For Transgender Americans, Legal Battle Over The Restrooms

[stephaniec]

For Transgender Americans, Legal Battle Over The Restrooms

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/27/opinion/for-transgender-americans-legal-battles-over-restrooms.html?_r=transgender

The Opinion Pages
For Transgender Americans, Legal Battles Over Restrooms


By THE EDITORIAL BOARDJULY 27, 2015  136 


Gavin Grimm Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times

"Gavin Grimm sat quietly in the audience last November as dozens of parents at a school board meeting in Gloucester County, Va., demanded that he be barred from using the boys' restrooms at school. They discussed the transgender boy's genitals, expressed concern that he might expose himself and cautioned that being in a men's room would make the teenager vulnerable to rape. One person called him a "freak."

When Gavin, 16, got his turn at the podium, he was remarkably composed. "I didn't ask to be this way," Gavin said. "All I want to do is be a normal child and use the restroom in peace"

[Tessa James]

I read the article, watched the video and was wowed by this young man's ability to be articulate and calm in the face of adult nonsense and hysteria.  Leave it to the young people to show us the way, and they are doing just that.  Student's all over this country are standing up, often with their parents and faculty behind them, for the simple right to use a public facility.

How very revealing some of those adults are about their ignorance.  They remind me of a past when kids would giggle and laugh if anything related to sex came up in class.  Parents are the ones who need to grow up and get over it now!
Their most frequently used weapons seem to be fear and ignorance, sigh.  Intersexed people with ambiguous genitalia have always existed and maybe another fear campaign to light up around bathrooms.  Far better to recognize the truth is that human diversity has always included transgender people and get over it.  To me the real pervs are those folks so riddled with fear and insecurity about what they do not understand and yet seek to publicly bully.

[suzifrommd]

Oh, I have a horrible feeling this is not going to turn out well for us. I really hope I'm wrong, but expecting a Federal judge to accept our gender identity as a matter of law seems like a long shot.

[KristalB]

The same BS is going on up here in Canada. It's all absurd.

When did washrooms become a sexualized place? I think the reason we have segregated washrooms in the first place had to do with the comfort of the user and not to keep people safe. ie a man can stand at a urinal and not have to worry that a woman will see his penis and a woman can stand in front of a mirror and adjust and powder without feeling like she's being inspected by the opposite gender. All rather modest in nature. But surely not because anyone thought "sex" would happen. lol

I was asked by a saleswoman in a department store which change-room I'd like to use, the men's or women's? I asked whom she thought would be more comfortable with me. She took me strait to the women's change-room. I think that says it all.