2015 was a record year for transgender people. According to motherjones.com by way of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), 21 transgender people were killed as of November 20th of last year, “which is more homicides than any other year on record.” That number is likely much higher as law enforcement has a habit of identifying victims by their “gender of birth” and not the gender of their identity.
What’s worse is that the vast majority of those killed were transgender women of color.
“I really have to use the bathroom!”
North Carolina Legislature’s passage of HB2, a bill that passed during a one-day special session to disintegrate home rule and to ensure that the LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgender, Queer) community has no lawful protection against discrimination.
It also “says people must use the bathroom of the sex listed on their birth certificate.”
Unless folks in North Carolina plan to carry around their birth certificates, I would like to see someone make a citizen’s arrest in the bathroom citing this law as back-up.
Anyway, North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory said that he signed the bill to prevent government overreach.
That’s a little bit of an overreach itself.
But this new law gives cover to those who believe that transgender individuals are child predators. Reality TV star Michelle Duggar once said that transgender people are just like pedophiles, and a photo on a website to stop a “Bathroom Bill” in Massachusetts depicts a man looking over the stall at a woman.
Peek-a-boo
Nomenclature on the website also urges people to sign the site’s petition to stop the bill, and to keep children safe.
While the site never directly conflates transgender persons with pedophiles, it’s not hard to connect the dots.
That’s why this bill is a dog whistle for social conservatives of both parties. Because without protection in the bathroom, an individual whose identify varies from the gender placed on their birth certificate may climb over a bathroom stall and harm a woman or a child.
Bathrooms have always been bastions of glory for child predators and those who enjoy physical altercations of the domestic kind.
It’s also why this bill, and so-called protections for bills like this, are asinine and insulting.
Collectively we care about the safety of women and children unless its shrouded in religious confusion.
But if we did care as we portend to, then transgender people would have the greatest of those protections.
Law enforcement officials fail to properly identify transgender people after death and societal and gender norms force nearly 25 percent of transgender people to be involuntarily removed from their jobs.
The Washington Post reports that transgender people are sexually and physically assaulted in homeless shelters and many of them are in the throes of poverty.
Then there are the murders and physical violence that many are subjected to that go unreported due to, you know, gender norms.
We are a society that attempts to apply altruism only to those things that conform and make us comfortable.
Our care for the safety and well-being of children and women is spurious. We always fail to account for those who we find to be unseemly socially.
No, a man pretending to be a woman will not barge into a bathroom to veer over a stall to peek at a woman because of lawful protections of transgender people.
If anything, a man pretending to be a man may barge into a bathroom to veer over the stall to peek at a man to ensure that he’s not a woman. That man pretending to be a man may physically manifest his confusion through violence and kill that individual who was simply trying to use the bathroom; an area that is supposed to be a safe space.
So who really needs protection in the bathrooms of North Carolina? Because statistics tell us its those who we’re afraid of.
-JH
photo credit: SF Pride 2015 via photopin (license)
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