North Carolina struck down Charlotte’s nondiscrimination law and then decided that people must use the public restrooms that match their birth-assigned gender (based on outer appearances, and sometimes some guesswork). Thus, the need for a "bathroom bill." There are so many problems with this it's hard to know where to start.
Bathroom Bills Are Creating More Issues Than They Claim To Solve
By A few weeks ago, a man followed Jessica Rush into the women’s restroom at the Baylor Medical Center in Frisco. When Rush noticed the man behind her, she thought she was about to be attacked. That is, after all, the nightmare situation that politicians inevitably mention as justification for their stance against anti-discrimination ordinances: men following women into bathrooms and attacking them. But the man who followed Rush wasn’t dressed up as a women—which seems to be what some politicians think being a transgender woman means—he was checking to see if Rush was a woman. The man, who left once he’d confirmed that Rush met his standards of femininity, offers a peek into the world that “bathroom bills” are encouraging.
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So the pushback against non-discrimination ordinances isn’t just a solution looking for a problem; it’s a problem-less solution creating actual problems. Navigating public spaces is often dangerous for people who aren’t heterosexual or cisgender. According to a 2013 survey conducted by the Williams Institute at UCLA, 70 percent of the 93 transgender and gender non-conforming respondents based in Washington, D.C., reported experiencing some form of harassment when attempting to use public restrooms. Their experiences ranged from being denied access to restrooms, being questioned about their gender by strangers, having the police called on them, and even being physically attacked or sexually assaulted. That’s why non-discriminatory laws exist in the first place, to ensure that people who aren’t heterosexual and cisgender can exist safely in public without harassment. As bathroom laws and the accompanying debates sweep the nation with unchecked “facts,” they only mobilize people like the man who thought it was his civic duty to follow Rush into the women’s restroom.
In solving the problem of the non-problem creating hysteria among a certain group of people (thank you, Republicans), perhaps we should look at what science tells us. It does weigh in: What Science Says About the Bathroom Debate.
Your genes don't care who you share a bathroom with, but your politicians do
Want to see a living experiment in what happens when traditional gender lines are truly blurred? Forget North Carolina or Mississippi or any of the places in the U.S. where politicians have made the question of which person uses which bathroom an unlikely cultural flash point.
Take a look instead at Samoa—the tiny island nation that can teach the world’s most powerful democracy a thing or two about the basic business of human sexuality. Samoa, like the U.S. and every other country in the world, is home to plenty of men and plenty of women, but, unlike any other country in the world, it’s also home to the fa’afafine.
The fa’afafine are, nominally, boys—with a boy’s anatomy and a boy’s chromosomes and, therefore, the “boy” box ticked on their birth certificate.
But the fa’afafine are something more too. They’re typically gay, yes, but they think and act and dress and feel almost entirely “in the manner of a woman,” which is what fa’afafine means. They are thus considered—even embraced as—a third sex.
