Playing the bathroom card. Again
“Do you want Negroes using your toilet facilities?”
Campaign flyer, Willis Smith for US Senate, 1950
Every time equal rights take a new step forward, opponents run for the bathroom.
They’re doing it now with HB2. They’re scaring people with horror stories about predators attacking girls in bathrooms.
In the 1970s, they claimed the Equal Rights Amendment would lead to men and women using the same bathrooms. The ERA didn’t pass, but unisex bathrooms came to pass. No big deal.
In the 1950s, politicians like Willis Smith (with the aid of Jesse Helms) yelped that African-Americans would use white-only bathrooms. And so they do. No big deal.
Now the threat is transgender people. And the scare stories haven’t changed.
It works, of course, with some people. One TAPster, a veteran of these battles going back to 1960, wondered last week how to explain all this to a woman worried about a man going into a bathroom with her 10-year-old daughter.
The truth is, you can’t explain. Change is hard. Fears are easy to raise and hard to assuage. It will take time.
Eventually, people will come to understand. They’ll learn that transgender is “a term used to describe people whose gender identity differs from the sex the doctor marked on their birth certificate.”
That is, it describes someone who was born a man and has come to consider himself a woman. Or vice versa. They may or may not have had hormone therapy or surgery to change their gender.
HB2 means that a transgender person who was born a man but dresses as a woman has to use the men’s room. And a person who was born a woman but dresses as a man has to use the women’s room.
That makes no sense. And neither one is a predator. A predator is a criminal – period.
In fact, the scary scenario that HB2 purports to prohibit is already happening. Transgender people may already be in the stall next to you. Has that been a problem for you?
It was hard for many people (and still is for some) to accept equal rights for African-Americans. It was hard for many people (and still is for some) to accept equal rights for women. It was hard for many (and still is for some) to accept that lesbians and gays aren’t perverts.
So this change will also be wrenching. As always, politicians will exploit it for their own political purposes. Like Pat McCrory and legislative Republicans are doing right now.
It’s a Republican tradition.
But this time something is different. This time, business people are weighing in, including some big North Carolina companies.
They’ve learned the lessons of tolerance and diversity. They’ve joined the forces that, eventually and inevitably, will prevail.
Pat McCrory is a product of that world. He should know better. Nevertheless, he has made the wrong moral choice. It could also turn out to be the wrong political choice.
Playing the bathroom card. Again
“Do you want Negroes using your toilet facilities?”
Campaign flyer, Willis Smith for US Senate, 1950
Every time equal rights take a new step forward, opponents run for the bathroom.
They’re doing it now with HB2. They’re scaring people with horror stories about predators attacking girls in bathrooms.
In the 1970s, they claimed the Equal Rights Amendment would lead to men and women using the same bathrooms. The ERA didn’t pass, but unisex bathrooms came to pass. No big deal.
In the 1950s, politicians like Willis Smith (with the aid of Jesse Helms) yelped that African-Americans would use white-only bathrooms. And so they do. No big deal.
Now the threat is transgender people. And the scare stories haven’t changed.
It works, of course, with some people. One TAPster, a veteran of these battles going back to 1960, wondered last week how to explain all this to a woman worried about a man going into a bathroom with her 10-year-old daughter.
The truth is, you can’t explain. Change is hard. Fears are easy to raise and hard to assuage. It will take time.
Eventually, people will come to understand. They’ll learn that transgender is “a term used to describe people whose gender identity differs from the sex the doctor marked on their birth certificate.”
That is, it describes someone who was born a man and has come to consider himself a woman. Or vice versa. They may or may not have had hormone therapy or surgery to change their gender.
HB2 means that a transgender person who was born a man but dresses as a woman has to use the men’s room. And a person who was born a woman but dresses as a man has to use the women’s room.
That makes no sense. And neither one is a predator. A predator is a criminal – period.
In fact, the scary scenario that HB2 purports to prohibit is already happening. Transgender people may already be in the stall next to you. Has that been a problem for you?
It was hard for many people (and still is for some) to accept equal rights for African-Americans. It was hard for many people (and still is for some) to accept equal rights for women. It was hard for many (and still is for some) to accept that lesbians and gays aren’t perverts.
So this change will also be wrenching. As always, politicians will exploit it for their own political purposes. Like Pat McCrory and legislative Republicans are doing right now.
It’s a Republican tradition.
But this time something is different. This time, business people are weighing in, including some big North Carolina companies.
They’ve learned the lessons of tolerance and diversity. They’ve joined the forces that, eventually and inevitably, will prevail.
Pat McCrory is a product of that world. He should know better. Nevertheless, he has made the wrong moral choice. It could also turn out to be the wrong political choice.