Reread my post.
“Outside verification” seems to mean a note from your doctor. You’re speculating about neutrality.
Doesn’t that also mean there will have to be, um, *inspectors *at all public bathrooms?
All application will be reviewed by a specialist. This is after your doctor verified.
To add to the link running coach gave, keep in mind that the law will disproportionately affect trans youth, who are likelier to be in a high school or college run by the state. And trans youth are going to have much lower rates of surgery than older trans folk, for reasons I hope are obvious (similar to the reason why there are more young virgins than old virgins).
This law makes it exceedingly difficult for trans youth in high school.
As for your speculation about “burly bearded types”, I’ll repeat what I’ve mentioned in previous threads: I’m cis, but I was very often mistaken for female until I was in my early thirties, due to my facial shape, long hair, and soft voice. I got called “ma’am” a lot more than I got called “sir.” I’m really, really glad this law wasn’t put in effect when I was younger, for purely selfish reasons. I presented as female without trying to, and I suspect I would’ve been the butt of a lot of harassment from people emboldened by this law.
While North Carolina may have prompted the release of the DoJ statement or actually been merely coincidental with it, the DoJ statement is, in fact, a response to a request by numerous organizations for guidance. They responded to numerous requests by soliciting input from multiple institutions, educational and otherwise, beginning last fall, and received over 28,000 responses on which they based their directives that address far more issues than kids’ lavatories.
The timing of the release of the directive may be connected to North Carolina’s assault on Civil Rights, but this was not a hastily thrown together attempt to attack North Carolina, but a nation wide response to genuine requests for guidance from multiple locations throughout the country that was in the works for many months.
In addition to the issue that North Carolina’s law is based on birth certificates, not surgery, there’s also the matter that the shape of one’s nether bits has no impact at all on whether they look “male” or “female”, unless they’re naked. Male or female appearance is governed partly by cultural features like choice of clothing, and partly by hormones. Most trans people will adopt the clothes and other cultural cues of their preferred gender, and while I don’t know how many undergo hormone therapy, I’d bet that it’s a lot more than the number who get surgery (if nothing else, because surgery is expensive). So that big burly fellow with a beard might still have a vagina underneath his blue jeans, and that lady with the big breasts might still have a penis.
Meanwhile, something Una said raises another point:
People really suck at understanding numbers. When Una says that there’s a thousand stories, that makes it sound like a big problem, and that those thousand people are enough to deserve our support. But if it’s correct that 0.1% of people are transgendered, then there are three hundred thousand stories, in the current US alone. And that’s using the most conservative estimates (which also play on the notion of “a thousand” being a large number): If the incidence of transsexuality is higher than that, as many suspect, then there are even more such stories.
(note: I don’t mean to imply that Una is innumerate: Obviously she’s not, and was just using “thousands” as a rhetorical device. But the point still stands, that there are a lot more transgendered people out there than most folks think.)
If you don’t see how the federal government coerces states via the ability to tax that’s your choice.
The DoJ statement regarding what would and would not be covered by by Title VII and Title IX legislation, in light of new issues regarding the rise of transgender awareness in the U.S., was a document that began to be prepared in 2015 as the result of multiple requests for clarification. It sought public commentary for several months, receiving over 28,000 replies, then organized and outlined the DoJ perspective for numerous issues, hardly limited to school restrooms. The publication date of that document may or may not have been prompted by North Carolina’s odd one day session, called specifically to attack Civil Rights in NC cities, but the DoJ document, itself, had been in preparation for months.
Good correction to the sequence, and appreciated.
The overarching point is not changed by this correction–namely, that enforcement bodies must decide how to interpret the laws they enforce all the time, especially when you’re dealing with high-level laws like the Civil Rights Act. Further, when they’re making such an interpretation, it’s better for them to tell the public how they understand the law so that the public can plan accordingly.
Calling the DOJ’s action “blackmail” or a “threat” is a silly misunderstanding of how separation of powers works.
I thought we had this shit dealt with back in the nineties, will Ally McBeal’s washroom concept, everyone uses the same.
Declan
From http://www.livescience.com/50635-bruce-jenner-transgender-prevalence.html:
Other places I’ve read say that the reason the number is probably greater is that some transgendered people are reticent to state it because of the stigma and possible discrimination.
Well, it is more likely its ability to spend–witness the long period of 55 m.p.h. speed limits.
I’m not sure what your point was with this, or whether you’re disputing anything I’ve said.
But now that you bring it up - over the time that you were very often mistaken for a female, how often were you harassed over your use of the men’s room?
I don’t know why you keep reiterating that the letter was not in response to the NC law. No one has claimed it was in response to the NC law.
What I did say was that if they were responding to “requests for guidance” then they would just respond to those requests. They didn’t send out letters to every school district in the country with implied threats of loss of school funding etc. because they were responding to requests for guidance.
BTW, what’s the source for your claim that the DOJ directives were based on “over 28,000 responses” from “multiple institutions, educational and otherwise”? I can’t find any references to this claim anywhere (or any reference to a request for public comments altogether) and I wonder if you or someone was confused by the reference to on the Justice Department Blog which included the entry on this topic - however the 28,000 comments there were about the BP settlement. I’m somewhat skeptical of this claim, because - in addition to the fact that I can’t find it anywhere - anything big enough to have attracted over 28,000 responses from “multiple institutions, educational and otherwise” would have attracted more attention than this did at an earlier stage.
The first time I ever heard anything about this “bathroom” issue was a couple years back, when our city council was debating a human rights ordinance, which was highly controversial and led to a huge influx of citizens commenting at the second (voting) meeting on the topic. Most of them were against it, but I spoke out in favor. To my understanding, it was protective of gay and lesbian rights.
But after I spoke, the next guy fulminated about how he didn’t care if I’m gay (I’m straight/“cis” all the way, but I’ve found it’s pretty typical for people to assume, for good or ill, that I’m gay if I speak up for gay rights: it’s seen as normal for straight women to do this, but not for straight men, sadly), but he just wanted me to “use the right bathroom”. WTF was he talking about? I wondered. Later, when this issue blew up nationally, I figured it out.
Yeah, your position is the one taken by most pundits, which surprises me. I’m more with the OP in worrying that this is unnecessarily tempting fate, just as the Massachusetts legalization of gay marriage in 2004 ultimately tanked the election for John Kerry. But at least in the case of gay marriage, it was on behalf of an important principle which really matters.
From the coverage I’m reading and hearing on NPR, the alleged great civil rights outrage facing trans kids in public schools is that they are being asked to use private, single toilet bathrooms. In many schools, these are otherwise reserved for teachers and staff. It’s a *privilege *to use them!
If schools were treating trans kids the way they presumably would have been treated a few decades ago (punishing them just for calling themselves the “wrong” gender or using the “wrong” clothes, hairstyle, or name for their birth gender), then the feds would absolutely be in the right to intervene. But for the injustice of being asked to use a private bathroom instead of going into the one aligned with their newly chosen gender? Give me a fucking break. This is right up there on the list of “civil rights violations” with the Halloween costume nonsense at Princeton.
And I think a lot of voters, including Democrats like me and certainly independents, will see it the same way I do. This is overreach by the feds, and not helpful.
A sound argument. I assume, then, that you feel the same about red states that refuse to expand Medicaid?
I wonder how many of these ‘privileged’ bathrooms are in public buildings in NC? Is McCrory going to offer up the keys to his personal washroom?
If the reason they refused to expand Medicaid was because they were in principle opposed to the federal government taxing to pay for Medicaid, then that would contradict the principle I described.
However, what the states who refused to expand Medicaid claimed was that they were opposed because they couldn’t afford to pay the state’s portion of the budget (which was set to rise over time) and because they suspected the feds would eventually cut their share and leave the states stuck with an even bigger tab. Personally I suspect that in addition to this consideration (which was probably a genuine part of it) they were also motivated by political opposition to the ACA generally. It’s hard to separate these two factors from each other. But the issue I was discussing here was not part of the calculation altogether, best as I can tell, so it’s irrelevant here.
The federal government taxes the states? Hmmm.
Just like it was a privilege for black folks in the South to have their own special water fountain reserved for them?
Sorry, but separate is not equal, and treating some people differently is discriminatory. (Especially in the group conformity atmosphere of high schools. For school officials to identify some student as a ‘freak’, who has to use a special bathroom, is just wrong.
Personally I suspect it’s even more than that. It’s that Transpeople want to feel like they’re accepted as being accepted as their identity gender, and not forced by society into the mold of their physical gender. Being barred from the bathroom of the gender they identify with amounts to a statement by society that they’re not really the gender they identify with.