The Politics of Bathrooms

This cycle is and has been bizarre. We’ve gone from discussing Mexico paying for a wall, to the size of Trumps manhood, to bathrooms in North Carolina. Frankly I wish Ted Cruz would discuss Trumps massive hiring of lobbyists to fill his staff, but here we are.

My stance on the NC law itself is immaterial. “The law is a ass, a idiot” as the old Dickens saying goes. A law in either direction in this case merely creates a lightning rod. The local laws that prompted the state law obviously create far too much room for abuse by dangerous people. The state law is going to attract attention, while I suspect actually doing nothing.

But, I keep hearing on CNN (most notably this morning from Carol Costello) that there will inevitably be “backlash” to Cruz’s position, which leads me to ask: Really?

I have little more than anecdotal evidence that I won’t go into in depth, but there is, I think, good reason that the liberal take on this may simply be wrong.

Transgenderism may just be a “postmodern bridge too far” for all but the most extreme leftists. The fact that there exists a group called “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists” (TERF) would seem to bolster that point. After all, if the most extreme supporters of LBG want the T to go away, there must be something inherently different about it.

The general assumption by the left thus far has been: People became more accepting of gays, ergo they must also be more accepting of transgendered. But I don’t think this follows. They are in fact, two distinctly different issues. To oversimplify: attraction is complex and different for each person. Sir Mix-a-Lot likes big butts and cannot lie, others may prefer a thinner figure, etc.  So it’s a considerable easier sell for someone to say your attraction skews towards the same gender than it is to say you’re in the wrong body. Claiming the latter requires a certain (to borrow the literary term) “suspension of disbelief” on behalf of the listener. Claiming that you’re a girl trapped in a boy’s body and that this is somehow different from claiming you’re really Napoleon Bonaparte resurrected from the dead is really going to push that suspension to the breaking point.

Now I suspect that most people tend to engage in a minimum level of civility, that is to say that we don’t simply jump up and start arguing with people at all times. Many times we may just smile, nod, and move on because direct confrontation simply isn’t worth it. So this breaking of the suspension of disbelief may not be visible on a day-to-day basis. But here’s the deal, when people go into the voting booth, pull the curtain behind them, that level of civility is far less necessary. People begin to assess things as they are, not necessarily as civility dictates we pretend they be. So the left may be overplaying its hand here. Insisting that people believe at all times and all places that the world is as the left says it is (that up is down, man is woman and babies aren’t human) might not get public pushback, but will it get pushback in the voting booth. Only time will tell. (Trump is Teflon though, so don’t expect it to tell with him.)

8 comments to “The Politics of Bathrooms”
  1. If the Obama administration’s definition of girl/woman includes biological males who prefer dresses and make-up, and there are many biological females (including feminists) who reject feminine clothing and refuse to wear make-up, can someone show me where the overlap is?

    If we are being asked to accept that all of these people are girls/women, there must be observable groups of characteristics that they have in common that make them easily identifiable as women and distinguish them from men. What are they?

  2. There isn’t. It’s postmodernism You’re being asked to accept that we are what we say we are, with no logical proof or evidence to back it up.

    Nietzsche’s famed land “Beyond Good and Evil” as it were. Granted Nietzsche has syphilis…

  3. Pingback: News of the Week (April 24th, 2016) | The Political Hat

  4. The goal is for them to control the narrative, by being able to say and do whatever they want, while being enabled and empowered to punish anyone who thinks, says, or acts contrary to their agenda.

    It’s just a power game for the the New-Marxists to erode another aspect of Western Civilization.

  5. People are basing their view based on their view of gay rights. This is not a gay issue; it is an everybody issue. Everybody, every single person, gets to decide which facilities they use if the standard is “self-identify”. You decide. No one can police your decision. Whatever you say it is goes.

    You can’t “self-identify” if you are a taxpayer or not. Or a speeder. Or a surgeon. There are rules and authorities.

    But here, there is no bar to anyone, including the most vicious criminals. They are ‘everybodys’ too.

  6. The entire point is to make the majority of people feel unsafe.

    And therefore more vulnerable to ever-more-intrusive Federal Government Control.

    And the cycle repeats.

  7. the other would be Title IX is a big club to force transgenderism

    “The U.S. Education Department declared in 2014 that discrimination against transgender students amounts to a violation of Title IX.

    Some school districts objected to the administration’s interpretation of the law, a tension that came to a head last year in a Chicago suburb. Federal officials, responding to a transgender student’s discrimination complaint, said that Palatine Township High School District 211 was required to allow the student to change in the girls’ locker room instead of sending her down the hall to a separate facility.

    It was the first time that the Education Department found a district in violation of Title IX because of transgender issues.”

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/transgender-students-access-to-school-bathrooms-is-new-front-in-war-over-lgbt-rights/2016/02/29/ba66d676-da61-11e5-925f-1d10062cc82d_story.html

    I saw a story this morning where some gal high in the DOE was crowing about her successful efforts to force the issue.

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