It must be difficult to be a hateful idiot these days. While you can still hate people based on arbitrary reasons beyond their control, and at least one presidential candidate in America has made it part of his platform, it’s also something that generates waves of backlash. The world is making it increasingly difficult to get away with hating people based on their race, religion, gender or sexuality, which has made it increasingly difficult for the hateful idiot to find someone to hate.
But they keep trying, and sometimes they succeed. Evidence is in the “bathroom laws” in North Carolina. The law makes it illegal for someone to go into a bathroom that doesn’t match the gender on their birth certificate. It’s specifically targeting transgender people – men and women who do not have the gender they were born with – seemingly because they are the only people that hateful people still feel comfortable hating. The result has been a large amount of backlash – the most publicized being cancelled concerts by a variety of musicians and a travel ban by cities like Columbus, Ohio – which has not lead to the law being repealed but is likely to hurt the state’s economy.
The proponents of the law are taking a “think of the children” approach to justifying their actions. They argue that if someone can go in whatever bathroom makes sense, then it will just open the door to child predators to run amok through the world’s toilets. Except that’s not a problem in places that don’t have these bathroom laws and anything a parent would object to is already illegal. While there have definitely been cases of people who try to use bathrooms for sexual harassment or assault, those cases all predate such laws and generally aren’t using gender identity as a defense for illegal behavior. Gender identity has nothing to do with whether or not someone is willing to do shady things for some kind of perverse thrill, and doesn’t make that behavior in any way acceptable.
The laws also create the problem they purport to solve, putting people into bathrooms that they do not belong in, based on what their gender is. I will use the example of transgender man Michael Hughes. While born a woman, he looks a lot more like me – he’s a large bearded fellow. In short, he doesn’t belong in a women’s bathroom any more than I do, which is to say not at all, and his presence there would definitely make any other bathroom users somewhat uncomfortable, though naturally he isn’t doing anything illegal in the bathroom itself. He got attention for pointing this out, posting a picture of himself in the women’s bathroom as a way of pointing out that he doesn’t actually belong there. Instead of getting scary people outside of the women’s bathroom, this is putting people who shouldn’t be in the women’s bathroom inside one. That situation is going to be awkward for Hughes and any of the women who have to see this large hirsute man in the washrooms.
What’s going to happen to people who are going to be forced into what is effectively, for them, the wrong bathroom? Well the short version is they’re going to be harassed. I’m not going to assume the worst in people – that is, I’m not going to assume this will lead to sexual harassment, though it very well could, because that’s the same line of thinking the other side is using – but going into what appears to be the “wrong” bathroom is going to get someone pushed to get out, and nobody should have to carry the proper paperwork to pee. People putting forward the idea that transgender people are out to get your kids are going to cause people to harass transgender people outside of the bathroom and in their normal life, since they’re being pushed as an enemy in order to get this unnecessary law passed.
The laws might be based around people who fear what they don’t understand, but that’s not a reason to create them. It is difficult for people to understand a struggle that we have no equivalent for in our own life – I was born a man, will die a man, and have enjoyed being a man for all the years in between, I don’t pretend to understand what is happening in a transgender person’s life. While I might not understand the experience I can at least admit that and accept them, rather than be needlessly afraid. It’s something that causes me no harm, so I accept it rather than fear it.
This is an example of a law that takes the opposite approach, that anything someone doesn’t understand needs to be feared and attacked. There are no benefits to this law. It’s going to lead to harassment and discrimination, it’s going to legally require people to go into places where they don’t belong, it’s not going to prevent a single case of child abuse and it’s going to hurt the economy of any place that tries to implement it. So what does this law accomplish? It gives hateful people someone to hate, and they’re running out of people to hate lately.
