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You Must Love Big Broth...Um, Sis... Um....Sibling

The notorious "bathroom law" in North Carolina is back in the news, since the Federal government has sued the state for violating the civil rights of "transgendered" people. Let's examine what's really going on there. Based on the comments I see on social media, it's not about what people think it is.

As "transgendered" people and their allies have been correctly noting, people have been using the bathrooms of the opposite sex for some time. They have done this by physically looking like the opposite sex, and by behaving as a member of the opposite sex would. It has been, in a word, surreptitious. No other person has had to accept what they do, but they have been able to do it. They were left alone to pretend that they were members of the opposite sex.

Leaving them alone wasn't enough for some localities in North Carolina. They insisted that their citizens must accept people using bathrooms made for the opposite sex. They codified this forced acceptance in law, saying that people could use whatever bathroom they wanted to (as long as they "identify as" that sex, whatever that means).

The state of North Carolina reacted by saying that no, localities couldn't legally force people to accept "transgendered" people as the opposite sex. This, in turn, triggered a backlash saying that of course people should accept "transgendered" behavior, and that of course "transgendered" people should use the bathroom that suits their imagined sex rather than their actual one. To think otherwise isn't merely to make bad law, but to be a bad person: bad enough that companies will refuse to do business in your state, entertainers will refuse to sing for you, and the federal government will sue your for violating people's bathroom-going rights.

So this isn't about rights, or violence, or sexual predators, or peeping Toms. It's about forcing people to accept the "progressive" view of sexuality.

Comments (20)

"Identify" is sooo...passé, these enlightened days. Now that we know there are more than 2 genders, we have come to realize that a person doesn't have to be just one of these genders. You can have more than one. You can switch between them over time. Or overnight. Or every 15 minutes. You can have NO gender, or a mix of genders, or several genders in full. The notion that gender is some overarching fixity in life is trampled into the dust of yore. That's was the 2000s, were modern now. Err, post-post-modern, that is.

Gender is not just WHAT YOU DECIDE at any given moment, however you decide it. Gender is also how people perceive you, and how you related to their perceptions. There is no "special" perspective, like your own that decides for EVERYONE, each person has the right to decide another's gender insofar as they interact with them. A person can be male to me, female to himself, and nutrois two-sex to her husbands. THAT's diversity.

Don't get hung up on singleness in gender anymore, life is multipolar now. Embrace it. Or her, or him, or she-it.

Well, what I am seeing claimed is that a "transgender man" is someone of the male sex, and the correct bathroom for them is the one designated for males. Likewise "transgender women" are truly female sexed and should use the appropriate facilities designated for females. This is the basis of their reasoning that HB2 is sex discrimination, some "biological males" are "discriminated against" and not lawfully allowed in the bathrooms meant for biological males. They will even go as far as affirming that there are biological females with fully functioning penises and biological males with fully functioning ovaries, and say that this is proven science. So those of us who disagree are not just hateful and bigoted we are also anti-science. We refuse to accept the facts of the world as it is, but instead are blinded by our religion.

I thought the same sex "marriage" nonsense was terrible, which it is. This may be worse, far worse even.

"So this isn't about rights, or violence, or sexual predators, or peeping Toms. It's about forcing people to accept the "progressive" view of sexuality."

What its about is Western civilization having finally arrived at the terminus of the train of liberalism it has been riding for centuries, namely, stark raving lunacy. http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.ca/2015/05/modern-man-reaps-insanity-he-has-sown.html

I'm pretty sure this isn't the terminus. It will get a lot worse before it gets better.

I've been surprised that the LGBT activists sided against this law because a man who won't undergo a transition operation, but says he's a woman is still different from a transgendered man. Apparently it's a thing with some people on the left to self-identify as "queer" while maintaining intimate relations with the opposite sex.

This is why the correct answer on the job to "how do you identify" is something like "pre-augmentation cyborg" or "pre-transformation werewolf."

Just out of interest: Does the NC bill apply to private businesses as well as public offices (like courthouses, public colleges, state employers, etc.)? Now, on this one, I'm absolutely fine with it either way, but I'm wondering: Does it _require_ use of the bathroom/locker room/shower room in line with reality, or does it merely _permit_ businesses to require this while _forbidding_ localities to _require_ that businesses accept the transgender nonsense?

If it's the latter, then the unanimous portrayal of this bill in the media is wildly false.

Also, am I right in recalling that the NC governor added general non-discrimination law for homosexuals otherwise to the bill while retaining the "bathroom" part of it? If so, some bakers and florists out there may have reason to be sorry that he caved to that extent.

"It's about forcing people to accept the "progressive" view of sexuality."

Yes, and in the process it frees the sexual predator and peeping Tom and other sex perverts to do what it is they do in public restrooms, so it's about that too. Peoples' concerns about all of this stuff are not just genuine and heartfelt, they are real concerns based on increased probabilities. Personally I have no real concern for the well-being of sexual predators, but such laws are clearly not in their best interests either. I mean, if a man is clearly suicidal, do you hand him a loaded pistol and say "here, go ahead and shoot yourself"?

This is a moot point, of course, but with each passing day it seems, we are given yet another example, or a dozen, of the wisdom of our founders in prohibiting the federal government from insinuating itself into State and local concerns. And this was clearly a State and local concern.

My understanding is that the NC law explicitly allows private businesses to set their own bathroom policies. In addition, it makes provisions for government run facilities to accommodate those who claim to be the opposite sex than they really are so that they do not have to use the facilities designated for their true sex.

One of the great ironies here is that people claim this law discriminates on the basis of gender identity *because* it does not take gender identity into account. So, it discriminates on the basis of gender identity because it does not discriminate on the basis of gender identity. Which is obviously incoherent. Their way out of this is to now say that gender identity *is* biological sex. Which repudiates all things claimed about gender and sex being distinct and unrelated that was common the day before yesterday.

Spot on, Jake.

Anyone who does not get this—especially Americans under 30, too many of whom (being young) are simply muddled on the issue—really ought to set aside an hour to read your article slowly, carefully; meditating upon it, line by line.

Howard, yeah, but they're too busy reading this crap http://www.ministryinthemommyhood.com/target-bathrooms-and-the-straight-conservative-preachers-wife/ on Facebook and Twitter.

One wonders if that woman writing that smug column Terry Morris linked will think differently about matters when she takes her daughter somewhere for swimming lessons and a naked man (who feels like a woman) steps out of the shower in the locker/shower room.

I find that the shower room side of this issue is, shall we say, under-discussed in the MSM.

Lydia, speaking of shower rooms: [i] Last year, I helped to engineer the renovation of a rural middle school built during the 1970s. That school had shower rooms. These shower rooms were unused. In fact, the girls' shower room was so unused that the school employed the room for storage. The stored boxes had a layer of dust on them. I didn't try the valve, but I did ask the school district's maintenance manager. He said that the plumbing in there works fine. [ii] My daughters are younger, but I have a son in high school. When I mentioned the aforementioned shower rooms to him, he was not surprised. He says that there is no storage in his school's shower room but that no one ever showers there, even after sports-squad practices.

What do you think of that?

When I was that age during the '70s and '80s, coach herded us through the shower room. We all took brief showers, whipped one another with wet towels, made lots of noise in the concrete shower bay, and thought nothing of it. We also casually mocked homosexuality (as if we knew anything about the subject, which was not often discussed), and thought nothing of that.

Could all this somehow be connected to your observation and Jake's article?

Is anyone here young enough to shed light on this?

In that case, Lydia, she'll probably say that the offender was merely *posing* as someone who "feels like a woman," since, afterall, it is the (straight) church people who have always harmed her children, never the transgendered. Nevermind that we've already warned that such policies *open the door wide* for this sort of posing, and nevermind that "church people" are a comparatively huge and diverse population, as opposed to transgenders. And of course (based entirely on the tone of her post, and its stupidity), it's probably a pretty safe bet that when she refers to the "harm" church people have done her children, she is (more than likely, and that's being nice about it) referring to their hurting their feelings, or in one way or another insulting them. She is NOT referring to the kind of psychological, nor physical, harm that a sex pervert can and will do them given that the door is now opened wide. But again, nevermind that.

In that case, Lydia, she'll probably say that the offender was merely *posing* as someone who "feels like a woman," since, afterall, it is the (straight) church people who have always harmed her children, never the transgendered.

In the future, we should also expect to see female offenders avail themselves of this logic. Female offenders are increasingly very common in the public school system, so it's not hard to imagine at least a few using gender identity as an excuse if they're caught in male only spaces in a middle or high school. In fact, I would hazard a guess that most of the sex crimes we'll hear about involving public restrooms, locker rooms, etc. will involve a woman and a late pre-teen or early teenage boy because the boy will have more pressure to help her cover it up and it's easier for a woman to turn the tables on an accuser in such a case.

Grammatical note... my understanding is that a transgender man is a biological woman who wants to be perceived as a man, and a transgender woman is a biological man who want to be perceived as a woman. So the noun that follows the adjective "transgender" is the gender destination at which your perception is supposed to arrive... on time and with a smile on your face if you know what's good for you.

Certainly, the word "transvestite" is more honest; cross-dressing in an attempt to change other's perception of your gender, with no federal guarantee of success.

HH, I went to Christian schools that couldn't afford shower rooms, so I have less experience than you do. I did attend summer camp, where there were shower rooms, and everyone used them without any serious embarrassment, though my guess is that those who were used to greater privacy (e.g., those with few or no siblings who didn't have shower rooms at their schools) may have found that the lack of privacy took some getting used to. I think you are right in implying, if I read you correctly, that children are not as able now to be comfortable in their own skin, as it were, because the whole issue of homosexuality and the general sexualization of culture has messed all this up. Tony Esolen has written a great deal about just how much it has messed it up for boys--all of that sense of comfortableness and camaraderie with other boys is just gone.

However, that doesn't mean that schools don't have shower rooms and locker rooms anymore. In fact, a school somewhere or other was just told by the Obama administration that they will lose federal funding if they don't let a boy change and shower in the girls' shower and locker rooms. The school tried to provide him with a private room, but he wasn't satisfied with that and demanded that he be allowed to use the girls' rooms. Whether the girls are forced to change and shower at the same time that he is there to be seen, I don't know for certain. But Ben Shapiro (I believe it was) said this should be reported as, "Obama administration requires school to allow boy to expose himself to girls." Some headline like that. Which is pretty close to the truth.

So, this probably will result in the end in a lot of money being spent to give everybody individual showering and changing areas, because I predict that's where the market will press as people try to live in this insane new world. But not every place will be able to afford that. For example, religious organizations and even the YMCA may not be able to afford it.

Lydia:

I think you are right in implying, if I read you correctly, that children are not as able now to be comfortable in their own skin, as it were, because the whole issue of homosexuality and the general sexualization of culture has messed all this up.

I do not know. As you are aware, in real life (as opposed to the imaginary world of a blog's comment column), people do things for all kinds of reasons you and I would not understand. You and I probably do things for reasons people would not understand. I probably do things for reasons you would not understand, or maybe for no discernible reason at all. Liberty and privacy mean that we all do not have to explain to one another everything we do.

But the discovery last year that the kids are all skipping the showers at school, that the very taking of showers at school now transgresses social norms, has caught me by surprise.

I do not pretend to explain it, but, yes, something like your conjecture was vaguely on my mind. Your mention of the showers has made me remember it. In my generation, we might skip the showers if the boiler was out of order, especially in cold weather; but not otherwise, or not most of us, at any rate. I don't suppose that the grownups would have gone to the trouble and expense of building and maintaining the showers if they had not expected us to use them.

It needn't interest you, but if it does: I recall one other, curious incident during the early 1990s, when I was single in my mid-20s. Working at a restaurant, I had a pal, a coworker, same age, who had "spring fever" (the weather had just turned warm) and wanted us to go out for a hike. This was in the western U.S. where the BLM manages lots of land and you could hike more or less where you liked -- so we parked on the side of the road in the hills, when it turned out that my pal wanted us to hike, er, in the buff: shoes, hat, nothing between. Well, he was a companionable fellow, it was a humorous dare, we're both male, so who cares? I'm game; we do it. Didn't meet any rattlesnakes or warlike Indians, happy to say. Got burned a bit by the sun. Made it back in time to work our restaurant shifts that evening (with clothes).

Now, to this day, I can only guess what put it in my pal's mind to suggest that. Haven't seen him since that year. Most likely, he was just being ironic: "Oh yeah? Well, try this!"

The act was pointless as far as I know. I cannot say that I had ever done it again. If young men today would never do it, I don't know that that says anything bad about them. But, you know: showers; hikes; shoes; hats; towels.... I was just wondering.

I wonder if Bruce Springsteen had a contract to play in the NC venue, and if there was some sort of clause allowing him to back out of it for political reasons, and if not, if he can be sued for refusing to sell his "services" to people who do not agree with his views, much like bakers might be forced to sell their products/services to people who violate their deeply held beliefs? I hope he gets sued.

c matt, I wondered just that question. How does an artist get away with NOT performing just because the state doesn't agree with his views? I find it hard to believe a contract was written to take that into consideration. Why would it?

Howard, my recollection (roughly 10 years earlier) from 2 small Catholic schools that had locker rooms with showers is that the boys in high school were more likely than the girls to use the showers, but that in both cases there were some who did not. For those who did not, I believe that the reason was partly being uncomfortable being naked even with others of the same sex. But larger than that, some were teased unmercifully with being small, undeveloped, or just plain weak, and the showers gave the bullies a whole new level of opportunity to be heartless. And, finally, I think there were some who just did not feel willing to be part of that scene where some were bullies and some were prey.

If putting a single sex into common showers had some kind of track record of helping to develop some virtues (like being comfortable with your own body) I would support it as a good idea. But I don't see that it did that. Those who were otherwise comfortable with their own bodies managed OK, but I think that the teasing undermined any plausible benefit among those who were not, and probably tended toward undermining the virtuousness of those whose self-image was OK but participated in the teasing. I suspect that even aside from the gender / transgender idiocy, our culture could well survive going to individual locker/shower arrangements. Frankly, it is NOT that expensive: it is a one-time cost for one thing.

I was appalled, back in the 1980's, when professional sports decided to allow women reporters into the locker rooms for "equality's sake", as if equal access to sports stars could override the demands of modesty. That attitude is part and parcel with today's nonsense, of course. I don't know that it contributed significantly to the wider problem (I don't know that many people out of the general population who visit pro sports locker rooms), but it was certainly symptomatic.

I was appalled, back in the 1980's, when professional sports decided to allow women reporters into the locker rooms for "equality's sake", as if equal access to sports stars could override the demands of modesty.

To say nothing of the risk that you are placing the (usually attractive) women in, considering the increasingly criminal profile of a lot of professional athletes.

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