Recently, North Carolina passed a bill that mandates that people use the bathroom that corresponds to the sex identified on their birth certificates. Even Republican candidates like Donald Trump have spoken out against the law, suggesting that it isn’t moral. This has sparked controversy around the country regarding LGBTQ+ community, and their rights to use the bathroom that they see fit. Though this issue is not new, it has garnered heavy media coverage, and deserves to be unpacked, and explored for further understanding.

This law has created anger because it shows that America, as progressive as it is, is still lacking basic understanding about the LGBTQ+ community, and specifically, in this case, the transgender community. This law was founded on, and supported by ignorance, and we cannot necessarily blame the ignorant for acting upon their lack of knowledge, but it would serve our country best to educate them.

Ted Cruz made a comment recently that essentially defines the ignorance of the American’s behind this bill in response to Trump’s rejection of the bill. Cruz stated:

"Donald Trump is no different from politically correct leftist elites. Today, he joined them in calling for grown men to be allowed to use little girls’ public restrooms. As the dad of young daughters, I dread what this will mean for our daughters — and for our sisters and our wives. It is a reckless policy that will endanger our loved ones,"

What many American’s do not understand is a basic understanding of transgender people, as Cruz exemplified in his statement. He refers to male to female transgender as “grown men” implying that the transgender women that use the restroom are merely men who see themselves as men, dressed as women. This is not true at all.

To understand transgender people, we must accept something that we cannot see; a major problem for humans. People don’t like to accept something that there isn’t physical evidence of. God, for example, has extreme backlash for many reasons, but one being that people refuse to believe what they cannot see or experience in some physical way. It may be true that we cannot physically identify God, but the fact that many people can identify him within themselves still makes him valid, and real to them.

“Transgender” is similarly something we cannot see. It is something internal; a feeling within an individual that their bodies are not suited to their identity of themselves. In this way, a body for transgender people becomes a costume they are trapped in. Imagine thinking about yourself with your eyes closed. You see your long legs, and your blonde hair all the way it should be. Then, imagine opening your eyes to see a mirror showing you that you are, in fact, an elephant. How disheartening it must be to look in a mirror and see four short stubby legs and a long trunk in place of golden hair.

When a transgender woman dresses in women’s clothes and grows long blonde hair, her goal is to try her best to suit the image she has of herself to her physical one; to replace the obscene trunk with the long blond hair of her self-image.

In the same way, she wants to use the bathroom that she imagines goes with her self-image not the one that says “elephant”.

In this way, it’s a strange disconnect to assume that a transgender woman is using a women’s bathroom for sexual reasons; for assault and harassment of “little girls”, when really she probably couldn’t care less about Cruz’s daughters, and the other patrons using the bathroom, except, that she knows it feels right because all the other patrons too, have long legs and long blonde hair like she does.

What this assumption that a transgender woman using the bathroom, is anything but an innocent transgender woman using the bathroom, shows me is not only ignorance, but a violence-obsessed community.

It is disconcerting that Cruz immediately believes that a transgender woman using the bathroom is something akin to a violent pedophiliac rape scene in which a man seeks out a little girl as she is vulnerably caught with her pants down in a restroom. What it shows is that society has a fixation with violence. Cruz as well as many others, assume the very worst when they think of a biological man and a young girl together in a bathroom.

Likely, because we have been raised in a “rape culture”, where we warn our females about males and how each one could be a potential rapist on the loose. By doing this, we make people think that rape is normal, natural, and something that is on every male mind that females must avoid.

The reality is though, that using a bathroom is neither a sexual act, nor an open door to violence. Yes, people in bathrooms are in a “vulnerable” state, but we are also in a vulnerable state when we are asleep on a train ride, eating lunch at a restaurant, or reading on a park bench. Vulnerability is everywhere, but just being vulnerable, doesn’t mean an act of violence is about to take place.

There have been absolutely no instances of a transgender person violating another in a bathroom. Mostly, because of what we are unable to see; the elephant we see is actually a human with long legs and long blonde hair trapped in a costume with neither interest in sexualizing her experience in a likely disgusting public restroom, nor interest in the other long-legged blonde people in there, and we need to understand that.