Friday, April 8, 2016

The Co-ed Restroom Controversy

Here we have some cogent commentary on the North Carolina transgender controversy, this time from John Hinderaker at Powerline. My own remarks here.

Hinkeraker sums up the situation in North Carolina. One notes that leftist governors like Andrew Cuomo of New York and Mark Dayton of Minnesota have already banned state travel to North Carolina.

In Hinderaker’s words:

The city fathers and mothers of Charlotte, North Carolina, dived into the fray, adopting an ordinance expanding the state’s anti-discrimination laws so as to permit men and women to use bathrooms at their discretion, depending on which gender they claim to identify with at the moment.

North Carolina’s legislators were not amused. Problems with the Charlotte ordinance were obvious. First, the supposedly intended beneficiaries were transgendered people, who are extremely rare. I have never met one; have you? It is bizarre to upset millenia of bathroom practice for the sake of a handful of people who are about as numerous as unicorns.

Second, no one proposed that transgenders who wanted to use the wrong bathroom had to have notes from their psychiatrists. In the absence of any means of verification, it seems certain that perverts, rapists and child molesters will camp out in women’s rest rooms roughly 15,000 times as often as transgenders. This represents a public safety hazard.

Third, how, exactly, was the brave new world of mixed bathrooms supposed to be of practical aid to transgenders? A transgender woman may sincerely believe that she is a man, but–absent surgery which is rare, and which already would entitle him/her to use a men’s room–she still can’t use a urinal. So what, exactly, is the point?

Has the left descended into stupidity or madness? Has it become so ideologically zealous that it feels compelled to follow its ideals to the furthest extreme? Apparently, it does.

Hinderaker concludes:

There was a time when, if you had said that one of our major political parties would someday consider it a vital civil right that men be allowed to use women’s bathrooms, people would have thought you were nuts. They would have been right.

6 comments:

KCFleming said...

It's not madness, but a deliberate effort to undermine bourgeois values, and replace them with the state as the only organizing principle.

Imagine there's no family. It's easy if you try.

Wm Sears said...

They're afraid to be the first to stop clapping.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

More self-congratulatory nonsense to correct a "societal wrong" that is someone else's fault. Corrective action that creates chaos and confusion.

Sam L. said...

Also, this encourages and enables Rape Culture.

Ares Olympus said...

Interestingly last month I went to an Irish running race, and with hundreds or thousands of runners all interested in discharging those last droplets of weight-bearing pee before the race, you can imagine porta-potties and restrooms are at a premium.

Now in racing there's an ultimate sexual divide since men will more like jump into some bushes or even just stand on the side of the road to do their thing, while women don't have the same option, except with a deep squat, although I guess Olympian women who are really competitive do what they have to do.

Anyway, in my case last month, I was surprised to see a woman coming out of a men's restroom stall in a business neighboring the race, and she just smiled meekly, with a face that said "You didn't see me."

So I'm not sure if I should have been ready to object or even followed her and called out for police like a good citizen, to help keep our sexual purity intact from toilet chaos.

Or perhaps the reality is we don't want men in the woman's restrooms, while men's restrooms are by default available for men and women or whatever combination of organs and gender flavors?

At least that seems a fair solution. Girls are sugar and spice, and everything nice, so they deserve extra privacy, but if they don't need it, they can join back up with humanity.

And bold women can use urinals too, thanks to modern technology.
https://www.yahoo.com/style/learning-to-pee-standing-up-one-womans-journey-124264636138.html

Ares Olympus said...

p.s. Apparently the bathroom police are ready for action or inaction as the case may be.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/04/north-carolina-lgbt-bathrooms-hb2-enforcement
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Some police departments were still checking with their attorneys this week to determine whether they could arrest an individual who used the wrong bathroom. Because it's a civil law, using the wrong bathroom wouldn't be considered a criminal violation in itself, Hallingse from the Asheville PD points out. But the law doesn't lay out civil penalties for the violation, either, says Oakley, so police officers will have to use their best judgment when responding to complaints. Danielsen, the spokeswoman from the Greensboro PD, says officers there will try to respond with the "lowest degree of interaction" possible. "Not every response needs to result in an arrest," she says.
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But just to be safe, they might recommand all post-menopausal women shave their chin hairs at least once per month to make sure no embarressing questions are asked.