North Carolina's bathroom law

Great Debates
81

So far, everyone’s looking at this issue through the middle of the telescope. You need to understand how rural conservative North Carolina works to get any sort of handle on what’s going on.

First and foremost, God doesn’t make mistakes. God makes a boy by giving him testicles and a penis, and he makes a girl by giving her a vagina. The doctor sees this, and accurately records the information on the birth certificate. And that, friend, is that.

Secondly, there is no such thing as “gender,” let alone “gender identity.” There’s only sex, determined by the above procedure. Therefore, since, as we have learned, God doesn’t make mistakes, if you’re a boy but you go flouncing around limp-wristedly pretending that you’re a girl or, which is the same thing, think you’re “gay,” you are sinning, since you are defying the will of God, the evidence of which is your sex organs. And if you are a girl, but are a “tomboy,” you’ll grow out of it (because it’s only natural to want to be a boy even if God made you a girl), but when you meet the right guy you’ll snap out of it and use makeup and get a prom gown. And if you still want to go all butch and cut your hair short, which The Lord God gave you as a covering, well, then, you are sinning. All this “pretending” in the face of the physically obvious will of God is sin, and you had better repent and get right with God before it’s too late. However, if you are unfortunate enough to have a real mental illness that makes you want to ruin your God-given bodies with surgery, we have only pity in our hearts for you, and fervently pray that you will get the Christian counseling you so desperately need.

Consequently, no problem exists, in North Carolina (or in the deserted wasteland of the North Carolinian conservative mind). If you need to go to the bathroom, or work out at a gym, check inside your pants (which you are wearing if you are a God-designed man), or under your skirt (if you are a God-designed woman) and go to the right one. Anything else is sinful, and what is sinful must, by necessary consequence, be made illegal.
-Right? :dubious:

82

I guess I don’t see why this should be any more difficult than desegregating locker rooms and such with all of the nasty perceptions of minorities by many white parents. Just as people got over their ill-informed perceptions of blacks mixing with whites in private spaces by disregarding their skin color, they similarly can disregard genitalia. It’s simply an old Victorian hold over that girl’s and women’s sanctity were put at greater risk just because there is a penis in the same room as them.

83

Yeah, I think people sometimes forget how severe the reaction was to racial desegregation. When swimming pools were desegregated, some southern towns shut down their pools in the middle of summer rather than risk the perils of race-mixing. This wasn’t just something people shrugged and got over quickly: the fears and disgust and fundamental hostility toward race-mixing was just as strong then as the fears and disgust and fundamental hostility people are feeling today toward trans people.

But in retrospect, nobody describes the fears of white supremacists as “genuine concerns,” suggests that they were legitimate interests that should have been balanced against racial equality, or believes that it was anything but a straightforward decision.

It only looks complicated because we’re in the middle of it. History isn’t going to see it as a difficult decision.

84

I don’t forget. I was there and remember it well.

But I think you might underestimate the resistance to gender neutrality in bathrooms, showers, and locker rooms. I personally don’t have a problem with it. (After all, I would get to enjoy the view, but others would have to suffer looking at me.) I doubt that I can persuade a typical middle-aged couple with small children that gender-neutral facilities for their children are a good thing right now because pretty soon we’ll consider it normal and won’t give it a second thought.

85

I don’t underestimate that, but that’s not what this thread is about. If you mean that I underestimate the resistance to trans-acceptance in bathrooms, I thought I made it clear that I don’t; I just think you’ve forgotten how heavy the resistance was to racial-equality acceptance in bathrooms and other places, half a century ago.

As an aside, you’re spending a lot of time establishing your own credentials as a liberal in this thread; I’m not sure that really advances the discussion.

86

I’m sorry, but I think that this is exactly what the thread is about. Charlotte passed an ordinance that waved a red flag and the NC legislature charged it. The whole thing was done poorly and now we’re stuck with HB2, even after Charlotte repealed portions of their ordinance. The legislators should be embarrassed that they have let it reach the point that it has. In effect, the legislators are claiming that the result of Charlotte’s ordinance would have been gender-neutral facilities. That’s been the main subject of my posts.

As far as establishing “bona fides” as a liberal, I’m guessing that anything I say will be interpreted as confirming your POV, so I will try to tone it down.

87

That’s what I’m leaning towards as well. There is clearly one group of individuals who is trying to use the force of the government to prevent the actions of another group of individuals, and another group who wants to stop being prevented from performing specific acts that are not inhibiting the rights of another.

I wonder how less complicated these sorts of situation would be if our default position was having to justify having the government inhibit someone’s actions when they aren’t inhibiting someone else’s. Right now, the complication seems to stem from trying to balance various concerns, levels of happiness, cultural traditions, the legitimacy of arguments, etc.

88

I think it may go a lot further than that. I think people in North Carolina ( as well as people in the states of South Carolina, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama), would like a bathroom ban on Muslims, Islamics, Asians, the disabled, bleeding heart liberals etc. It’s a safety thing and I don’t think they feel safe with other people in their and their kid’s bathrooms.

89

Yes, that’s what the thread is about. Charlotte did the equivalent of desegregating public swimming pools in their city. The NC legislature did the equivalent of overriding them and requiring segregated pools.

Your response, that “the whole thing was done poorly,” improperly lays the blame at the feet both of the people working toward equality and the people standing in its way, simply because those standing in its way aren’t comfortable with equality. Characterizing the move toward equality as “waving a red flag” implies both that the municipality wanted a fight, not equality (there’s no sign that this is true), and also that the legislature is incapable of rational thought (okay, I’ll give you that one).

You may wish to reread letter from a Birmingham jail:

The whole thing is worth a read, and a reread. King addresses concerns very similar to yours in language far more eloquent than I can summon.

As for your claims about bona fides, no claims are necessary or helpful. There’s no particular reason that your argument needs to be made by a particular kind of person; if you want us to know what kind of person you are, we’ll know that entirely by the words you give us here, and the substance of your argument will always be more persuasive in that regard than your claims about yourself. But again, there’s no reason for us to care about whether you’re a raging anarcho-syndicalist, a peaceable ex-hippie, a fiscal-conservative Democrat, or a Tea Partier. Your arguments will stand or fall by themselves.

90

That right there ^ fucking nailed it, LHoD. Excellent post.

91

Except that God, for reasons of Es own, really does sometimes make a child with, say, testicles and a vagina. If you’re going to say that God doesn’t make mistakes, then you’re forced to conclude that children with mismatched genitalia, who really do exist, aren’t mistakes. And once you’ve accepted that, it’s a fairly short step to accepting the existence of other sorts of mismatch.

EDIT: Forgot one point I wanted to make there. A lot of those rural conservative North Carolignians would probably object to my use of a gender-neutral pronoun for God. You might want to ask them why.
Meanwhile, on the argument that teenage boys would take advantage of the Charlotte ordnance to go into the girls’ locker room… Why didn’t they already? Until very recently, most places did not have laws saying that only girls could go into the girls’ bathroom. That was enforced only by tradition and social consensus. Like as not, a high school boy stayed out of the girls’ locker room because if he didn’t, the other boys would laugh at him, shun him, and/or beat him up. And we still have that tradition and social consensus. So why do we need these laws all of a sudden, when we’ve never needed them before?

92

This is easy. I have a 90-minute lecture on this topic I present.

First and foremost, intersex persons like myself do in fact exist, regardless of any interpretation of a book written by bronze age goatherds. Numerous MRI studies over the past decades have also given strong evidence that transgender persons of all walks may in fact have an intersex brain condition.

Second, no one says God has to make any mistakes at all. Since intersex persons exist, God clearly intended for us to exist, so the person making the mistake here are Christians who are placing their own human limits upon God. I mean, for goodness sake - one believes in an omnipotent and omniscient being that created the entire fucking Universe, but somehow can’t choose to create a transgender person?

They believe God created SOULS, the Universe, pygmy shrews, venus flytraps, black holes, quantum physics…but when it comes to creating a transgender person, Christians are going to stuff God into a box and say “whoa now, that’s taking things a bit too far.” I mean, it would be laughable if these same people weren’t threatening my life and the lives of those I care about. Like this child right here, who I personally know, have interviewed on my radio show, and whose family lives down the street and whom we have spent Christmas with. And who receives death threats almost daily - threats to murder a child in cold blood - from “concerned Christians.” I’ve heard and seen the threats personally.

http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article122430344.html

What a shame that nearly every major medical, psychological, and therapeutic body on the planet disagrees with this. Sex and gender as separate concepts is not even new; the OED separates the two words and their meanings as far back as the 1400’s I believe.

I start to deconstruct religious arguments by asking Christians why they want to have a tiny little God in a Box, so weak and helpless that “he” cannot even create a transgender person. Then I go into all the Bible verses that seem to address transgender persons (Deu 22:5, etc.) and give strong evidence by religious research that the verses, when viewed in a historical context, do not mean what the “common sense” reading of a mulitply-translated English version of Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek seems to mean.

Most of the time it makes no difference. Why? Because these people aren’t really relying upon their “Christian studies” - they very simply are people who find people like me “icky,” to the point where they wish with all their Jesus-groveling hearts that I was dead. :rolleyes:

93

Parts of that article are scary and parts of it are beautiful. Thanks for sharing that link.

94

Well that and the expectation that the school will “police” it in some way.

There are plenty of things that might go down in a locker room that don’t explicitly break any law but a school can prohibit or discipline anyway. Many alluded in this thread: photographing people, showing off an erection (not making any attempt to conceal it) etc

I don’t think bathrooms need any explicit policing, but school locker rooms are a little different. There should be responsible adults making sure everything’s OK, same as in the rest of the school. E.g. “So Brad, captain of the football team, you’ve suddenly decided you’re trans gender? Get out of there and report to the principles office. And I’ll arrange a few weeks of sessions with our councillor where you can discuss your new feelings”

95

I’ve wondered this as well. The conclusion I came to was that there was a perceived erosion of social norms, thus prompting some to seek to codify into law the social norm they perceived was being eroded. Gay marriage laws defining marriage as between a man and a woman alone is a good example; to the best of my knowledge, they largely didn’t exist until a sociopolitical movement to accept gay marriage began.

96

So you are in favor of gender neutral restrooms and showers?

97

As one possible solution to the problem that has already been implemented and is working in other places such as Europe, yes. At the very least restrooms.

A lot of this issue, though not all of it, seems to deal with expectations. Some people are expecting women to get assaulted or feel uncomfortable because of “men” being in the same bathroom as them. Some have Victorian expectations of strictly segregated bathrooms. And most simply, some expect to only see their same genitalia, if any at all, when they go into a gender-segregated bathroom. When these expectations are not met, discomfort arises, and people react negatively to this discomfort. So the widespread existence of gender neutral bathrooms may train some of these expectations out of people just as race neutral bathrooms trained the racial expectations out of people. Now hardly anyone bats an eye when there is someone of another race in the stall or urinal next to them.

98

I am. I don’t think big government should be stepping in and requiring cities and private business to follow unessesary laws.

If Target wants to have gender neutral bathrooms why shouldn’t they need allowed to?

99

This is along the path of what actually happens. In the schools I work with, when a child comes out as transgender, typically it’s after having had many sessions with school counselors, who are often working with counselors and others (like myself) from outside the school to assess how to handle this.

This isn’t even about “bona fides”, actually - it’s about making sure that a public gender role transition is best for the child. Some children have mild to moderate gender dysphoria, whereby the parents, the child, the counselors, and us will all agree that while some accommodations need to be made (such as changing names and pronouns), the child does not feel the need to necessarily use different facilities. This is often the case with genderqueer or gender-variant youth. In other cases, we advise a path for the child to gradually transition to full gender role representation as their real gender.

People who say things like “the bathroom laws don’t require any proof” etc. don’t really understand how actual policies are set and enforced at actual schools and school districts. The law may say one thing, but the school determines how it’s enforced. Never in all my experience have I encountered a school whereby the hypothetical Brad could waltz in and say “um, yeah, I’m like transgender (snicker) and need to use the girls showers…” The reality is a process of discovery and gradual assimilation, and in never done in vacuo of professionals. I have heard of a few (less than 5 or 10) cases where a student did try to push the system - and in every case I know, the student was put up to it by their ultra-conservative Christian parents as a political protest, and they were all quite open that was what they were doing. Since no school counselor nor outside counselor would sign off on the transition, then the effort goes nowhere fast.

Could a school be negligent and skip steps? I guess, but that’s really poor school administration, rather than a problem with the kid.

As it happens often times the young transgender student feels the weight and massive pressure of society to NOT go into the opposite shower facilities, and they either ask for a separate facility, or they ask to be excused from gym requirements (and often this is granted). I’d say easily in 3/4 of the cases I’ve seen the kids just stop going to gym altogether and take a replacement class instead. I’ve met with them, talked to them, and some are terrified of using the “other” facilities. Why? Because they just want to blend in and be accepted for who they are, and want the whole mess to just go away and let them be themselves. They attempt suicide sometimes out of terror over what transition could mean to them.

And yet, like myself, they have to do it.

Just as in the rare cases when I’ve got haters or “concerned” people to sit down for a few hours with real, live transgender people and learn about us, when people do the same with the kids, they come to the awareness that this stuff is all for real, and the kids need support.

100

I’m surprised that the state of Texas let me marry my wife. I mean, statistically, if she was to get beat up, odds are I would be the one doing the beating. Since there are many cases of wife battery in Texas, wouldn’t it be best for the state to prevent my wife marrying someone that is the most likely to be the source of wife battery?