One of the interesting things about the increased acceptance of gays and lesbians has been the fact that as more of them have come out, people have been startled to discover that many of the people around them, their friends and relatives and co-workers, are gays and lesbians. Having known them for so long with no problems, it becomes harder to maintain their prejudices that they are different in any way other than in their sexual orientation, which has no impact on anyone else.
I hope that the same thing happens with the hostility towards the transgender community. The current spate of anti-transgender legislation is undoubtedly fueled by ignorance and fear of people they have no idea about. Trevor Noah exposes the insanity behind the legislation involving bathroom use.
The transgender community is undoubtedly smaller than the LGB one and thus one may encounter members less frequently but even I, a quite reclusive person who does not get around that much, have personally encountered at least six that I know of, a couple of whom I know well, so I suspect that if someone lives in a reasonably sized city, they will have already met someone, even if they did not know it.
Jessica Williams discusses the issue and talks with a panel of transgender persons. If others could simply meet and talk to them, I suspect that for many their fears would disappear because they are so ordinary, just like you and me. The weird thing is that forcing them to use bathrooms according to the gender on their birth certificates (though how the hell one enforces such a law baffles me) would result in far more confusion than allowing them to use the bathrooms that conform to their gender presentation.
(These clips aired on April 6, 2016. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Nightly Show outside the US, please see this earlier post. If the videos autoplay, please see here for a diagnosis and possible solutions.)
Makes me want to go to NC and pee on some floors.
(That was how my cat used to show when she was displeased with me, which was basically all the time)
As a matter of presentation and tactics progressives and LGBT supporters might want to steer clear of the claim that no one has ever been molested by a LGBT person in a bathroom. No, I don’t think it is a real problem. But we all know that given a little time someone will claim to have been molested by some LGBT person, somewhere, at some time. Religious fanatics have active imaginations and many of them make a point of being willing to, quite literally, in their own words, “lie for Christ”.
Give it time. I’m reasonably sure there will soon be variety of ‘there I was’ stories claiming inappropriate behavior by someone who might have been LGBT.
It has to be noted that the vast majority of child molesters self-identify as straight. Most are white, male and cis. Not that anyone on the right is ever going to allow anything as trivial as reality or facts to keep them from promoting a perfectly good lie.
What gets me is that there are already laws making it illegal to sexually assault or molest people. Those laws apply to all locations, including bathrooms and to all people, regardless of status, identity, or orientation. This is clearly another politically motivated and artificially manufactured crisis.
lorn,
I agree that the absence of such a case in the past is not the best argument.
Howabout the fact that right now, we can say that more children have been molested by right wing politicians than LGBT people? Can we get every place to put in a special outhouse for politicians? It seems fair…..