Trans Bathroom Myths Pt.2
- Cody
- May 26, 2016
- 8 min read
[Continuation of this article]
2. Another thing that anti-trans bathroom legislation seeks to do is protect the safety, privacy, and comfort of cisgender folks – specifically children in most cases – at the risk of the safety, privacy, and comfort of transgender individuals. It is easy to rally people against a perceived threat by simply crying out that children are at risk because no one wants to seem like an insensitive villain that could potentially put children in the tracks of danger. However, rather than interrogating societal issues of patriarchal power, rape statistics, and acknowledging that bathroom signs are not going to keep sexual predators out if they want to get in, the far-right is choosing to use fear of trans people as an easy distraction. By scape-goating transgender individuals and saying that their access to bathrooms could maybe, possibly, potentially, hypothetically cause a threat to children, we are feeding into systemic transphobia that seeks to continue oppression of transgender people by segregating them in facilities that are “separate but equal,” similar to the black vs. white drinking fountains, bathrooms, schools, and other institutions that were prevalent within America before the Civil Rights movement.
Of course, these people do not see it that way. They believe that making transgender women use the men’s room so that there are no “men in dresses” in the ladies room is facilitating equality because it means that both people have a “safe place” to use the bathroom in privacy and comfort, and because it ensures that men use male facilities and women use female facilities. This could not be any farther from the truth, of course, because forcing someone to use a bathroom that does not corresponds with their gender identity can be extremely traumatic and dangerous for the person in question. These laws attempt to promote the safety of cis people with no regard to that of trans people.
There are absolutely no issues that can logically, or ethically, be cited in regard to integrating cis and trans folks into the same bathrooms – none. There would be several benefits, on the other hand, such as the validation and normalization of trans identities by providing them with accommodations that respect and acknowledge them as equal to cisgender folks. But let’s make one thing clear: trans folk have been using the same bathrooms as cisgender individuals for ever. It has never been an issue in the past, and it is now, as author, scholar, and trans rights advocate Jennifer Finney Boylan calls it, “a solution in search of a problem.”
A lot of this comes down to rhetoric, which the far-right is notorious for using to warp and twist arguments and facts to suit their needs and further their oppressive agendas. A big issue is the terminology and wording used in many ads and propaganda videos. It is true - we do not want men in women's restrooms. No one is saying that (except maybe those who are advocating for gender-neutral or unisex bathrooms in lieu of gendered bathrooms, which will probably be another post). Right-wing political leaders are saying that allowing transgender [women] to use the female restroom will place "boys in the same restroom as little girls" and open up a door from Hell that will allow men in dresses to flock to the ladies room to prey on whoever is vulnerable. That is just not the case. Period.
First of all, if transgender women and girls have access to the ladies' room, there will be no boys/males in the bathroom. Referring to trans folk as their birth sex (natal sex) is a blatant act of transphobic rhetoric, as I explained. There are no two ways around it (see my future post "Gender vs. Sex - An Idiot's Guide"). In short, gender and sex are no longer considered synonymous. Men can have vaginas and women can have penises. I think of it as a birth defect, personally. Gender is defined as "the state of being male or female (typically used with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones)." As one Huffington Post article says "...by preying on misinformation about transgender people and calling trans girls boys, advocates for these harmful measures [anti-trans bathroom laws] decry the fictitious end of sex-segregated spaces altogether." In short, transwomen ARE women. If you think otherwise, then you are the problem in the bathroom and you should be asking yourself: why am I so invested in the genitals of the person in the stall next to me, anyway?
If we are worried about the safety of children, why are we not worried about the safety of them all? Why are we only worried about cisgender children, and not paying any mind to the horrors that can occur if a trans person is forced to use the wrong bathroom? Transgender folk are at the very top of the pyramid when it comes to violence, discrimination, etc. More than any other minority, trans people are the most likely to be victimized. Forcing a trans person to use a restroom, changing room, or locker room that does not correspond with their identity effectively outs them, which opens up that Pandora’s box we talked about and welcomes bullies and offenders to target the trans individuals through tactics that can range from verbal to physical violence – and even murder. Why are we more worried about the comfortability of bigots than the lives and well-being of the oppressed? It is merely discrimination of trans folk.
Statistically, leaving your child alone with a doctor is more dangerous than letting them use the restroom that a transgender individual is using. Leaving them alone with a dentist, a priest, a gym teacher, an uncle, a cousin, a family friend – even their own father – has more basis in reality, statistics, and facts for the potential of aggressive acts of violence, sexual or otherwise, than letting them use a bathroom that a trans person is using. The reason for this is that your child has a far greater risk of being injured by someone that they know than by a complete stranger who only wants to use the bathroom.
In a study conducted on victims of childhood sexual assault, 93% of juvenile victims reported knowing their attacker. 34% were family members, and 59% were acquaintances or family friends. Only 7% claimed to have been attacked by strangers! That is in part because most responsible parents do not leave their young, vulnerable children alone in public – but also because the effort and risk that a sexual predator would have to put into enacting violence in a public space that is as heavily trafficked and monitored as a public restroom is usually a deterrent. I am not saying that sexual assault in bathrooms never happens – I am saying that, believing that allowing trans folk to use the bathrooms that they identify with will create a breeding ground for sexual predation is utter madness and lunacy.
There is no correlation between the two whatsoever. Statistics have debunked this myth perpetuated by the far-right, calling it "beyond specious." There has neither been an increase in sexual crime in bathrooms within states where bathroom equality for transgender people exists, nor has there been any evidence to support that cisgender men are masquerading as [transwomen in order to gain access to female facilities so that they can spy on or prey on the vulnerable women and children inside. It is literally a non-issue that the conservative Republicans are exacerbating by giving highly-hypothetical scenarios that are rooted in ignorance and transphobia.
This legislation also largely singles out trans folk that do not pass as their identified gender because they are perceived as “faking” their identity to gain access to the bathroom of their choice. You don’t really see propaganda that focuses on passable trans people, regardless of how transphobic the creators are, because passable trans folk are, for some bizarre reason, considered to be less of a threat since their gender is more easily discernible based on the primary and secondary sex characteristics that we are socially conditioned to consider “cisnormative” in gendered bodies. But more on this in another post.
At the end of the day, what this boils down to is accountability. Saying that transgender folks should not be allowed to use the restroom that they identify with because there MIGHT be a problem is the equivalent of saying that you won’t drive to work this morning because you MIGHT get into a car accident – except that the odds you will get into a car wreck are far more likely than the odds that you or your child will be the victim of a sex crime that was made possible through this legislation.
All over the news, we see declarations that “men will be in the women’s room!” What is largely absent in this argument is not only that trans people have had the legal protection to use the restroom of their gender identity for years – decades in some states – and that it has went swimmingly up until now – but also that transmen exist. No one seems to be worried about the men who were assigned female at birth being able to use the men’s room because of our perceptions of men. The type of people pushing for anti-trans legislation do not recognize trans folk as their identified gender, which reduces transmen to female; Republicans do not consider women to be capable of posing a sexual threat to children. What this shows us is that, even to Republicans, the very real threat of male sexual predation exists because of the amount of sexual power that we attribute to male bodies. That is where accountability comes in.
Rather than unjustly holding all transgender people accountable (and stripping them of their equal rights in the meantime) for what is largely a hypothetical fear, why are we not holding those responsible for sex crimes accountable for their actions?
Despite living in an androcentric hegemony and rape culture, or perhaps because of it, we all have this innate fear of men. There seems to be this fear that "transwomen are men" and are therefore more likely to be violent aggressors or sexual assailants. Some believe that all trans folk are predators, perverts, and deviants by default. Others are not so much worried about "real" trans people as they are about the offenders who they think may take advantage of trans-positive bathroom legislation. These people are spreading myths that, by allowing trans folk access to the bathrooms they prefer, sexual predators will begin to wear dresses and claim to identify as trans just to have easier access to women to victimize. To date, not a single instance has been documented regarding a transwoman assaulting a cis woman in a female restroom. Not ONE. There are, however, loads of examples of hate-based violence against transwomen when they have been forced to use male restrooms. Remember, at least one transwoman is murdered every 29 hours. That statistic is staggering and mortifying in light of these new bills.
Since such a staggering number of rapists and sexual offenders are male (remember, nearly 99%), it makes sense that we would be afraid of them. Severely twisted propaganda ads, such as the now-infamous Houston Prop 1 video, show drastically-skewed and dramatized hypothetical situations of male-on-child violence in restrooms, and this is partly why so much pressure to repeal the Hero Act began to surface recently. But this begs the question: why are we scape-goating transgender people – an already discriminated and oppressed class – rather than holding men, especially male sexual predators, culpable for their actions? Why are we not pressing for bills that ban sex offenders from public restrooms? That would be far easier to police than someone’s gender because, as we have learned, being able to accurately predict someone’s gender is not at all an easy thing.
The more I read the misinformed opinions and bigotry, the more I fear for the future of this country. The nonsense that sexual predators will exploit transgender non-discrimination laws to sneak into women's restrooms needs to stop being spread. It is promoting transphobia and validating the sentiments of people who would advocate for violence against trans folk.It is blatant hate-mongering that does not take into account science, psychology, and available data. Do we really want to regress to the Dark Ages, before Civil Rights and equality? Do we want to continue segregating folks based on flimsy boundaries that are purely imposed by sociocultural traditions and constructs? I sincerely hope not – and the best advice that I can give you if you are out in public and unsure of someone’s gender as they enter the same restroom as you is: don’t fucking worry about it; they know who they are far better than you.
SOURCES (I can back my arguments up - can you?)
- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-d-esseks/anti-trans-bathroom-bills_b_9703224.html
- http://equalitymatters.org/factcheck/201403200001
- http://abcnews.go.com/US/sexual-assault-domestic-violence-organizations-debunk-bathroom-predator/story?id=38604019
- http://www.sarsonline.org/resources-stats/reports-laws-statics
- http://ndvsac.org/wp-content/uploads/SA/Myths%20and%20Facts%20about%20Sexual%20Assault.pdf
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