North Carolina’s House Bill 2 got stuck in my mind a few
days ago when I stopped at a gas station to use their restroom and I was
surprised to see they’d renamed the men’s and women’s single stall bathrooms
since last month. They are now both “unisex.” That solves a problem on single
stall bathrooms and that common-sense solution has the side benefit of helping
to keep lines from forming by the formerly women’s side. After leaving the gas station
I spent the next ten minutes wondering why the owners took it upon themselves
to make the change. Is someone in the owner’s family transgender? Did they have
an incident that triggered a demand that the ‘disturbing the peace’ law be enforced?
Are they just compassionate business owners who believe in being politically proactive? Why, why, why didn’t I have the guts to ask about the unisex signs?
Two years ago I never would have
ever guessed this topic would come up in our presidential election cycle. When
I was young it was ‘whites only’ bathrooms that they fought about all the way
up to the Supreme Court. Ted Cruz is on a rampage about men in “girls”
bathrooms---he never calls them “women’s” restrooms---and last night Trump said,
“Just leave things the way they are” because it would cost businesses too much
to make changes. Then this morning he flip-flopped to match the Republican Party
Line and he said it should be left up to each state if they want to change the
law, it shouldn’t be a federal issue. Ya, Donald, if they’d done that with
‘whites only’ bathrooms, drinking foundations and lunch counters guess what the
South would still be doing today. And now the United Kingdom and a handful of
other countries have issued travel advisers warning their LGBT communities
against going to North Carolina and Mississippi. I’m not sure, but I think this
is a first for the USA to have other countries declare parts of our country as
unsafe for tourist travel.
There probably isn’t much middle ground between where each
of us stands on House Bill 2 issues. We either think it’s needed or it’s over-kill
but I’d like to know what they’re going to do down in North Carolina to implement the new law. Do they expect
people to have their birth certificates with them at all times in case someone
questions if the sex you look is in opposition to what they suspect you might
be hiding? I ask myself how I would feel if Caityn/Bruce Jenner came into a restroom
I was using. I've seen other caregivers like I was bring their husbands into the
ladies room and it never bothers me nor did it ever appear to have bothered
other women when I did it. Many even went out of their way to be nice. How would a transgender be any different than a handicapped guy in a woman’s restroom? I
ask myself how I’d feel if I had a transgender son who got beat up a few times
for being in a men’s bathroom while dressed like a woman.
Life was simpler back in the days when people in the LGBT
community were still in the closet---simpler for many of us but vastly more
complicated for those who suffered in those closets. I truly believe that someday
(within 10 years) science will figure out how to test for and correct what goes wrong in the
gestation period that causes a baby to be born wired in their brains
differently than their sex organs. And do it while a baby is still in the womb. But until the research brings us to that
point is it fair to expect transgenders to live life suffering in silence or with
daily ridicule just so the rest of us don’t have to face our prejudices and
fears? Knowledge is power but that doesn’t mean newly acquired knowledge doesn’t challenge our
core beliefs from time to time and require us to grow...or be left behind on the
wrong side of history. ©
