Transgender Bathroom Access Now In NYC
Bill De Blasio has issued an executive order allowing access to public bathrooms for transgender persons in New York City.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio signs law to base bathroom and locker room use on gender identity. The executive order guarantees all people access to the city’s single-sex facilities that align with their gender identity, without having to show identification or proof of gender.
Transgender Bathrooms
Opponents of laws like these are quick to point out that they aren’t discriminatory against the LGBTQ community, but are more concerned with giving the legal greenlight to predators to follow their prey into a closed off area. Ignoring the obvious contradiction (automatic assumption that someone who is transgender is a child rapist is itself discriminatory), there are a couple of points that must be considered.
Men already sneak into women’s bathrooms. If you spend a few minutes on Reddit’s “Let’s Not Meet” section, you’ll see it’s alarmingly common. The threat is already there, and trans people have nothing to do with it.
A bathroom peeper or rapist doesn’t have the impulse control to wait for a law to pass so they can exploit it. They’re just going to walk right in. Again, I urge people to check out the “let’s not meet” section of Reddit we linked to.
A cisgender (cis) man, someone whose gender identity or role is appropriate or conforms with society, casually strolling into a bathroom is less conspicuous than putting on an elaborate “trans woman” disguise that’s only going to draw more attention. The idea of a man putting on a dress and wig just to enter a women’s restroom is unsupported by reality, but is more scaremongering about extremely unlikely, almost farcical, “what if” scenarios.
Ultimately, when we try to tell people going through a transition which bathrooms they can or can’t use, we’re singling them out and discriminating against them because of their differences. Heterosexual men and women rape little girls and little boys. This abuse isn’t limited to one specific type of person. Ultimately, the Mayor has declared that, in New York City, bathrooms and other single sex facilities are a fundamental human right that should not be restricted or denied to any individual.
