A Grain of Salt
CLOSING THE DOOR ON DISCRIMINATION
By Patrick Tamayo
The world is crumbling all around us.
Bombs blow up around the globe, earthquakes decimate civilizations, police continue to shoot at anyone remotely resembling a criminal and our entire election process appears to be a complete farce.
Yet we get all bent out of shape about which bathroom people are using. Not starving kids, drug cartels, radiation leaking into our oceans, offshore tax evaders or anything even remotely important.
Seriously, it’s a bathroom.
Why does someone’s gender identity determine which bathroom that person uses?
If a person identifies as female, use the women’s restroom. If a person identifies as male, use the men’s restroom. Who cares? It’s 2016, surely we’ve evolved enough to understand that this should not even be a discussion.
But the kids; the poor kids; what about the kids? I have an idea, and I’m going out on limb here.
It’s absurd to assume transgender women have been waiting all this time for someone to say it was OK to use the women’s bathroom so they could be creepy with your kids.
If a sexual predator wants to use another gender’s bathroom, that person is not going to go through the trouble of dressing up like women to touch little Lisa’s bottom. Guess what? They’re just going to go in and do it.
So it’s unfair/unfounded to assume a cisgender person can be safe in the bathroom with our kids, but that a transgender person poses an immediate and high-danger risk for everyone in the immediate area.
The notion that any kid’s safety relies on what sexual identities are let into each bathroom is preposterous and goes to show how close-mindedly fearful we still are as a society.
We need to get over ourselves and the idea that solely because one person is different than the next, that person should be treated differently.
Conservative Christian groups have recently called for a boycott of Target because the store now allows employees and customers to use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity.
Apparently, Tim Wildmon, the president of the American Family Association (same group that brings biblical ethics to the media) feels that spouses and children are in danger because of some threat transgender women may pose.
“This means a man can simply say he ‘feels like a woman today’ and enter the women’s restroom… even if young girls or women are already in there,” Wildmon reportedly told MSNBC.
We need to get over ourselves and the idea that solely because one person is different than the next, that person should be treated differently.
It seems Wildmon may not understand that the time, effort and risks involved with such actions would stop the majority of men from doing so. And those who would abuse their own gender identities to walk into women’s bathrooms and be creeps are a vast minority anyways.
There have always been transgender people. Does anyone wonder which bathroom’s they’ve been using all this time?
Target should be boycotted for letting their employees use different shades of red shirts, not because they’re smart enough to understand that gender neutral bathrooms are not a big deal.
However, it appears North Carolina has missed all memos on the matter, recently becoming the first state to make it unlawful for transgender people to use bathrooms that don’t match the gender they were assigned at birth.
As if that wasn’t ridiculous enough, they also passed a bill that prohibits cities from passing anti-discrimination ordinances which protect gay and transgender people.
Now, I understand that it’s North Carolina.
I understand that they have a completely different way of thinking down in those parts, and what the majority of society deems acceptable may not be how things are done in North Carolina, but the way transgender people in that state are being treated is inherently wrong.
These kinds of laws, and this kind of backward thinking only paints targets on the backs of transgender people.
According to a report by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, transgender people in 2013 were 3.7 times more likely to experience physical violence from law enforcement and 1.8 times more likely to experience sexual violence.
Laws like North Carolina only put this demographic in even more danger by demonizing trans people as a whole.
Various states are dealing with issues and lawsuits involving the gender neutral bathrooms. The fact that this is even an issue is beyond the scope of understanding.
This does not matter. This should not be an issue. There is no moral dilemma either. I’m fairly sure God does not care about what bathroom anyone is using. Surely, if it’s between bloated Ebola babies and what bathrooms transgender people are using, God would address the first problem long before acknowledging the second.
Yet with all the actual problems going on in the world, we still prefer to focus on some of the most ridiculous ones, and for that we should be ashamed.
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Send an email to: Patrick Tamayo