Bathroom Differences

I have no idea what it says about the USA that any news program, of any reasonable length, is devoting at least one story to who can go in what bathrooms previously identified for which people.  Is it a good thing that this is a story -- or actually a bunch of stories?

This is a hard topic to touch.  Ruth Marcus, in Sunday's Washington Post, rather despicably added at the end of her op-ed, "... as if being transgender is equivalent to a propensity to prey on children."  How do you have a dialogue about the subject when opinion columnists write right past the issue?  No one is out there saying they're afraid of actual transgender people in their bathrooms (it's the phony ones that cause the fear), but Mrs. Marcus throws that in to stay on the left side of things.

The left, at root, does not want to acknowledge that there are differences between men and women.  At least, they would be happy if nowhere, anywhere, were there any acknowledged differences whatsoever, save for Bill Clinton's bed.

But there are differences, and they're going to have to be acknowledged.

First, the disclaimer: I don't really give a good gosh-darn if I'm in a men's room and a biological guy walks in dressed up as a female, whether someone in a drag show or a sailor in an intermission from a production of "South Pacific", or a transgender person who has gone all the way short of the ultimate surgery.  And I don't really give a good gosh-darn if I'm in a men's room and a biological female walks in dressed as a man, again, regardless of circumstance.  It's 2016.  People do a lot of things, and how they're dressed walking into a men's room no longer shocks me.

But I am a man.  And while it may be 2016, and it may be the object of the left to run us all through a meat-grinder so we no longer have any differences, I am still different from a woman.  I may be 64 years old and maybe 152 pounds soaking wet, but I am stronger than most women, stronger than nearly all my age.  They do not cause me innate fear in a closed environment.

Men are built differently, have different God-given hormonal expression, and two of those expressions are vital -- we are genetically built with innately greater strength overall, and we are built to be more aggressive overall.  Plenty of exceptions abound, but until we are at a point where sexual attack reports, arrests and convictions are relatively equal between the genders, the leftiest equality hawk will have to concede that difference.

This is why Ruth Marcus's sentence is so offensive.  Start with the fact that there is no real concern about what goes on in men's rooms -- even older, smaller men like me don't feel fear in there, at least from genetic women.  At least I don't think we do.

And it isn't even the actual transgender men dressing as women that I suspect women are concerned about in women's rooms -- they might be more uncomfortable than fearful.  But where men are not fearful in men's rooms, and there really isn't any expectation of women faking being male to get into a men's room and take advantage of a vulnerable male, it absolutely is not the same for women.

Men are stronger and more aggressive.  Those lacking the morality to be civilized -- and the prisons are packed with evidence that there are plenty -- can readily take advantage of "flexibility" in bathroom laws and act in a predatory fashion.

And forget bathrooms -- when does that spread to situations like, as the article actually mentions, college roommate assignments?  We know colleges are leftist bastions, how would you like your daughter to protest being assigned a freshman roommate who only believes himself to be female, and being told by the school that she is the one who needs to be tolerant and accepting?  And when does a predatory male take advantage of that situation?

But let me get back to the real point.  There are transgender people.  It is uncomfortable for them to be put into embarrassing choice situations in areas like restroom decisions.  I truly sympathize with them.  They are not innately bad people as a result of being "T", and their affliction is not one of evil.  And for Ruth Marcus to claim that we who are concerned see actual transgender people as some kind of enemy, or great risk, is simply offensive to us.

But treating the situation in a way that allows exploitation of others to appear to accommodate the group in question isn't right either.  I haven't heard a public restroom solution that removes the apparent stigma without (A) causing great expense and (B) creating the risk of facilitating predators.

Just once, I'd like to see this discussion of a problem that is occupying news minutes in ridiculous disproportion to its incidence in society, to appear to recognize what are legitimate concerns of both points of view.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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