So, let's say you're off to go hike Mount Katahdin and commune with Mother Nature. But dammit, it's a long ride from Southern Maine and that 32-ounce drink, along with all those salty snacks you've been munching to stay awake, has finally pushed you over the edge. No problem, though: There's a restaurant just ahead.
You find a table and then place your order (or the other way around depending on where you are), and you head for the restroom. Except the manager tells you that you can't use that restroom because he feels it's not your appropriate one.
Or maybe you don't get headed off at the pass — but as you exit from the room, you are treated to a beating for doing your personal business.
Sound unlikely? Don't be so sure. Just last week in Maryland, a young transgender woman was brutally assaulted after leaving the restroom with which she identified, allegedly by a 14-year-old girl and a 18-year-old woman.
Here in Maine Representative Kenneth Fredette (R-Newport) is the sponsor of LD 1046, which would allow the operator of a restroom or shower to decide who can use which gender's facilities. The Bangor Daily News reports that, according to Fredette, his bill would prevent the Maine Human Rights Commission from being able to find that public and private entities discriminate if they force transgendered people to use restrooms that correspond with their biological sex, rather than the gender they self-identify as.
"There is not an absolute right for a transgender to go into the bathroom they identify with," Fredette told the News. "We have to draw lines in this society so we balance rights with the rights of everyone else."
For example, he said, "What situation do we put young children in when they go into a private place and then what they perceive to be the person of the opposite sex comes into that bathroom? That could be quite shocking."
Do kids get shocked and run out screaming or crying when they see a burly woman with some dark mustache hairs in the women's room? Or an effeminate man with long hair in the men's room? I've never seen or heard an example of this. And by what standards will you judge a person's gender visually? Will there be an underwear check? A genetic test? I shudder to think what might happen to me if I cut my hair low again and go out without earrings and makeup.
This is a proposal to legalize discrimination because we'd rather legislate to personal comfort than common sense. Certainly there's historical precedent: Once upon a time, families that looked like mine couldn't be legally recognized — never mind that races have been mixing since the beginning of time and some of our Founding Fathers created plenty of mixed-race families themselves.
This bathroom nonsense is a move to protect people who fear difference at the expense of a disadvantaged minority, not about children's safety or concerns about being subjected to the prurient interest of fellow bathroom-users.
But it protects the wrong people. Transgender people are at increased risk of their lives ending early through assault or suicide because people are so uncomfortable with their very existence that they terrorize them — including by subjecting them to some sort of inspection before using a restroom.
Viewed through that lens, whose rights need balancing? A transgender person who wants to piss in the stall of the bathroom where he or she feels comfortable, or those who already piss all over that person, sometimes to the point of hospitalization or death?
Shay Stewart-Bouley can be reached at diversecity_phoenix@yahoo.com.
