In the Shitter

Golly, I know it’s probably slipped under your highly tuned radar, but lately, people sure do give a shit about who is taking shits and where they’re doing it.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m talking about the sudden surge in attempts by lawmakers to stop trans men and women from using the bathrooms appropriate to their actual gender, forcing them into bathrooms based on the genitalia they were born with.

This has been an issue for a while now, but seems to have really hit the public’s collective, myopic eye with North Carolina’s House Bill 2, the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act, which also stomped all over local ordinances (so much for small government). But people have been pushing these bills in some states since at least 2015.

It was inevitable that once the issue jabbed in the public eye, we’d see bigots, hate-mongers, and the purely ignorant from all walks of life throwing their two cents like rice at a wedding. and I mean from every walk of life, from the lowliest peasant like me, to politicians and actors.

Some of what we’re seeing is pure hatred, often Biblically-inspired (because God hates a lot of people apparently, which makes one wonder why it made them). Common with this type is the idea that transgender is bullshit because “God doesn’t make mistakes”. Which, frankly, hurts my brain a little when I see it. Because if you ask them “What about kids born with pretty severe birth defects?”, they’re still all “God doesn’t make mistakes.” Everything that happens is God’s plan, except for the stuff they don’t understand or agree with (if a kid is born with no legs, that’s God’s plan, but if you’re gay, you hate God or some such BS).

A lot of it is pure ignorance along the lines of “Why are they letting men use the women’s bathrooms?”  Some of this I at least understand. It’s a confusing subject that many people have never, ever thought about. Much of the ignorance is because many people, when they hear “transgender”, think “cross-dresser” or “transvestite”. You, brilliant reader, and I know these are not the same things, but I don’t think the average man or woman on the street is aware of that.

When you try to explain it to them, you can occasionally see that, yes, they do see the difference. But many don’t, can’t, or won’t. Some people can’t conceptualize the idea that there could be a physical, demonstrable difference between the gender the brain says it is and the sexual organs the body was born with. It’s like trying to conceptualize a hundred million billion trillion, it just isn’t going to happen with some people. The best you can do with them is try to get them, not to understand fully, but to accept that it is, despite their lack of understanding, and that these are still just people trying to piss like everyone else.

The most common argument (that I see anyway) against trans men and women using the appropriate bathroom seems to be some variation of “Well now men are going to dress like women and assault women in children in the public bathrooms!!” The problem with this is that, wait for it, people were assaulting kids and women in bathrooms, dressed as women and not, for a long god damned time before anyone gave any thought to trans bathroom use.

It’s a bullshit argument used by the ignorant (see above) and the deceitful trying to provoke the ignorant. And the people that use this argument get really mad when you point out that statistically, they are a far greater threat to people in bathrooms than any trans man or woman. And it blows their minds when you point out that it’s entirely possible they, their sisters, moms, wives, and daughters have quite possibly already used the bathroom with a trans woman, and hey, they weren’t beaten, kidnapped, raped, or killed. Let alone that when it comes to bathroom assaults, trans men and women are victims, not perpetrators. Sometimes, you can get through to these people, but not often.

Something here that I find very telling is that the conversation is almost always about what will happen to people in the women’s bathroom. It’s further evidence to support the idea that men and women, as a group, think men are fucking animals just waiting for the opportunity to savage any vulnerable prey if out of sight of polite society.

Touching on that is that more than one prominent male has said (paraphrasing) that if they had been able to say “I feel like a girl today” they totes would have gone into the girl’s locker rooms and showers lol. So basically, we’ve got people like Mike Fucking Huckabee and Louis Waste of DNA Gohmert admitting that they would be sexual predators if they had the opportunity.  And that’s a part of the problem. A lot of the male resistance to this comes from the fact that a lot of men would be sexual predators if they thought they could get away with it. So maybe there is something to the idea that men are fucking wolves in sheep’s clothing. An awful lot of guys sure seem to think they are.

But I digress.

One reason we’re seeing this is because it’s far less socially acceptable to hate and discriminate against people based on their skin color.  Due to some hard fought recent battles, it’s far less socially acceptable to discriminate against gay people. But we’re people, and importantly, we’re in an election cycle, so we have to be able to discriminate against someone. Especially if you’re a politician on the right (fear- and hate-mongering is a common right-wing tool). Yeah, you can use unauthorized immigrants and Muslims, but doing that still gets a lot of pushback. So you can stir up hate for them, but only to a point, because, oh, right, they still vote in sizable numbers.

But trans men and women? Eh, no one care about them, so we can discriminate, slander and libel them all we want. Hell, tv shows and movies still make “tranny” jokes with almost no repercussions, right?

But the truth is that a major push for these and other hateful, discriminatory laws is coming from a single source: Mathew Staver and his Liberty Counsel legal organization. Note that the Liberty Counsel is a hate group according to the SPLC.

The Liberty Counsel has done everything from waging a legal war on abortion to endorsing the criminalization of homosexual sodomy to supporting that stupid clerk in Kentucky who wouldn’t issue marriage licenses to gay couples because God.

And if you look, you’ll find it’s the Liberty Counsel who is drafting a lot of the out-of-the-blue anti-trans bathroom laws. Because the Liberty Counsel is only about the liberty of Christians to hold power and screw over anyone they hate or disagree with.

And people are easily manipulated and directed.

So if you’re trying to explain to someone why these anti-trans laws are discriminatory bullshit, feel free to mention that they come from a hate group that’s still pissy about SCOTUS and marriage equality.

If you’re all up in arms about men dressed as women in the women’s bathrooms, take a moment to reflect that not only are you being an ignorant bigot, you’re also being used as a blunt object by a hate group that doesn’t give one single shit about you, regardless of which bathroom that shit is taken in.

Fight the power however you can, brothers and sisters.

Peace.