Throughout my school years, I was a target for bullies. I had a few things going against me that put me in their bullseye.
I was smart. I was always at or near the top of the honor roll and as a result, I was often the teacher's pet.
I was feminine. Compared to my male peers, I was a girly boy and was considered gay.
I was not athletic. Although I loved playing ball, I was usually one of the last to be chosen for a team.
The bullying subsided after I finished school and began working. Occasionally, as an adult, I would have a close encounter of the bullying kind, but most of the time, I was bully-free.
I assumed I would be bully-free for the rest of my life, but the bullies are back. Now they are trying to tell me where I can bathroom.
They claim that they have legitimate reasons to tell me where I can and can not go... to protect women and children in case I decide to become predator while I sit on the throne.
The trans-predator scenario never happened and never will. It is just a bully-sh*t excuse to bully because bullies got to bully and now they are trying to bully us.
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| Wearing Ann Taylor. |
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| Grzegorz Wilk on Polish television's Twoja Twarz Brzmu Znajomo. |
The same excuse "to protect women and children" was used in the south to condone segregation.
ReplyDeleteVery well said and I could not agree more.
ReplyDeleteI hear you Stana. I was small, smart and somewhat effiminate. Even some of the girls picked on me about walking like a girl and that I had a little gynocomastia (I think they were jealous).
ReplyDeleteNow, sitting in the middle of all this, I'm almost shell shocked. North Carolina, Mississippi, now Tennessee is considering it and I've heard even Florida. Thankfully our governor vetoed our bill although our bill didn't say anything about transgender bathroom issues. The funniest part is one sponsor of Tennessee's bill to "protect" women in bathrooms had his office moved out of the building at the order of one of the ranking members in the House. The reason she gave for ordering his office moved? Sexual harassment in the capitol building to the point he was considered a danger to women!
Well, I think that this is an issue that has to be approached carefully. They use the term "bathroom bill" but that doesn't tell the whole story. A few points to consider:
ReplyDelete1. Bathrooms are nothing. I have used women's rooms while en femme in T-friendly locations. As a general rule one only exposes herself in a stall. The bigger issue is locker rooms where women completely undress and take showers in front of each other.
2. Stana is right that transwomen never cause problems but that is not the end of the story. I think the real concern the opponents are raising is that any man could dress like a woman (without even having to don a skirt or a dress), claim to be trans and head into the locker room to enjoy the view.
3. There are two spheres where this could happen. The public schools and the world at large. In the public schools they could require medical evidence but in the world at large how do you know who is truly trans and who is a pervert pretending to be trans?
4. And in any event, both scenarios present issues that could easily backfire. In the case of the world at large, many women are still freaked out by a man in women's clothes while many others are somewhat tolerant (so long as it's not their man). Telling women they must disrobe at the health club in front of someone with male genitals and no boobs with no guarantee they are not trans and are just there to look at them naked could lead to a backlash. At the same time, even with medical evidence it's a lot to lay on a twelve-year-old girl that a person with a boy's body is really a girl and it's no big deal to expose herself. I can see a serious parental backlash potential, and it is always the adults making the rules and the kids who have to take their clothes off.
5. Just MHO but I wonder whether this fight shouldn't be won gradually through education and, in the short term, the creation of three sets of bathrooms, male, female and open-to-everyone.
Just a thought: why not make all toilets gender-neutral with cubicles? Changing rooms too. Problem (more-or-less) solved.
DeleteAfter all, some of the issues you raise have equal problems if a father takes his young daughter into the 'men's toilets' or a mother takes her young son into the 'ladies' toilet' - especially older children who need extra care. And that's before we get to the annoyance of not having baby-change facilities in male toilets as a father needing to change nappies and so on.
As a coda, in the 1980s my primary school didn't have changing rooms at all, the whole class changed for gym in the classroom. The move to separate facilities is a relatively modern one and predicated less on evidence and more on gender segregation. Hence the worries about 'perving' in children as young as 5.
Just a thought.