Cisgender Men Are Way More Dangerous to Women Than Trans People
Donald Trump has officially rolled back previous instruction that public schools allow trans men and women to use the bathroom pertaining to their gender identity.
I never thought sharing a bathroom would be up for such debate, but legislation like this rides on the back of some presumed threat if bathrooms become trans-inclusive.
Read More: How Natalie Egans Explains Transgender To People Who Don’t “Get” It
According to the Student Physical Privacy Act in Kansas, “Allowing students to use restrooms, locker rooms, and showers that are reserved for students of a different sex will create potential embarrassment, shame, and psychological injury to students.” It totally ignores the embarrassment, shame, and injury that trans individuals face all the time.
Not to mention, in the quest to make sure that trans people are peeing in the right place, anyone who exists outside of our rigid ideas of gender becomes a target too. Take the woman who was mistaken for trans and harassed in a Walmart bathroom, for example.
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The American Family Association wants you to believe trans-inclusive bathrooms are “exactly how sexual predators get access to their victims.” The only issue: there is literally no evidence of that.
80% of rapes are committed by people known by their victims, meaning not strangers in bathrooms but family members, friends, and acquaintances. And rapists are usually cisgender heterosexual men, most of whom never spend a single day in jail. So who are lawmakers seeking to protect if they’re more worried about rapes that haven’t occurred yet than rapes that actually do occur?
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There’s also this idea that rapists will pretend to be trans, as if these aren’t public single-stall bathrooms we’re talking about. The kind of person who would perform as trans just to rape someone is going to feel motivated to rape someone regardless. Bathroom access isn’t going to make or break a rapist’s motivation to commit a crime.
Seems like the bigger threat than trans-inclusive bathrooms is the average cisgender hetero-identifying man. This whole bathroom debate just opens trans individuals up to harassment and violence, while we worry about threats that haven’t even happened. Give me a break.
