NC's transgender law violates Civil Rights Act, Justice says

Parent Cafe
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There is alot of talk about molestation and rape in this thread or just general fear of assault. That seems to come up alot on threads about gender and sexuality. I wonder what percentage of women are fearful of men and that roots the belief about potential assault. I said several times I don’t want to see guy parts in my locker room…I never said I was fearful of being molested… I find it interesting that the conversation often turns to assault and molestation. I find it interesting that sending an 8 year old boy into a man’s locker room is thought of as “wrong” because of fear of molestation as opposed to simply thinking that it isn’t an issue of reaching an age when starting to teach about personal privacy and the general concept of modesty would typically be occurring. I grew up in a pretty sexually liberal Scandinavian family but we were still taught modesty and personal privacy growing up and I brought that into the way I raised my kids and I never worried for one minute that something “bad” would happen to my 8 year olds changing in the guys locker room, showering and entering the pool or going to the bathroom by themselves in a restaurant if my husband wasn’t along and I talked to them often about what was inappropriate behavior on other people’s parts as well as their own and what to do if they were in a situation where a stranger came close to them and they were uncomfortable. One of the best things we can do to help children prevent themselves from being assaulted as they grow older is to teach them personal privacy and personal responsibility.

Upthread it’s been asserted that laws are in place and all this activism around new legislation is not needed that folks sort themselves out and have been. So maybe that’s true. Maybe the teeny tiny portion of the US population of women with male danglies just avoid public locker rooms. Males have been denied access to the ladies locker rooms based on that particular biological feature historically so now we need to change that? I’d be fine if nothing changed for places where once takes off their clothes and showers en masse, but I also can see benefits to gender neutral public restrooms given the stall doors and the inevitable line outside of women’s restrooms…but then again that is because of urinals and troughs and the ability of men to be quick about it. if putting the two together creates adverse conditions and even longer lines at public venues then even that doesn’t make sense either.

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Why the need to repeatedly refer to male genitals as “male danglies”? We’re adults here, we can handle the word penis, right?

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@momofthreeboys:
The thing about young boys in restrooms is not conjecture, there is fact around that, sending boys into public restrooms by themselves is a danger, it is real, unlike the hoo ha about transgender women using restrooms and sexual assault on women in there.

As far as why women react to the sight of a boys dongles, I have heard that one expressed directly, that a boy in a restroom is a ‘man’ in there, a lot of women associate the sight of male genitals, no matter how young the boy is, with men being sexual predators and such, this has been written about when things like that are discussed. I think it is appropriate to talk about privacy and such (same thing would apply to a young girl, by the way, things like in a public setting like that not staring at others, not making comments, etc, like “mommy, why is that woman so fat?”). I also would agree that a boy older is more likely to be able to protect themselves and be careful, but my wife has seen and I have heard women complaining about a parent with a 6 year old in the restrooms as well. I also find that you used the word “modesty” , that underlies a lot of problems, because whose idea of modesty? Modesty has no legal meaning, like I said according to muslim law what a lot of women wear every day is immodest, should we pass law on that? Modesty is something that is taught and a lot of it is about being respectful of others, which I understand, but how far do you go? Do you drag modesty down to the level of let’s say a woman who has been sexually abused and freaks out at being around anything associated with being male, so if a woman has a problem and you bring your 5 or 6 year old in the restroom, do you accede to that? Do we make public law based on the notions of Christian fundamentalists, whose ideas aren’t all that different than radical Islam? In terms of a boy in a women’s restroom, there is decorum there and the ganglies or not has little to do with that; if the mom takes the boy into a women’s locker room or restroom (and many places these days have seperate locker rooms for children, my local Y does, kids of either age can’t use the adult locker rooms after a certain age and before another one), it is up to her to keep the boy from running around naked, or otherwise acting in a way that is out of line, but that would be no different than with a young girl making sure she doesn’t stare at other people or run around or do things that are inappropriate, it is about actions and behavior, not whether they have a dongle. I can see objecting to older boys being in there, over the age of 8 or so, because at that age they are becoming aware of sexual feelings and the like and to me are more likely to do something stupid, like stare at a woman’s body or something else inappropriate, and yes, by that time he also has to start learning to be conginizant of things, but the idea that because a young boy or a transwoman has dongles weirds someone out shoudn’t be the basis for banning them IMO.

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Maybe becausr that is the stated purpose of the NC law.

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Hah LOL because i’m more concerned about offending someone than using correct anatomical words…it’s a rough crowd you never know what’s going to come back and bite you in the behind or who you are going to offend!

It’s been ages since I took a con law class, but there have been through times many legal discussions as high up as the supreme court surrounding modesty. Modesty as a legal issue has been around for a long long time. It should be no surprise to anyone that some people value modesty laws and some vehemently defend their right to bare all. it’s obvious that we have evolved from a society in which married couples were portrayed in separate beds in television shows, to television shows that show couples of all combinations doing more than sleeping in separate beds and to highly sexualized videos and commercials that young people are exposed to day in and day out… so societal thoughts about modesty is constantly fluxing and evolving. In my mind, modesty falls into that vast space of ethics and morality and as Justice Earl Warren said (and I never forgot this quote) law floats in a sea of ethics.

Personally I think the argument in NC centering on assault and molestation is a weaker argument or at minimum less interesting than the moral and ethical issues around modesty and what “we” as a society want to allow in public spaces with regard to genitalia (including breasts).

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On a (perhaps) more positive note:

http://www.buffalonews.com/city-region/cheektowaga/from-gay-to-transgender-cheektowaga-student-finds-acceptance-20160426

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First of all I doubt very much that a non surgical trans woman would have any desire to be completely naked in a female dressing room. I was actually with a trans woman in a dressing room in an outlet mall the other day. Both of us kept our undies on. The only thing that upset me was that her thighs are much nicer than mine.

Second is the weakness of the “lets protect our children” argument. This morning I listened to a local radio program that features teens discussing the bathroom laws. A caller was having an absolute fit that “this allows perverts to put on a wig and a dress and molest a child.” The teen’s response was perfect: “ma’am, anyone can do that with or without a gender law.”

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The NC law is more than about bathrooms:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/not-about-bathrooms-critics-decry-north-carolina-laws-lesser-known-elements/2016/05/14/387946ec-186b-11e6-924d-838753295f9a_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_northcarolina-420pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

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Can someone explain what these religious reasons would be?

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I assume it’s all the “God made you a man or a woman and you can’t change it,” “male and female created He them,” parts, along with various abominations, etc.

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@sylvan8798 A girl I know, who is Catholic, thought being trans was a sin because it altered the body that God gave you. Obviously there are other religious convictions used to justify the bill, but that’s the one I’ve heard the most.

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^ I can think of scores of other things that alter the body God gave you, but I bet she doesn’t think surgery to fix birth defects is a sin,

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From the Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gina-duncan/say-it-to-my-face-i-met-w_b_9932274.html

I greatly admire all the trans people who have been brave enough recently to stand up in public and face those who demonize us, and want to drive us back into the shadows. I don’t think I could do it; I limit my advocacy these days to the Internet!

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I still don’t get how that means you don’t let them use a certain bathroom. People who are unmarried and living together are also “sinners”. Shouldn’t we brand their foreheads with a large “F” and make them use separate bathrooms from the rest of us so they don’t get their sinner cooties on us? I understand what you are saying, but the consequences don’t seem to follow. But then, that’s often the case, eh?

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S is one of my heroes. He’s gay and has the courage to be out. What kind of mother would I be if I had less courage than he does? You have the courage to be who you are, and to speak that truth to others. We need to become educated about things that we could not have dreamed about growing up and to adjust accordingly. Every little bit helps - at least for some of us.

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My son is one of my heroes too. After all, he came out to me – and to some of his friends at school – as being gay, when he was 12. Which was two years before I came out to him as trans (which he had already guessed, as it turned out), and told him about my transition plans. And he accepted me, as I accepted him.

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It doesn’t really matter. Some people will claim religion for things other people do that they disapprove of while ignoring religion for things that might require them to alter their own behavior.

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^Not to mention, where in the Catholic faith is there a prohibition towards “altering one’s body”? Besides serious surgeries like birth defects I mentioned above, wouldn’t that also include tattoos, mole removal, braces, and a whole host of other common “alterations”? Fine if you want to make up your own religion (well, not fine, stupid), but ridiculous to subscribe things arbitrarily to an entire faith.

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@sylvan8798 No disagreement here. I don’t understand using religion to deny rights to others, it seems kind out of counterintuitive to my understanding of the Bible. Plus seperation of church and state should make the religious argument a moot point anyway :wink:

But if you’re looking for other religious reasons why people support the bathroom bill just listen to some of Ted Cruz’s speeches.

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The sad irony of this whole mess is the religious argument basically turns into “I am uncomfortable with it, so it must be against the Bible”. For example, the blacks have not exactly been a group supportive of gay rights for much of the time, it is only in recent decades that the black community have started supporting LGBT rights (for example, when Prop 8 passed in California, a lot of people analyzing the voting said black votes for it helped pass it, and with high black turnout because that was the 2008 election where President Obama was elected, it amplified the effect). Black churches have been known to be homophobic (that doesn’t mean all, by any means, but many black churches are very conservative), and more than a few of the civil rights leaders of the 60’s were opposed to both the gay rights movement and same sex marriage. There are ironies there, of course, the same bible was used to support slavery (after all, Paul told a runaway slave to go back to his master, among the many citings of slavery in the Hebrew Scripture/OT), and miscegenation laws were supported by the story of the Tower of Babel, that races were supposed to be separate…so yeah, you can use the bible to defend almost anything.

With the issue of transgender people, what the idiot set usually cite is “God made man and woman” (how that makes being transgender somehow not fit that I don’t know, given that trans folks identity as male or female), it doesn’t say anywhere what that means, does it mean identity or the body? (And I doubt the bronze age people who wrote the Hebrew scripture would even have thought of that). Of course, you get the old “a man shall not wear the attire of a woman or the woman a man, that is an abomination”, which is kind of funny, besides the fact it was aimed at keeping women out of the temple (some women used to cross dress to be able to go to the temple, since it was off limits to women), women today wear mens clothing all the time, women wear pants and so forth…not to mention, of course, when a transgender person is wearing what they do, they are women and men wearing clothing for women and men lol.

The bible makes no direct reference to transgender people, so those opposed to them have to do what so many have done, construct it out of the Bible using quotes that likely have nothing to do with it. Fundamentalists are famous for that, they take stuff out of context, they read things into the words that aren’t what they are saying, yet claim everyone else is misstating the bible when they talk about things like context.

The reality is this law was not about the issues of bathrooms and sexual molestation, and that is evident in the law itself that they passed. It wasn’t limited to bathrooms with transgender people, the law in question was basically an epistle to hates of the right wing, it basically eliminated local laws covering a broad spectrum of things, it outlawed local civil rights laws of any kind, it forbade localities from enacting minimum wage laws, it forbid laws protecting veterans from discrimination, it basically is trying to wipe out 60 years of civil rights legislation. If that law passed muster with the courts it will be a sad day in this country, because the law is clearly nothing more than those on the losing side of history trying to keep their power.

We will know something when NC elects the governor this year, if McCrory is re-elected then all the claims that this law represents gerrymandered districts, that most people in NC are tolerant and reasonable, will go out the window and anyone thinking of going there, living there or having business there has a choice to make IMO.