“The bill was made to protect young girls and women in general under the risk of being attacked by a sex offender. No one in the left takes this seriously they would rather stomp on people’s religious liberty and security concerns of females to protect their precious LGBT minorities. Being liberal is about putting minorities and their interests first, anyone in the majority who disagrees is an intolerant bigot.”
Really? It protects young girls and women from being attacked by a sex offender? How? A sex offender (by the way, while much rarer, women of all kinds are on the sex registry, and some of them were for acts against fellow women…so how does this protect women?..if you argue “well, very few incidents have happened with women attacking women”, guess what, there are even fewer of transgender women assaulting fellow women in a restroom) is a sex offender, the problem with this bill is it automatically assumes that since transgender women started life as men, and men are the majority of sex offenders, that ipso facto a lot of transgender women are going to be sex offenders. It would be like banning men from being teachers who teach girls, or being around women, to ‘protect women and girls’, it assumes bad behavior on the part of someone based on simply who they are. The fact that these laws are being mostly promulgated in the old Jim Crow states should come as no surprise, the underlying fear and hate of integration was that blacks, especially men, would behave “inappropriately” with whites, especially women, and this is basically the same argument.
More importantly, this argument is like the argument they tried pulling with same sex marriage, that “allowing same sex marriage would destroy families and hurt children”, claiming that as legal justification to ban the legal recognition of it, and like the issue of transgender women in restrooms, it is a cure for an ill that basically didn’t exist, it was banning something for a hypothetical ill. When they took the same sex marriage bans to the Supreme Court, the opponents tried that argument, but the proponents were able easily to prove that argument was bogus.
There is a fundamental problem with the argument about transgender women in restrooms, and that is if transgender women are such a threat, how come we haven’t seen any numbers of attacks going backwards in time? One of the fundamental problems with this law is it pretty much zeroes in on transgender women who can’t slip easily under the radar, who appear to be more masculine looking and whatnot (taller, larger, etc). Transgender women have been using bathrooms for a long, long time, people have transitioned and lived their lives as women for a long time, so where are all the attacks from “these people?”.If in fact transgender women had a lot of sex predators among them, how come these ‘bathroom laws’ suddenly became an item, when transgender women have been using restrooms for many, many years? What these laws are is that now transgender women who may not slip easily under the radar are using restrooms, those that people may suspect started life as men, and there is a ‘creep factor’ that “eeew, that is a man” with all the associated ideas (which are insulting to men I might add), that men are naturally sex predators and such. It is interesting that in all this debate, the religious blowhards and the bigots have said nothing about transgender men, I have not heard complaints about transgender men using men’s room, this is always about “protecting women and girls”.
More importantly, such laws are made discriminatory, versus serving a public need, because there already is evidence such laws are unneeded. Laws are supposed to be based on harm, on serving or protecting the public good, and in many places in this country there either is law, or simply people dont’ care, transgender women, slipping under the radar or not, have been using women’s facilities for decades, and there has been no problem.
If they were worried about the wording of the law, there are ways to address that be rewording the law allowing bathroom access, but the law went out of its way to basically ban any transgender woman from using a bathroom. The argument about a guy in a suit using a restroom is bogus, in places where these laws exist it simply doesn’t go on.A transgender women who is presenting as a man will use a men’s room, and think about this one, let’s say there is a sex pervert who wants to go into the women’s room, going in wearing a suit and tie would be the last thing they would do, because it would attract attention to them. If a guy went into a women’s room like that, and hung around there, or was peeping in stalls, they would be spotted and under the law could be arrested, because their behavior in there is illegal, no different than if a woman went in there and peeked and such. No, the law basically assumes that any transgender women going into a bathroom is ‘a man in a dress’ and as such, is likely a pervert, and that is discrimination and bias based on idiotic notions, not reality.
As far as this ruling goes, one thing the conservatives especially keep forgetting is the US is based on English law, and as such is based on precedent as much as statute. Arguing that in 1964 those writing Title IV saw women as being those born and raised that way is leaving out the role of precedent, which in part came about to match changing society. In the 1890’s, the Supreme Court decided that racial segregation was okay, in the 1950’s it reversed that. The bill of rights was written with individuals in mind, and the courts since pretty much the founding of the country said that corporations did not have the rights of people, but in recent times SCOTUS turned around and reversed that. Title IV was predominantly written to protect the civil rights of blacks, to end Jim Crow, and at the time those writing it viewed women’s predominant role in life as being raising kids, back then women generally stayed home to raise kids (working married women were a minority, unlike today, where it is the opposite), and the fields that were thought fit for women was limited…and it took court decisions, precedent, to determine the bounds of applicability. More importantly, since 1964, what a woman is has become a lot more complex, the biology of what a woman is includes genetics (the XX chromosome) but that has changed, and more importantly, that gender identity is likely biological as well based on brain wiring, not to mention ideas of self identity, and to apply statutory law based on notions of the past in general are fraught.
By the way, the thing about “birth certificate” is discriminatory in of itself. Some states don’t allow changing birth certificates at all (I think Texas is like that, what a surprise), some states amend the certificate but you know it was amended, others only allow amending it if someone has had GRS surgery, so it isn’t so simple to say all they need to do is have the right BC, and with GRS there are a lot of reasons why transgender people don’t have it, whether it is medical reasons, or more importantly, the cost, GRS can run many 10’s of thousands of dollars and very few insurance plans cover it, even today, so they would be especially vulnerable to this kind of thing.
The irony of the NC law is that under this law, a transgender male could be arrested for following the tenets of the law, if a transgender male wearing a suit and tie walked into a women’s room, they would be following the letter of the law, but likely would be arrested under this law for being a predator in a women’s room.