Author: Amanda

Bathrooms, Hate Crimes, and the Progressive War on Women

by Amanda

I have to get this out of the way: I don’t hate transgendered people. My best friend for many years was TG. Progressives equate that to me saying, “I’m not racist because my maid is black,” but I’ll assume that anyone reading this has at least half a brain. Also I used to do a bit of cross-dressing as a teenager. I guess you could say I was gender confused. I don’t have an opinion about whether I was deranged or mentally ill. (I sure did suffer from depression.) I came across a bunch of jocks before school one morning, and they called me a fag. I thought it was funny.

Let me get another thing out of the way. I have shared a public bathroom with a TG person any number of times (in addition to my best friend) and it never bothered me. I never saw it bother anyone else, either. I’m sure I have shared a bathroom with a TG I was never aware was TG, because that person passed. These laws and regulations are useful only to protect Transgenders who do not pass.

Given that, why do I rant about these new bathroom laws? First, because they are laws. If a law does not fall under the Non-Agression Principal, then in my book, that is government overreach. Target and Planet Fitness are private businesses which have the right to make whatever bathroom, locker room, and changing room policies they want. If I don’t like it, I can shop or work out somewhere else. But once bully government gets involved in my naked spaces, I no longer have a choice. Well, I do have a choice. I can be more vulnerable to straight morons who are going to take advantage of the laws to stalk and assault women, or I can be pushed out of the public sphere, living like my great-grandmother did, or like a woman in a Muslim country.

Talk about “Get your laws off my body!”

The second thing that infuriates me about these laws is how proponents justify them: as a civil rights issue, and as a safety issue. Gender fluidity begins with internal feelings that may result in an action being taken. It may be controversial for me to say that a person can control their feelings. I happen to think it a necessary skill for every adult. But for sure a person can control their actions. So if a non-passing TG does not feel accepted in certain situations, such as employment, that person can refrain from going TG to an interview. Can an African-American refrain from being African-American? No, black people actually were “born that way.” Being African-American or a woman is a state of being; it is not possible to refrain from being that. Transgendering is a behavior. Should TGs have to constrain who they are and what they do to maintain equal treatment in society? No. Of course they should not. Nor should anyone. The point is, they CAN; African-Americans can’t.

The other justification I hear for having transgender people use the bathroom or locker room of their gender identity is that bathrooms and locker rooms are places?where non-passing TGs experience violence. Violence against TG people is horrible. It is inexcusable. It is unacceptable. A Time article dated August 17, 2015 titled: “Why Transgendered People Are Being Murdered at a Historic Rate” states there had been 15 murders of TGs up to that point in 2015, primarily TGs of color. In 2014, there were 1,359 incidents of hate violence against LGBT individuals, of which TGs were the largest share.

No one deserves to be a victim of violence. Every individual human is a child of God who has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. No one deserves to be harassed. But since we are asking women and girls to be the safe harbor for TG individuals, and to bear the brunt of straight jackasses who will inevitably abuse these?laws, how are women faring?

TGs are undoubtedly harassed, but harassment is also a fact of life for many women. When I was young, I was sexually harassed at school, at work, on public transportation, walking down the street, at the YMCA. I could go on. The last time I was harassed was a few months ago in a grocery store parking lot at noon. Does our world feel safe to women? Survey your women friends. How many look in their back seat before getting into their car? How many would go to a bar alone? How many feel safe on a walk or jog alone? Or staying at the office past business hours? How many walk through a parking garage alone without a second’s thought? Or are afraid to be at home alone?

According to the CDC, nearly one in five women has been raped in her lifetime. One in six women has been stalked. Of raped women, 40 percent experienced their first rape as children, and 12 percent were children under age 10. I say first rape because 35 percent who were raped as children were also raped as an adult. Doing the math on those numbers yields about 2 million American women raped in 1 year. Most of these women experience PTSD, and are much more likely to experience asthma, diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, frequent headaches, chronic pain, difficulty sleeping, and poor mental and physical health.

The PTSD that literally millions of female rape survivors experience is only going to be aggravated by opening up bathrooms, locker rooms, and changing rooms to biological males. There are laws against indecent exposure, and laws against voyeurism, but these laws would seem to be, nonsensically, suspended in the very places where men and women are most likely to be undressed, particularly shower or swim facilities. Our girls will be forced to endure voyeurism against themselves, and exposure to post-adolescent penises, at the very tenderest ages. Our government is not just allowing, but requiring, sexual violence against women and girls.

So are Progressives telling us it’s worth it to put millions of women and girls into trepidation and fear about being exploited, in order to protect a tiny minority of TG individuals from feeling uncomfortable? To prevent whatever percentage of a few thousand hate crimes that may occur in a changing room, bathroom, or locker room–by replacing those with an untold number of acts of voyeurism and indecent exposure against untold numbers of girls and women?

I guess the right to safety and privacy is non-existent for women and girls, unless that woman or girl was born with a penis, or pretends to have one. It’s the penis that confers the rights. If that isn’t male privilege, what is? TG behavior being equated with blackness makes it white male privilege.

There’s the Progressive war on women for you.

Two liberals text smack-down over American Sniper

A: I saw American Sniper last night. More like American’t Sniper.

Me: I thought American Sniper was really good. I loved it. I polished my nails today. My toenails look ok but my fingernails look like crap. We also saw Silver Linings Playbook and loved that. Interstellar? Not. So. Much.

A: That’s an old movie, but ya it was good. Interstellar was fine and American Sniper is a glorification of war and murder. I’m reading the book right now.

Me: I didn’t think American Sniper glorified war. Why do you say that?

A: Because Chris Kyle is portrayed as a hero. I understand that he saved Americans but he also stated he didn’t regret killing any Iraqis who were commonly referred to in the move as “f*&%ing savages.” Enjoying killing people who do not agree with you is an act of terrorism.

Me: I see what you’re saying. On the other hand, there seems to be an effort on the part of Michael Moore types to portray Al Qaida as being on the same moral footing as the US. ?Killing a kid with a drill, burning a pilot alive, beheading people. That is f*&%ing savage. Killing is bad. Killing to exact maximum suffering is worse. Making women and children act as meat shields…all these are acts of f*&%ing savages, and the American military does not occupy that same moral plane.

A: Invading a country because of reasons that were false? I would want an insurgence too. America does a pretty decent amount of torturing, themselves. How about the man that was covered in water and left on a concrete slab to die? That was a case of mistaken identity. Sure, Iraqis have done terrible things but so have Americans. That doesn’t mean that the generally peaceful population of the Middle East should be considered savage terrorists. I would hope my family, my teachers and I aren’t being portrayed as merciless snipers.

Me: I never agreed with the Iraq war. You can be sure that you, your family and teachers are being portrayed as infidels who deserve death. You’d have probs been married off years ago and would not likely be allowed in school. They make movies out of their atrocities. They sell them and post them online and play them on TV. I travelled in Turkey for a month. I loved it and I loved Turks. It’s not ignorance from me. The important thing is to see evil for what it is, and if you don’t, you empower evil. Evil can’t be turned back with rainbows and Care Bears.

A: American Sniper is making money off of American propaganda. Kyle is not a hero. He is a good shot. The bottom line is he said he enjoyed killing people that had no bad intentions towards him (as well as people that did). Where you get the idea of rainbows and Care Bears is unknown to me. Iraq is protecting itself just like America. I didn’t say I wanted to live there but America is plenty f*&%ed up. I still have things to be afraid of that I shouldn’t have to be. Marriage is also a massively different cultural phenomenon that’s hard to compare with the west. Moore is a great director who argues his points with valid intellectual evidence. It seems Eastwood’s goal was making a fortune off of portraying war as a cultural triumph.

Me: I didn’t read Kyle’s book. So you know more about him than I do. America has problems, the American military has problems, but comparing them to the barbarism that happens over there is totally wrong. Michael Moore is a propagandist. If you think America is on the same moral footing with Islamic terrorists, then he has successfully propagandized you. Yet you wouldn’t want to live there… Because it’s run by ?bunch of woman-hating pedophile murderers perhaps? This is the problem with moral relativism: suddenly that’s an ok society. Their values are ‘just a little different.’ You have to be a LOT different to create a market for viewing videos of burning someone alive or having sex with 9 year-old girls.

A: I understand things are going wrong there. But America is not helping. Thinking it’s ok to want to kill people–any people–is sympathizing with acts of terror and in this case is extremely islamaphobic. Kyle was doing a job directed by the US Army and he happened to be very good at it. This does not make him a hero. It is not a good thing to be “the most lethal sniper in US history.” We should not be led to believe in military ‘glory.’

Me: I think he saved a lot of lives. Understand, my quarrel is not with you. Moral relativism is my target. It is evil, but believes in no evil. You can read about the context of the USA’s involvement with terrorists, but I remember it. I remember it back into the 1980s. I was very aware of what was going on and like most people I didn’t think it mattered. But they declared war on us and brought their violence to our shores. The US moved the war back out of our country and in to someone else’s. You can believe that’s wrong if you want, but they declared war on us. And with their torture, beheadings, mayhem, and movie-making thereof, you think Clint Eastwood is glorifying violence and murder? The US does everything it can to avoid hurting civilians, but the terrorists’ main target IS civilians. They have no reverence for human life at all and it is absolutely preposterous for anyone to be apologists for them. Whoever taught you to do so is badly misled. Why defend the indefensible?

A: I’m not defending terrorists. The majority of the Middle East is peaceful. The majority of the United States is peaceful and that does not include Kyle. You can’t “think” he saved a lot of lives. I am aware he was an asset to the American military. If he enjoyed killing people based on culture he is at the very least an ethnocentric asshole. The Middle East is generally full of terrible people but the USA can be forgiven for torturing innocent civilians. It’s ok because it’s the greatest country in the world!

Me: I see. They declared war on us and attacked us, but we’re the ethnocentric ones. Their main purpose is to torture and kill civilians, but because the US sometimes accidentally kills or negligently tortures a civilian, that makes us the same as them? No we are not the same. Our values are totally different. Our values are superior. You call that ethnocentric; I call that knowing right from wrong.

A: Um ok but the terrorist attack came from Al Qaida which was based in Afghanistan. We invaded Iraq under the false idea they were harboring weapons of mass distraction (which America does all the time). There are plenty of people here with the immoral goal of torturing and killing which by no means describes the majority of the Middle East.

Me: That’s a really good point. I felt even at the time that it seemed fake, and I was against it. The fact that the US was either dishonest or incorrect seems to have hampered our efforts ever since. Still, in hindsight, the USA is on the right side of history in this struggle.

You know how in the movie Chris Kyle’s dad tells him there are sheep, there are wolves, and there are sheep dogs? Well, I think you’re a sheep dog.