The Boogieman isn't a Transgendered person, it is North Carolina HP 2
The merde de jour is the pointless North Carolina law (HB 2) prohibiting transgendered persons from using the public toilet, that fits their gender identity. The law should not be looked at as the “bathroom bill” instead it is a revocation of civil rights and the right to public access. The North Carolina legislators and the misinformed misanthropes, who support it, need to bag-check their suitcases of fear and bigotry and knock on the door of common sense! (2) They have way too much time on their hands if they worry that a transgendered person--automatically a pervert (1) according to some of these narrowly focused people--is waiting to hit on them in a public toilet or that a school child will suffer grievous harm if a fellow student, who has the same gender, through identity, choses to use the toilet stall next to them.
Massachusetts State Representative Paul Heroux wrote in the Political section of the Huffington Post: “. . . This is a bill about civil rights and all public accommodation. A lot has been said and written about the concern over sex offenders using transgender public accommodation laws to gain access to use a public bathroom for improper use. I think this is largely the result of two things. The first is to search for reasons to oppose so-called bathroom bills due to an underlying discrimination against transgender people. And second, a fundamental misunderstanding of how sex offenders do and do not operate.”
(1) Pervert is defined as:
1. Verb-- alter (something) from its original course, meaning, or state to a distortion or corruption of what was first intended. Synonyms: distort, corrupt, subvert, twist, bend, abuse, misapply, misuse, misrepresent, misinterpret, falsify
2. Noun—a person whose sexual behavior is regarded as abnormal and unacceptable. Synonyms: deviant, degenerate. . .
There are people cruising public bathrooms, bars, etc. for “action.” At least one highly publicized example--in the past couple of decades--is ex-Senator Craig from Idaho. Craig, a three-term Republican Senator, went into a public bathroom at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in 2007. He was arrested by an undercover policeman and charged with lewd behavior. Craig was using foot and hand signals, according to the arresting officer, to solicit "gay" sex. The Senator plead guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct. A plea he later tried to retract.
Ex-Senator Craig, now a lobbyist in D.C., has a political history of supporting anti-gay policies —opposed same-sex marriage, domestic partners benefits, and didn’t want hate crimes to cover sexual orientation. He wasn’t and isn’t, I assume, a transgendered person. One can only presume that this ex-Senator supports North Carolina HB2.
I’m not sure what the statistics show about LBGT persons soliciting in public toilets or molesting children; probably not even a small blip in the figures. There is very robust body of research about pedophilia. Those data do strongly suggest that heterosexual men are the largest group of predators who prey on children. And there is a high probability that the child victim knows the person who molests them: relatives, priests, scout leaders, teachers. . . . Another category of predators includes the half-brother of our setting Utah Governor who was just arrested for his attempt to solicit and meet a 13 year old via the internet.
Massachusetts State Representative Paul Heroux went on to write: “What about a voyeur? A voyeur may try to dress up as a woman to gain access to a woman’s restroom, and they have. However, that is done with or without transgender public accommodation laws. If someone is caught breaking the law being a voyeur, claiming to be transgender offers no protection to voyeurism. So it makes no sense to say that transgender public accommodation should be denied because someone else may do something wrong.”
Being LBGT doesn’t mean you lurk in dark places next to grade schools and try to “recruit” kids into a “gay lifestyle.” If I understand correctly, being gay isn’t a function of a decision to be gay but rather those data indicate that being gay is in that person’s genetic wiring. And being gay or transgendered doesn’t make that person an automatic pervert.
Assigning the label, pervert, deviant, or degenerate is as subjective as the definition above indicates. Does ex-Senator Craig fit the definitions? I don’t think so. I believe him to be an ultra-conservative, narrowly focused social and political hypocrite. And his protests about his probable homosexuality remind me of a scene from Hamlet.
Hamlet: "Madam, how like you this play?"
Queen: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks."
Hamlet Act 3, scene 2, 222–230, William Shakespeare
But I feel bad for the ex-Senator. He can’t find the courage to admit to himself and then perhaps to those in his surrounds that he is gay. I can’t imagine the angst and mental anguish. Coming out would likely come at a high personal cost but the pay-off would likely be a happier life. The son of a close friend came out when he was into his fifties. It was costly but he appears to be much happier.
My brother, while not a Senator, shared many of the Senator’s conservative values and like Craig was deeply “in the closet.” Jim, my brother, was in denial until he died-without embracing his genetic reality--in the early nineties from the complications of HIV/AIDS. And at least one elderly uncle is firmly entrenched in renunciation of his genetic front-loading.
Did my brother, or do my uncle and Craig feel trapped in the wrong gender? It’s a guess but I doubt it. The overwhelming oppression of an ultra-conservative family background was the cloud that prevented them from embracing what they really were. Many other men and women, with identical backgrounds have come out but for whatever reasons my brother couldn’t and the ex-Senator and my uncle won’t accept reality.
I don’t understand labels and while one of my contradictions is that I use them, I hate being labeled. I am labeled as: heterosexual, big and tall, and ethnic minority, Hispanic, middle-eastern, or Mediterranean, left wing, environmentalist, conservationist, etc. I self-label as: Sephardic Jew, Ladino speaker, fiscal conservative and social and cultural liberal, and an ultra-ecologic conservative (look for a later post about this last).
The ugly labels assigned to LGBT persons seem to be fear-based not unlike other discriminatory and hateful slurs about: ethnicity, culture, language, religion, sexual or gender identification. I’ve read that fear is one of two primal reactions. The other is flight. Both occur in the mid-brain. The first question we answer in our mid-brain, to any stimulus, is: “What is in my best interests?”
“Fear was the hand of the devil holding a scalding hot branding iron and touching your brain and your stomach and yelling at you to run with leaden feet.” Dan Groat, Monarchs and Medicants
Being LBGT isn't a perversion, deviance, or as those data show, a life style. And it's not the mid-brain making a decision for the person. You can't be recruited to be LBGT, and you don't become "that way" if you are sexually assaulted or molested. LBGT persons don't choose to be who they are. It's hard wired. Choosing to come out or stay in the closet is a lifestyle choice, one that my brother, ex-Senator Craig, and my uncle made. Being a bigot, misogynist, racist, radically religious or member of a club, political party, or terrorist group, and a rapist, is a choice, often a learned behavior. A person can be recruited into these things and can choose not to be. It can be taught as a family value; a learned behavior. My brother and I grew up in a family that was firmly entrenched in bigotry. He died a bigot: religious, Republican, and in spite of his denial, gay. I, for some reason, made a lifestyle choice.
The governing bodies of North Carolina are not fact-checking their paranoia and fear about LBGT persons, and in the case of HB 2, transgendered persons. But they are self-recruited into their narrowly focused, group-think world-view. many politicians share these beliefs. They may say that they are making decisions using common sense. But:
At dinner with some friends who support gender equality, LGBT came up as it often does with us. (Damn Liberals!) I mentioned that If someone wants to live as the gender they feel they were born with or embrace their genetic wiring, I support their actions. I mentioned that we had watched the TV Series Transparent about a middle-aged man who has finally openly embraced the gender he has felt he was all along; a woman. I said that in one of the later episodes the transgendered person went to a gathering of gay women and was rebuffed and not welcomed. A comment at our dinner table was something like: when she (the star of the series) was a man she was a male of power and privilege and which was the reason she was shunned at the retreat. The rationale was that she was still XY and would never be XX and that she, when she was living an XY life, had been part of the oppression of XY. Which could have been true. However. . . .
I was shocked into silence for a few seconds: a rare event. I thought that of all of the people I know, these people at the dinner table were the most liberal in their support of transgendered persons. What is the difference I asked if the person still has the XY chromosome but believes they are female? They have the right to be accepted for what they believe and feel I argued. She shouldn't have been shunned. Maybe this is the rationalization that North Carolina used to say that regardless of the gender that someone wants to be and is, they must use the toilet assigned to their birth gender: XX or XY. I speculated but did not share, bigotry is bigotry.
There is a probability that I’ve sat in a stall or stood at a urinal next to a transgendered person. How would I know unless that person told me? And if they did what would it matter? It's their business. I’m late middle-age (67ish) and daily try to understand my own contradictions. It is a constant chore, but I work hard not to react immediately to words or other’s actions (labels still trigger a fight or flight reaction) but rather reflect and consider the intensity or volume of my own reaction or response. If you're XX and want to use the XY toilet or XY and want to use the XX toilet, regardless of gender identification, just don't make a mess. Leave the damn seat down!