Bob CollinsIn the new rush to police bathroom use, who will protect people from self-appointed bathroom cops?
This happened in Texas last week when a man thought a woman who went into the ladies room looked too much like man.
The Dallas Observer says it’s not the first time it’s happened.
Once, when Rush was at Hobby Lobby, a woman accosted her for trying to enter the restroom her granddaughter was using. Another women berated Rush for brazenly waltzing into the 24 Hour Fitness locker room before recognizing that Rush was, in fact, a woman and muttering an apology. And pretty much whenever she goes into the restroom at the mall, she’ll hear kids murmur “Mom, there’s a boy in the girls’ bathroom!”
The confusion isn’t universal, however. Once, because the women’s restroom was full and figuring that everyone mistook her for a dude anyways, she tried using the men’s bathroom at a bar. Its occupants were immediately panic stricken. “Whoa, there’s a chick in the bathroom!” they yelled. “Get out, get out!”
Rockwall, Texas — a Dallas suburb — is poised to become the latest community to join the panic over the issue of transgender people using a bathroom, which prompted an editorial today in the Dallas Morning News.
According to a politically motivated and lamentably successful disinformation campaign, non-discrimination laws that allow people to choose the appropriate bathrooms for their own use — as they have done since the age of outhouses and chamber pots — are somehow dangerous. Such laws, according to this tortuous line of speculation, are an open invitation for sex predators cunningly disguised as men disguised as women (got that?) to brazenly walk into the ladies’ WC and assault helpless women and innocent children.
Never mind that in town after town, public safety agencies in cities with non-discrimination laws, such as Dallas, report that they have seen no uptick in assaults in ladies’ rooms, nor have they seen sex offenders masquerading as transgender in order to gain access. And never mind that people who are transgender, or who describe themselves as non-gender-conforming, are much more likely to be victims than perpetrators of crime.
Never mind that an actual sex predator, whose criminal behavior could lead to a life prison sentence, is unlikely to be deterred by the threat of a misdemeanor fine for using the wrong bathroom.
Yet unhinged potty paranoiacs killed a broad package of anti-discrimination protections in Houston last year, and North Carolina rushed a toilet-gender law through its own Legislature to undermine a similar ordinance in Charlotte.
The paper called the growing panic “bigoted looniness.”
Last month, Target announced it would allow people to use the toilet that matches their gender identity, prompting a call to boycott the Minneapolis-based retailer.
Oxford, Alabama reacted predictably, passing an ordinance imposing a six-month jail sentence and a $500 fine on anyone using the “wrong” bathroom.
“If Target wants to close all their stores in the state of Texas, I will go over and help them pack and help them leave,” Texas lawmaker Matt Shaheen, a Republican, tells the Texas Tribune. “I will die on this issue politically. I am going to bat for my wife and my daughters.”
