I have a new thought on the "bathroom bill" making its way across various American cities in recent years.
For those of you not in the know, the "bathroom bill" involves any variant on this theme: permitting 'transgendered' people to use whichever gendered bathroom with which they identify. The opponents are concerned that, since public areas (unlike workplaces) won't be able to keep track of their customers, any person (usually male in the example) can decide that he's going to pretend to be female that day just to get into the ladies' room.
Proponents argue that a man who wants to rape a woman is unlikely to do it in the ladies' room where they can be easily discovered and multiple women might overwhelm him. But, frankly, he doesn't have to rape her to do her harm. Men have been caught hiding cell phones in a bathroom to record women undressing and then selling the video to pornography sites. (Are you a porn actress? Are you *sure* you're not?) There is also a growing problem in society in which a strange man gets hold of some partial-undressed picture that a teen girl carelessly left on an unlocked profile and using it as blackmail to make her send him nude pictures and pictures of her engaging in sex acts. If a man can go right into a ladies' room for no other reason than that he claims to be female today, such material will be much more accessible.
But that's all beside my actual point. None of those thoughts are all that new. This is the new thought:
Proponents claim that life is hard for a male-to-female transgendered person, being not safe to use the men's room and not allowed to use the women's room. They fear that angry and disgusted men will attack them in the relative privacy of the men's room. For them, I have this question:
If the "bathroom bill" is in effect in a given locality, what's to prevent those angry and disgusted men from following you into the ladies' room?
What a mess.
