By Irene F. Starkehaus -
It's happening in Europe. It's happening in the United States as well. Bathrooms are the new target for the Left's political crusading. According to Maggie Lit of Campus Reform online, if you happen to go into a bathroom at the University of Bristol in the UK, you are likely to notice a sign posted by the LGBT+ Society that offers the following advice to patrons:
If you're in a public bathroom and you think a stranger's gender does not match the sign on the door, follow these steps: 1. Don't worry about it, they know better than you.
In Des Moines, Iowa, two men have gone to court and have won the right to use ladies rooms in public places while a third man lost his battle to use the women's facilities at the YMCA in Burlington, Iowa.
These are just three of the growing list of examples that illustrate the Democrat Party's legitimate War on Women by insisting that we must protect a person's individual right to urinate in any lavatory of his choosing regardless of physical reality of his gender. And can you believe the devolution of our culture is such that bathrooms are actually considered hegemonic paradigms that must be destroyed? Well, I guess they are. I swear that the Left is just making stuff up now.
From the LGBT+ perspective, a transgendered individual should not be made to use bathrooms that are segregated by something as specious and ephemeral as genitalia. If it makes a transgendered individual uncomfortable urinating in a room with people who are biologically the same sex, then society must adapt to accommodate his anxiety and allow him to pick whichever room makes him feel more at ease. If you – a hegemonic heterosexual – feel uncomfortable urinating in a room with the biological opposite sex, that's your hang up. It shows how intolerant and phobic you are. Maybe you should stay home and let more open minded people take care of things from now on. And you call yourself a feminist.
'Tis an interesting twist on our road to moral relativism that we are at the genesis of bathroom anarchy. The finger wag brought to us by the LGBT community is about to challenge the tolerance of people who probably thought they were otherwise "freethinking". Thus we bear witness to what shall become the first noticeable fissure in the coalition between the LGBT community and women's rights organizations.
Let me ask you something. If I grew to believe that I'm the Queen of England or if I believed since childhood that I was born to be the Queen of England, does it follow that I am the Queen of England?
Right. The mere act of wishing to be the Queen does not make it so. Furthermore, if I could force the whole of society to refer to me as Queen Elizabeth though they can clearly see that I'm not, then perhaps I have managed to induce some kind of mass psychosis i.e. the emperor has no clothes. And while that's something worth noting and maybe even studying, I still wouldn't be allowed to use her bathroom even if I thought I knew better than her.
Given that line of reasoning, if a man puts on a dress and decides that he is a woman, does his outfit somehow transform him into a woman? Better still – and this is the more relevant point to why this trend toward bathroom mobocracy is so troubling – if a man puts on a dress, does it necessarily follow that he must automatically identify as a woman? Does his simple act of entering a ladies room signal that he is now a card carrying member of the LGBT+ community and that no physical or psychological harm can come to the biological women who might also want to use the facility?
In considering who the main target of the LGBT toilet crusade is, this may represent the first concrete evidence that a War on Women actually exists. The bathroom….that is to say, the ladies room is not some random construct of the Middle Ages that was put in place by bigots to keep women segregated and unequal. Quite the opposite, actually. It is a relatively modern invention and it was created with the expressed purpose of liberating women from their confinement.
So the story goes – and whether this is whole story, I couldn't say for sure, but Public Broadcasting sure seems to think it is, so who am I to judge – that Harry Gordon Selfridge, American born businessman who rose to a position of prominence in the UK by duplicating the Marshall Field shopping experience in London, developed the idea for a ladies bathroom so that women could be out of their homes for extended lengths of time.
It seems almost surreal in this day and age that a woman could be made house dependent by simply depriving her of the privacy she needs to function away from the home. Prior to the invention of women's toilets, a lady could only venture out for as long as her bladder would permit. As old fashioned as it sounds, the lack of segregated bathrooms had the effect of limiting behavior in terms of travelling, shopping, dining, gathering, meeting, exchanging ideas. So let this be understood, something like the presence of men in the ladies restroom can create the unexpected consequence of limiting a woman's access to equal opportunities in education, the work place, etc. We know that a lack of reserved bathroom access can suppress women because it has in the past.
The most troubling aspect of this whole situation is that the LGBT community is going to win their little toilet battle in War on Women because no one has the time, patience or resources to argue on a case by case basis about toilets. Progressives will erode public opinion about this issue for the sheer self-indulgence of seeing whether they can, but who is going to police the situation when there is an inevitable uptick in sexual assault connected with transgender bathroom choice? Where can this possibly lead but to tyranny?
Will there be a move to register transgendered men and women so that they might legally use bathrooms reserved for the opposite sex? Is that how it will work? Will transgendered individuals be assigned a license? Okay, then what? A necessary violation of privacy like cameras in the ladies room?
Or will women instead opt to stay home rather than deal with the drama and oppression that progressives have brought to their bathrooms? Leading to limitations on college choices. Limitations on career choices. Limitations on travel choices. Limitations on their ability to meet, assemble, exchange ideas. And all brought to you by the Democrat Party's War on Women.
