This bathroom thing has, pardon the expression, gotten out of hand.
Those of us in the punditry industry have been saying for a while now that it’s hard to do satire anymore because life has gotten so absurd it’s hard to tell the difference.
So now all we can do is give examples from the news and say, “You can’t make this $#!+ up!”
I never in a million years would have imagined so many people would be passionate about asserting the rights of guys to use the ladies bathroom.
“But I identify as a woman!”
Yes, and I’m really sorry about that. Honest to God I am, and I’m not being facetious. It must be living hell to live with that kind of confusion. But the fact is, you’re not.
“What about people who’ve undergone the gender reassignment surgery?”
Then you’re an unfortunate human being who has found a doctor willing to surgically mutilate you. But you still have an XY chromosome set. In my humble and Johns Hopkins University’s not-so-humble opinion.
(Johns Hopkins university hospital pioneered the surgery, and has abandoned it after concluding that the surgery does not turn a man into a woman or vice versa in any meaningful sense.)
However that law in North Carolina so many think is the Confederacy rising again specifically excepts those who have had the surgery.
“Transgendered persons aren’t all sex offenders!”
OK, but beside the point.
This is the point. I have a nine-year-old daughter. I don’t get to go into the ladies room with her, and she certainly doesn’t want me to although when she was younger I changed her diapers more often than I can count.
Why in hell should she want a stranger who is capable of standing up to pee in the ladies room with her?
It’s not about my fear of sex offenders preying on my daughter – it’s her privacy!
Is that so hard to understand?
Yes, ladies rooms have stalls. Yes we have public restrooms. And we have certain social conventions of behavior in them, which I think but do not know for certain are different for men and women.
I had a young man of confused gender ask me why he couldn’t keep using the bathroom of his (?) choice and what are you going to do, have a pantless inspection before anybody walks in?
Could we solve this the way we always have, with a certain benign hypocrisy?
If you can’t tell the difference between a lady and a drag queen, ignore it!
If you are a business owner, set your own policy and see if your customers can live with it. Target has already begun that experiment so we shall see. That North Carolina law is about public accommodations.
And why did they have to make an issue of it to begin with?
Well I can think of a couple of reasons.
One is that this is in no way shape or form a battle for “rights.” It’s a case of “Notice me damn it!” from a bunch of, again pardon the expression, drama queens.
And for a number of straight men and women, it’s virtue signaling.
“Look at me! I’m a civil rights hero!”
Sorry ladies and gentlemen, the Freedom Riders risked being murdered and buried in the swamp. You might get unfriended on Facebook. Oh the horror!
You risk nothing while making countless women uncomfortable in their most private moments on behalf of a tiny minority of pathetically confused individuals. They certainly deserve our compassion, but not turning our lives upside down to humor their delusions.
Behind that smug, I’m-so-much-more-enlightened-than-you posturing is a smarmy let’s-freak-out-the-squares attitude that I remember from my hippie days when I was that kind of @$$#0!e too.