Arizona bill seeks to tie bathroom use to birth gender, restricting transgender rights (Vancouver Sun)

A lot of talk is made of recent GLBT progress — witness the rapid growth in support for marriage equality in just the past few years here in America — but more often than not these measures of progress only affect transgender people tangentially, if at all. Certainly there have been causes for celebration in the past few years, such as President Obama adding protections for gender identity for federal hiring and appointing transgender people as advisers and members of the Democratic National Committee, but transgender concerns and rights still aren’t nearly as visible as things like the struggle for marriage equality.

Two decades ago, as Bill Clinton began his presidency and we had the first significant recoil from the cultural conservatism of the Reagan era, sexual orientation began to be a less problematic issue for many. The “gay panic” that started with the whole Anita Bryant debacle in the seventies, fueled significantly by the misperception of AIDS as a “gay disease” in its early years (and President Reagan waiting far too long to address the issue, an unpardonable slight), began to fade away, but throughout the nineties, and even into the first years of the new millennium, there was a strong undercurrent within the GLBT community that people had to “look straight” and “act straight” in order to gain acceptance. I haven’t picked up an issue of The Advocate in several years, but back when I was at the University of Toledo I read it quite frequently, and flipping through the pages you would hardly ever see a transgender person, or a person of size, or anyone who didn’t fit “the look” seen in practically every other magazine of the time, either in the articles or the advertisements. You could come out of the closet, but only if you didn’t look or act like you were ever in the closet in the first place.

This has gotten better over the past few years, but there’s still a lot of work to be done, especially when it comes to raising awareness of the issues transgender people face, both in America and around the world. We can’t afford to overlook the struggles that gay, lesbian, bisexual and pansexual people still face, just as we need to continue to fight the racism and sexism that is still far too common in our culture. Still, the fact that such an elementary issue as bathroom usage can cause not just this kind of publicity, but the kind of stereotypical and hateful response that prompted State Rep. John Kavanagh of Arizona to introduce and defend his bathroom-use bill, shows that there still needs to be a lot of consciousness-raising and education done on the issues that transgender people, and genderqueer people as a whole, are facing.

Let me start by saying that, as important and personal as issues of gender identity and expression are to me, this particular avenue of entry to the issue is one that is being forced upon me based on what’s in the news. I don’t think any sane person could call me a prude, but for all that I talk openly about issues of sex and sexuality, bathrooms, and more specifically the primary reason we all use them, kind of gross me out. I’m somewhat uncomfortable trying to handle this particular area of gender identity and expression, but this is the hot topic right now, so I’ll do my best and step around the more unseemly aspects of this conundrum whenever possible.

Really, that gets to my first real hangup about this whole issue, which is why we’re making such a big deal about a place where, in my experience, most people want to get in and get out as quickly as possible and don’t interact with one another unless someone has to reach over to use the paper towel dispenser. Even at a place you know well, using a public restroom is always a huge crapshoot (pardon the pun) because you never know what the last person who used that particular facility did. You go to a public restroom in a hurry because you need to do something that needs to be done in a hurry if you don’t want a really bad accident, and then when you’re done you try to get out of there as quickly as possible so you don’t pick up other people’s germs. In my experience, the stereotype of women using a washroom as an informal gathering place to talk away from the menfolk is completely overblown, and if it ever was true then modern developments, like being able to surreptitiously text friends at the table and having to go outside to smoke, have probably significantly decreased how often this happens nowadays.

What galls me the most about this particular case in Arizona is how the reasons being used for this proposed legislation cut right to the same misconceptions and fear-mongering that social conservatives have been using towards non-heterosexuals and non-cisgendered people since before I was born. It’s bad enough that this bill identifies “bathroom gender” as what’s on the birth certificate — so even those who have had gender reassignment surgery and legally changed their gender are still forced to use the bathroom of the gender they were assigned at birth — but John Kavanagh saying that people shouldn’t be able to use bathrooms based on “what [they] think [they] are” cuts right to the chase and shows that Kavanagh, like so many other social conservatives, do not even believe in the concept of gender identity. For them, the mere presence of a penis or a vagina — never mind those who are born with indeterminate sexual organs — is enough to make an irrefutable judgment on what’s inside a person and how that person should behave. These are the same people who would look at the snow outside my window right now and proclaim that snow in springtime “proves” that there is no such thing as climate change. When they make their tautologies  so personal as to claim power to define someone’s identity for them, though, that is a deeply personal attack and a violation of the most basic levels of respect and dignity.

As if Kavanagh couldn’t get any worse, he then goes on to state that anti-discrimination laws for restrooms could serve as a cover for pedophiles. This is the same stereotypical slippery slope argument that’s been used for decades not just against genderqueer people, but non-heterosexuals as well, that anyone who breaks the heterosexual “norm” must therefore be a “sexual deviant” in all other possible ways, from kink all the way to pedophilia. It is as offencive now as it was back then, and the growing support for marriage equality in America shows that now that most people have gotten to know non-heterosexuals and have seen that (gasp!) they’re just like everyone else, people are realizing how incorrect and completely foolish that argument was for gays, lesbians, bisexuals and pansexuals. Gender identity and expression are still significantly different from sexual orientation, though, and I don’t know that people’s perceptions of non-cisgendered people have changed as much as they have for non-heterosexuals.

I sometimes see this stereotype when I’m out shopping and parents pull their children away from me as we pass, and it’s one of the few things people do to me that genuinely bothers me. If you’re an adult and you choose not to associate with me because of my gender identity and expression, that’s your loss. That’s your right, though, and more power to you for exercising it. When a person pulls their children away from someone because of their gender identity or expression, or their sexual orientation, or the colour of their skin, or what have you, that is a far different thing. That is teaching that child to be intolerant, to put fear in that child of “the other” that, if left unchecked, will evolve into hatred, and that is precisely what leads not just to dumbheaded bills like the proposed Arizona restroom legislation, but violence against those who break “the norm,” up to and including murder.

As I’ve made more and more genderqueer friends, I’m led to wonder if we just need to get rid of the old binary bathroom system altogether. (Some colleges and universities with genderqueer students have done this, and it hasn’t led to any serious problems I’ve heard of.) Having a single bathroom for all people to use, regardless of gender identity or expression, would solve far more problems than it would create. The only problem would be getting rid of urinals to prevent problems of possible genital exposure, but I’ve never understood why this hasn’t been a problem for cisgender men in the first place. I’m surprised more people like Kavanagh haven’t proposed “gay only” restrooms to solve the “problem” of homosexual men possibly looking at your package when you’re peeing and “what we all know that could lead to.” Seriously, urinals are disgusting, so just put everyone into a stall with a locking door so none of us have to see any of that stuff. (Fun fact: at that private school I went to, the stalls in the high school student restrooms didn’t have doors, so you had to do your business where everyone could see you. Yeah, and people wonder why I have so many issues?)

Kavanagh says that his proposed bill “simply restores the law of society: Men are men and women are women. For a handful of people to make everyone else uncomfortable just makes no sense.” No, Mr. Kavangh, but close-minded hate-mongering jerks are close-minded hate-mongering jerks, and you are part of that handful of people making everyone else uncomfortable by whipping out your intolerance and forcing everyone to look at it. Go back under the rock you crawled out from under, and let the rest of us pee and poop in peace.