was against the law. This is maybe the evidence that helps convict the defendant or maybe the only evidence.
Now does this help the liberals understand!!!!!!
It's not about discrimination folks.
PLEASE SHARE EVERYONE

Actually, in the scenario above, I seriously doubt the creep saying he was transgender would help his case at all. Nobody's just going to take his word for it.  At the very least I'm sure they would ask for further evidence that he was transgender.  People don't just wake up one day, say "I'm transgender!" and start using women's restroom.  Myself, I have public blogs going back 10 years that discuss my gender issues.  I have friends who can corroborate that I'm transgender.  I've seen four therapists,  who presumably kept records.  I have photos of me en femme, a box full of women's clothing in my size, and so on.  

As I said in the last blog, women molest children too.  And men usually molest girls in other places besides public restrooms  So I'm not sure how many people this law would actually protect.  Meanwhile these laws will harm many, many trans people in all stages of transition.

These bathroom bills are evil, period.  They put trans lives in danger, they treat trans people like criminals, and they don't actually protect the ciswomen they're trying to protect.

Only Time Will Tell

Time is too nebulous a concept for me to grasp sometimes.  I have no idea what happened 10 or 20 years ago, and so I anchor everything to where I lived or worked when such-and-such happened.  I have to check IMDB to remember how old my cat is, because we bought her the same day we saw the fourth “Die Hard” movie.  I've been in my current job for 16 years, and it amazes me how far we've come in that time.  When I started working here, everyone had dial-up internet, and cell phones were just starting to become common.  I remember the first year I worked here, the CEO declaring "no cell phones in the building" because he felt they were a distraction.  He'd never get away with that today, now that they're so ubiquitous.

New technology tends to make the old ways look barbaric within a few decades.  Look at all the memes making fun of cassette tapes and floppy disks, and that’s fairly recent technology in the grand scheme of things.  Once we've all had self-driving cars for 20 years, we'll look back and say, "People used to operate cars by hand?  How unsafe!"  Once we invent a healthy lab-grown meat that tastes good, and use it for a couple of decades, we'll wonder how we ever were so backwards as to slaughter living creatures.  The “I, Robot” movie jokes about how dangerous gasoline is going to seem someday.  Heck, if we all switched to Velcro shoes for a few years, laces would look absolutely antiquated.

Meanwhile, social progress just keeps going back and forth, ebbing and flowing like the tides.  If you keep looking to the past, you'll find eras where people were open-minded, then strict, then back again.  In some ways, homosexual activity was more acceptable in ancient Rome than it was 30 years ago.  As much as I like to see things change for the better in my lifetime, it's bittersweet because I know it's not permanent.  Maybe it'll be 100 years, maybe 1000, but gay marriage will eventually be illegal again.  Technological advancements are permanent, but social advancements have an expiration date.

So whenever I hear someone say they’re voting a certain way “for future generations,” I get a little skeptical.  It’s up to those future generations whether something stays a law, and all it takes is a resurgence of certain attitudes for society to take large steps backward.  At best, we can only vote to make things better for the next generation, and try to raise them in such a way that they continue to pay it forward to future generations.  But other people are having children too, and their backwards attitudes are also getting passed on.  Social justice is a war that can never be won by either side.

This feels like a lengthy introduction to a blog on a more specific subject, but really I'm just babbling.  Have a nice day!

More on Bathrooms

A friend reposted this on Facebook:

"I DESERVE A CHOICE TOO! If people want a choice create Three! Everyone deserves a choice. There are way to many sexual Predators in this world to allow someone to Say they "identify" so they can use The female or The Male Restroom. There are creepy men and women in this world and if all a Predator has to do is look or Identify as the opposite sex to be in a private area then we have problems. I'm just saying create a safe area for all. Don't take away my rights by giving someone else a right."

Where to begin, where to begin...  I guess I'll ignore the "to/too" spelling error and all the random capitalization, but don't think it escaped my notice.

Okay, first off, I'd be overjoyed if there were always a third restroom open to all genders.  There are many reasons those can be useful, not just for trans people.  It's not a particularly new idea, I've already heard of some trans people using the "Family" restrooms available at some businesses.  Just relabel the Family restrooms as "Unisex", you have a nice alternative for those who can't decide which restroom to use.  That said, actually requiring trans people to use them is a bit reminiscent of the old "Separate but Equal" laws, and it sends the demeaning message that trans women/men aren't "real" women/men.  But it's nice to have it as an option.

But realistically, you're just not going to get every business out there to build a third restroom. Some buildings don't have the room, and some small businesses don't have the money for the construction.  Going forward I hope new buildings are designed with this in mind, but until then we will often have to work with just the two choices.

I know the author means well, but her statement contains so many unintentional insults that I'm having trouble keeping myself from really going off.  Putting "identify" in quotation marks is a red flag, it shows she doesn't take trans issues seriously.

I think this sentence is the root of it: "all a predator has to do is look or identify as the opposite sex to be in a private area..." That's actually two very different statements - "look" and "identify" are vastly different things - so I'm going to break it up into two versions.

First we have, "all a predator has to do is look... as the opposite sex to be in a private area".  So maybe it's not trans people that worry the author, it's the possibility of cis men pretending to be trans so they can sneak into restrooms.  Of course, they can disguise themselves already, with or without a law.  If cisgender people are going to disguise themselves as the opposite sex to sneak into restrooms for sexual assaults (and I'd like to see a cite that this actually happens with any regularity), then they'll still do so.  People planning a sexual assault probably won't be deterred by a law.

But I guess not every man is feminine enough to pull off such a disguise, so those men will just say, "I'm transgender!" so they can still go into the bathroom and assault women.  Who are they going to say this to?  Is it wise to have such a visible disguise when you're planning something as secretive as a sexual assault?  And what about manly-looking cis women?  Not every woman looks like a supermodel; is someone going to be checking the doors to make sure the more burly women are truly female?

But the second version of that sentence is the one I find insulting.  "all a predator has to do is... identify as the opposite sex to be in a private area."  I guess the author is worried about trans people after all.  Trans advocates argue that there are no reported cases of trans people harassing people in bathrooms.  If they actually identify as the opposite sex (which is the point of all this), then they probably aren't a predator.  A transwoman using a women's restroom is there for the same reason as the cis women. 

But the phrasing of that sentence is infuriating.  "All they have to do is identify", oh is that all?  What an idiot I've been!  Of course all my trans issues have been about wanting to use women's restrooms, and all I had to do was identify as a woman in order to get in there!  It was a cunning plan, involving four decades of psychological trickery to morph my inner psyche so that I'd identify as the opposite gender, all so I could be rewarded with using the toilets in the women's room.  Imagine my disappointment when I finally got in there and discovered the women's commodes were identical to the men's.  There was no magic unicorn spigot dispensing gold coins as I'd always believed.  I'm starting to think it wasn't worth it.

Has the author considered the fact that sexual predators come in both sexes, and target victims of both sexes?  There are already adult men who molest young boys, how do we protect the male children?  Should men not be allowed in the men's room?  There are also female pedophiles, how do you know that the woman in the stall next to your daughter isn't planning to kidnap her?  And what about lesbians?  They're attracted to women, and can legally use women's restrooms.  Aren't you afraid they'll sexually assault other women?  Looks like there's all kinds of checks we're going to have to do before we let people use the restroom.

As I've said before, I'm not comfortable in public restrooms.  I can definitely relate to those who get nervous by the presence of others.  If a woman has trouble peeing in a stall next to someone she perceives as a man in a dress, I sympathize.  But that "man in a dress" most likely agonized over which restroom to use.  She (and I do mean "she") might have held it in as long as she could, knowing that picking the wrong door could get her beaten up or arrested.  She probably even considered going home early, sacrificing the rest of her night out in order to relieve her bladder in the safety of her own home.  For someone like that, a third restroom would be a godsend.

But a lot of trans people are farther along than that.  Those who are late in their transition are no longer questioning.  They are who they feel they are, period.  You may have a transwoman who has spent years transitioning, and looks female, dresses female, and is never questioned.  Maybe she still has male genitalia, but you'd never know unless you saw her naked, and that's none of your business anyway.  It's ridiculous to say this woman should use the men's room based on her birth certificate.  You think you're uncomfortable peeing next to a "man in a dress"?  Don't you think the men feel a little uncomfortable when this obvious woman walks into their restroom?  Won't the women be a little uncomfortable when a fully transitioned female-to-male uses the women's room?

Yes, there's two sides to this, I get that.  On the one hand, we have trans people wanting to feel safe.  On the other hand, we have cis women wanting to feel safe.  Since cis women outnumber trans women, I can see the logic in giving them the priority.  But how likely is each scenario?  A trans woman, fully decked out en femme, could get killed going into the men's room.  "Trans panic" assaults are so depressingly common that a lot of trans folk are afraid to leave the house.  Meanwhile, the "guy pretends to be transgender to assault women in the restroom" scenario is much less common, if it happens at all.

Okay, but the author isn't necessarily saying it happens a lot right now, she's saying that it might start happening, now that the public knows that claiming to be transgender is an option.  In other words, "We have to make this activity illegal, because some people might take advantage of it to commit a crime."  Let's apply that logic to any other legal activity.   "We have to make driving illegal because some people might use their cars to run over people."  Well guess what, people do use their cars to run over people, a lot more often than people put on dresses to assault women in restrooms.  Yet driving is still legal.

Here's a little secret:  I hate guns.  I wish people didn't have them.  I think the world would be better without them.  Yet, out of 500+ blog posts, you haven't seen me talk about making guns illegal.  Why is that, I wonder?  Maybe because I don't believe we should punish the majority of law abiding citizens over the actions of a few criminals.  Other people's rights don't always benefit you - sometimes their rights even scare you - but they still deserve those rights.

And transgender people deserve to use whichever restroom makes them feel safe and comfortable.  Period.