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| Michael C. Hughes, transgendered man |
We men
really don’t give much thought to the public facilities we use to answer
nature’s call. These are not places in
which anyone wants to spend much time.
We generally have stalls with doors for activities that require toilet
paper. For activities that don’t require toilet paper, sometimes there are
small dividers that make it difficult to see what your neighbor is doing, and
sometimes there aren’t.
I confess
to a certain curiosity about the companion facilities devoted to ladies. There must be something special about them
since women tend to visit them in larger groupings and stay there somewhat
longer than men would. I presume that
they largely consist of multiple stalls since all female restroom operations
require toilet paper. But, I’ve never
been inside—I think I would feel uncomfortable and unwanted there with my bald
head and graying mustache—so I really don’t know.
I’ve taken
to thinking about this because of the brouhaha that has just bubbled up from
North Carolina in the last few days. At
the end of February, the Charlotte City Council passed
an ordinance that protects people against discrimination based on marital
status, sexual orientation and gender identity.
Among other things, it enables transgendered people to use the restrooms
and locker rooms that correspond to their gender identity.
The State
of North Carolina would have none of that.
In
response, the State Legislature passed, and the Governor signed into law, House Bill
2, otherwise known as the Public Facilities Privacy & Security
Act. Among other things, the law strips cities
and counties of their ability to provide greater levels of antidiscrimination
protection than the State provides. Not
only does it mandate that people use the facilities designated for their
“biological sex,” but it also prevents municipalities from requiring their
contractors from extending that greater protection to their employees and customers
or passing laws that make it illegal for places of public accommodation to
discriminate against people for their gender identities if they happen to vary
from their biological sex.
To avoid
all doubt, House Bill 2 specifically provides that there shall be no girls in
the men’s room nor boys in the ladies' room.
The law does not provide for monitors to crosscheck anatomy with birth
certificates.
I don’t get
this.
I grew up
in an era when, as Archie Bunker used to sing, “goyls were goyls and men were
men.” We all knew which room to use
because we knew which gender we were.
Even if a person understood deep down that he or she was a she or a he,
nobody had the means to swap out the equipment to conform to his or her internal
reality. Instead, the idea was to avoid
stigma, humiliation and mistreatment by hiding the truth. You just didn’t go around saying you were a
girl when your equipment was male. The
ethic was to suffer in silence rather than accept the bruises and broken bones
you’d get from other men who didn’t understand.
But those
days are over. Modern medicine
understands that nature doesn’t get it right all the time. We acknowledge that on relatively rare
occasions, nature issues you a jock strap when you really wanted a bra. We accept that the
greater harm is to require a person to betray his or her own nature by
conforming to nature’s mistake. And we now have the technology to transform a
Bruce into a Caitlin.
The
ostensible concern of the North Carolina State legislature seemed to be that a
male sexual predator might decide to claim that his gender identity was female
for the day and to haun the ladies' room somewhere in Charlotte,
looking for someone female to rape or abuse.
Why there’s no similar concern about male sexual predators haunting the
men’s room looking for weaker men and children to abuse is, BTW, remarkable.
In places
that allow people to use the restroom or locker facility consistent with their
gender identities elsewhere in the country, there’s no evidence that what the North Carolina State
Legislature apparently feared has ever
happened.
Nor is it
likely to. Transgender people have made
a commitment to their true gender identities.
Men with female gender identities go out of their way to dress and look
like women. Men who have not made that
commitment simply can’t walk into the ladies room and not be noticed, feared
and ejected.
I can only
think of two reasons for this law. The
first is an understandable discomfort on the part of the cigenered arising out
of ignorance or prudishness. These
concerns should dissipate as people gain more experience with transgendered
people. In another context, whites, for
example, learned to accept and even welcome blacks into what were once strictly
segregated facilities (though it initially took the force of law to break the
ice).
But the
other reason is troubling. Even if
Charlotte’s ordinance had not been voided by the state government, the vast
number of restroom interactions (aside from interactions with porcelain) are
going to continue to be between people whose external plumbing matches the
room’s fixtures (at least as far as anyone knows). With so few interactions between cigendered
people and transgendered people in restrooms, the only problem the North
Carolina law addresses is largely hypothetical or extremely rare.
And laws addressed to hypothetical or extremely rare problems are largely symbolic.
We are
living through an era in which we use symbols to divide and segregate ourselves
from our neighbors. It’s no longer
acceptable, in real life, to discriminate overtly against anyone (unless, of
course, you’re a Trump follower). Thus, we use symbolic discrimination. When
our governmental authorities adopt laws that will have very little impact on
real life situations, they do so as a way of demonstrating the dominance of one
group over another.
House Bill
2 may, to some extent, flows out of this. It is the product
of what is likely to be the last gasp of
a population that grew up in a whiter, straighter world. Their numbers
are declining, their political influence is waning, and everybody knows
it.
It’s
a shame that they can still make others suffer.
It’s a shame that they can’t pass gently and graciously into the night.
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