In the Bathroom

In the news everywhere these days is controversy about bathrooms.

What?

Yes, bathrooms.

North Carolina's HB2 (you can find a bit of explanation here, for example) requires that trans individuals use the rest room of their birth gender, rather than the gender with which they identify.

I have many angry feelings about this. Most of my anger is because there appears to be some kind of fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be trans. Transgender is an integral aspect of one's person, going to the very question of who one is, of what gender one is -- in soul, if not in body. (The body fails the soul, so many times, in small and large ways.) What transgender is NOT, is a boy waking up one day and just deciding to be and dress like a girl in order to use the ladies' room, in the hopes of being able to take advantage of the women in there.

Not to mention, there is also described in the media some kind of (irrational and ridiculous) fear that trans people are in fact pedophiles and children in bathrooms are in danger. For pete's sake. I can't even justify that with a response.

I am not afraid of trans women in the bathroom. I welcome any person who wants to be within the sisterhood of women. It's not easy. Why isn't it easy? Because so often, we are afraid of men. The ones who would hurt us, not (just) in the ladies' room, but anywhere and everywhere.

Keep transgender people out of the ladies room, for our "safety"?  No. How about finding a way to protect us from predators, wherever they may be?

From Facebook.