Why are bathroom bills even a thing? Why are we allowing for the further institutionalization of blatant discrimination? This country is supposed to be a place where people can find the American dream; instead, it has numerous lawmakers who want to deliberately and publicly discriminate against people.
You, me, and the next guy have been around trans people our entire lives, and here is the thing: their genitals did not affect you, me, or the next guy at all. Why are we picking on people who just need to pee?
For all you know, anyone around you could be trans, so who are we to ask about their private parts? That’s the thing, genitals are deemed private parts, but an overwhelming number of republican congressmen seem to want to get a sneak peek into trans people’s pants.
Cis (a term for people whose experiences of their own gender agree with the sex they were assigned at birth) privilege means no one questions your gender identity or what parts you have. Cis people are allowed to have parts that can be deemed private.
The tables are turned for trans people. Someone comes out as trans and the first thing everyone wants to ask is “Are you post-op?” “Are you keeping your penis?” “How do you have sex?” Trans people’s genitals are immediately on the minds of many cisgender people when they find out someone is trans. Not only is this extremely inappropriate, but it does not allow trans people to have the same right to having private parts as everyone else. What is the obsession with other people’s organs?
These headlines saying “men enter women’s room” and others like it fail to reach the entire point of allowing trans people to enter into the restroom. Trans women are not men and trans men are not women. Statements like “men belong in the men’s room” are correct. Trans men belong in the men’s room because they are men, regardless of what genitals they have.
This brings me back full circle to cisgender people’s privilege to have private parts and the idea that a penis is what makes a man. This assertion just isn’t true. What makes someone a man or a woman is their own personal gender identity.
Instead of protecting trans people in the bathroom, bathroom bill proponents are using rhetoric like “men in the ladies' room want to molest children” to scare people. Last time I checked, any form of sexual abuse of children or adults is illegal.
A man entering a women’s bathroom or a woman entering a men’s bathroom in order to be a sexual predator has nothing to do with gender and everything to do with their own sexual deviancy and desire to hurt others. Trans people want to go to the bathroom to pee, or wash their hands, or check to make sure they don’t have food in their teeth.
People saying “we don’t want men in the ladies room/ladies in the men’s room” are right. However, where they fail to understand the case of trans people is that trans men are men and trans women are women.
A trans woman in the men’s room is exactly what these people do not want, yet are too uneducated on the subject to understand. They fail to recognize and grasp what it means to be transgender.
Regardless, it all comes down to scare tactics by people who do not comprehend what it means to be transgender, and even if the argument stood that trans men or trans women did want to hurt children, this is still illegal. It is to hurt children illegal regardless of someone’s gender identity and bathroom bills have nothing to do with this.
Bathroom bills fail to protect trans people and instead create the false idea that trans people are predators. Bathroom bills put trans people in the place of the perpetrator when in reality an overwhelming number of trans people are the subject of hate crimes. Just check out this article from Time which states that "nearly 80 percent of transgender people report experiencing harassment at school when they were young.”
Just let people use the bathroom in peace. As a cisgender person, I have had the privilege to not have to question what bathroom to go into and on top of that, I have not had anyone want to inspect my genitals or see my birth certificate.
This is a privilege I have anytime I enter into a public bathroom. It is something I do not even think about because I have enjoyed this privilege since birth. This privilege should not only be extended to cisgender people, but to ALL people.
Furthermore, ads featuring extremely feminine women that read “do you really want her in the men’s room?” and vise versa completely miss the point. People should be allowed to pee in the place they identify. These ads place emphasis on trans people “passing” and force them to conform to traditional values or femininity or masculinity.
If a transwoman is not dolled up in pink and a skirt, is she not “feminine enough” to be in the ladies room? A trans person’s worth is not based on their ability to pass and we should not continue to police their gender and make it so that society only values people who look cisgender.
Honestly, this entire bathroom debate blows my mind. It reinforces a perpetual binary of the sexes and ignores how many people are coming out and identifying as gender nonconforming, gender neutral, gender fluid, etc. What is the big deal about what private parts we have? If the biggest fear in the bathroom bill controversy is men entering into women’s bathroom and assaulting women or children, we need to seriously reevaluate the issue altogether.
If this is the biggest fear, well, maybe the debate should not be about where people decide to pee but about sexual assault prevention. Maybe we should teach our children about sexual assault and why it is wrong instead of worrying about the genitals of the person in the stall next to you who is just trying to do their thing.
Because at the end of the day, this issue is not really about how much politicians care about the safety of kids, it is about discrimination of trans people. Bathroom bills and the fear being used to back them up isn’t really about sexual violence, it is a product of bigotry and hatred of the trans community by uneducated politicians. Politicians are using scare tactics to inaccurately paint a picture of the trans community to further perpetuate bigotry.
Maybe we should work on living in a world where women (and men) do not have to live in fear of sexual assault. This seems like time better spent than policing people’s gender identity and expression.
