Transphobic Legislation?
Our politicians don’t have anything more important to do than to keep people from going to the bathroom of their choice.
I shared this image in my stream this morning. I don’t see anything inherently wrong with the sentiment this picture presents, which is why I posted it. And it didn’t take too long before the hate started to flow. Emperor Palpatine would have been proud. Not going to share the hate because, well, hate-sharing is wrong no matter who does it.
What I will do is point out the hypocrisy of such legislation by sharing with you, just how many legislators don’t appear to have anything else to do with their time. Besides monitor whose going to the bathroom where… Oh and pretty much making the LGBTQI community unnecessarily uncomfortable.
Yes, I believe it was in Kansas where they offered a bounty…
It was suggested to me, however, it wasn’t just this easy to ignore trans people going to the bathroom.
My Response:
Yes, it is. We don’t stop people from going to the bathroom just because there are Congressmen who engage in sexual acts with women or men who they are not married to. In some cases, the very people promoting said bills are guilty of sexual indiscretions of an epic nature.
We don’t stop people from going to the bathroom if a person is a police officer, serial killer, ex-felon, or otherwise dangerous individual we don’t know about. Having gendered bathroom has become almost an artifact of the past and should go back into the dustbin of history.
Public restrooms have not always been gender segregated. “Historically, shared public latrines have been a feature of most communities, and this continues to be true in developing countries such as Ghana, China, and India,” note Olga Gershenson and Barbara Penner in Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender.
“Private, sex-segregated lavoratories were a modern and Western European invention, bound up with urbanization, the rise of sanitary reform, the privatization of the bodily functions, and the gendered ideology of separate spheres.”
According to sociology and sexuality studies professor Sheila Cavanagh, the first separate toilet facilities for men and women appeared at a ball in Paris in 1739. Until then, public restrooms, such as they existed, were generally gender neutral or marked for men only. The earliest efforts to legislate gender segregation in the United States were due to a lack of women’s facilities in workplaces.
In 1887, Massachusetts was the first state to pass a law mandating women’s restrooms in workplaces with female employees. As far as I can tell, this was a pretty good idea; factories and other places that had begun to employ women were refusing to install restrooms for them. Perhaps the job market would have corrected itself eventually, but in the mean time working ladies had to pee.
— Reason: The Biggest Obstacle to Gender Neutral Bathrooms? Building Codes.
Making just one more non-issue into an issue seems almost criminal given the state of affairs of most city and state governments where corruption, poverty, poisoned water and homeless are the order of day.
At the federal level corruption, environmental destruction and war are the primary reasons this nation can’t seem to progress effectively.
While we are gushing from the financial and cultural arteries around these issues, there was someone who thought making an issue about bathrooms was more significant than resolving one of these more important issues.
If you were to ask me where I wanted my government to spend their time it would be on not putting bounties on citizens trying to use the damn bathroom.
Because if we are going to have bounties, the ones that should be levied should be on members of government who don’t actually do anything useful during their times in office.
I bet we could pay out on a lot of those!
If only our politicians could make useful legislation which could handle any number of social ills our nation seems to struggle with.
Perhaps we can one day mandate something useful such as ‘The Removal and Subsequent Dismissal of the Stupidly Focused Politicians Unable to Deal with National Crises Act #666" in Federal Court.
Let people go to the bathroom in peace.
Thaddeus Howze is a writer, essayist, author and professional storyteller for mysterious beings who exist in non-Euclidean realms beyond our understanding. Since they insist on constant entertainment and can’t subscribe to cable, Thaddeus writes a variety of forms of speculative fiction to appease their hunger for new entertainment.
Thaddeus’ speculative fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies: Awesome Allshorts: Last Days and Lost Ways (Australia, 2014), The Future is Short (2014), Visions of Leaving Earth (2014), Mothership: Tales of Afrofuturism and Beyond (2014), Genesis Science Fiction (2013), Scraps (UK, 2012), and Possibilities (2012).
He has written two books: a collection called Hayward’s Reach (2011) and an e-book novella called Broken Glass (2013) featuring Clifford Engram, Paranormal Investigator.
