Ever since North Carolina passed that ludicrous law demanding that people go potty in the bathroom that matches their birth-assigned gender my social media has lit up with posts in support of the law and posts decrying it. Some of the people supporting the law have a hatred of anything NOT heteronormal dripping off the page, and some of them have simply bought the argument that men might take advantage of the law to dress up as women and rape women in bathrooms.
The first category of people are simply bigots and beyond hope, so they can stop reading this now. Plus, I’m going to use some big words and big thoughts and bigots are so axiomatically stupid that they’ll have trouble getting to the end of the page anyway.
For those who have been hoodwinked by the fear of rapists exploiting the law to rape women and/or children in bathrooms, I wish to explain why this law does NOTHING to protect women/children from rape any more than separate water fountains protected whites from “black diseases”. It was never about catching black cooties; it was always about othering a group as lesser or dangerous. It’s the same with the “make wee where God said you should” laws.
First, the law itself is as useful as a kettle made of butter. Seriously, it is grandstanding for heternormative prejudice and not much else. How will this be enforced? Many transgendered people can “pass” for a natal-gendered person, so how are you going to always KNOW who is in there making boom-boom illicitly? Behold a transgendered woman and a transgendered man:
So … which bathroom would you be surprised to see them in?
Moreover, there are no genital detectors on bathroom doors. It’s not as if a transwoman will suddenly be hurled back from the entrance of the bathroom by anti-wiener rays. Even if that WERE possible, gender-reassignemnt surgery means there wouldn’t be a wiener to detect. What does that mean? Use your birth-assigned toilet unless you’ve undergone junk modification?
These laws are so ineffectual that a transwoman named Mara Keisling, who is the head of the National Center for Transgender Equality, used the women’s restroom in North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory’s office while working to repeal the law. Seriously, this law is good only for toilet tissue and othering transpeople.
Secondly, the law is a protection from a “risk” that simply does not exist. There are, despite memes and hysteria to the contrary, ZERO reported rapes by transgendered people against cis-gendered adults or children in bathrooms. It is a risk so small that you have a much greater likelihood to have walked on the moon than to have been assaulted by a transgendered person in a bathroom.
There are, however, plenty of reported crimes wherein transgendered men and women have been raped by cis-gendered men in bathrooms … just like cis-gendered adults and children have been raped repeatedly in bathrooms by cis-gendered men. You see, men don’t have to “dress up and pretend to be transgendered women” to rape women in women’s restrooms. Male rapists have been using restrooms as a handy place to sexually assault women, other men, and children for a while now.
A fifteen year old girl “was attending an evening event at a church … She walked to the bathroom and noticed a man she did not recognize loitering in the hallway. As she shut the bathroom door, the man pushed his way inside and forcibly raped her”.
And adult man lured a 12 year old girl into a CVS bathroom and raped her.
A toddler was raped in a bathroom by a teenaged church volunteer and the church tried to coerce the toddler’s parents to keep silent about the incident.
A six year old girl was dragged into men’s bathroom and raped by 33-year-old William Coffey, who was loitering in a church because it gave him an opportunity to find an unattended child.
A 23-year-old woman was raped in the bathroom of a bar, when a man “grabbed her by the throat, forced her into a stall and attacked her”.
A transwoman in a historic gay bar was “was using the single-occupancy unisex restroom … when a man came in claiming he only needed to wash his hands. He then proceeded to grope and rape her before fleeing the scene.”
A woman was raped when 22-year-old Mario Valenzuela followed her into the 40/40 Club’s unisex bathroom.
A woman was raped in a courthouse bathroom by a man who waited for her to exit the stall before attacking.
A woman was raped by two men who forced their way inside the bathroom of a rest stop.
And OMG I have just discovered a porn site dedicated to “hot women being raped in bathrooms”: It is Hot Woman Raped In Bathroom – Heavy-R.com but I am not providing a link on my site. Mother of God, how is this legal but transwomen peeing in a woman’s restroom is illegal???
Bathrooms are dangerous places for women and children. Bathrooms are potential rape sites. But transwomen and transmen are not the reason why.