Sometimes all satire has to do is hold up a mirror to reality.
Although in reality, the subtext isn’t “use a different bathroom” but rather “don’t use a public restroom, don’t come out in public, move out of town/state.” “Are you uncomfortable enough that you’ll leave us normal people alone now?”
Yes. You’re depressingly right. Also while I don’t want to generalize the transgender people I’ve known want to pass as the gender they identify with. They want to look like “normal people”, as if that term meant anything. And they were uncomfortable, if not afraid, even before this became a hotly debated issue.
That why I believe that for the people who started all this there’s also a layer of “We lost the same-sex marriage fight so let’s find somebody else to pick on”.
Rambling anecdote follows:
One firm I freelanced at for a while had several loos for its thirty or forty staff. These were single user bathrooms, and they were situated between floors on either side of the building. The building was once a pair of Georgian townhouses with doorways knocked between the two sides, and the loos were halfway up (or down) the staircases between floors.
As a freelancer, some days I’d be working on one floor, sometimes on another; sometimes on one side of the building, sometimes on the other. If they’d had a simple arrangement — say Gents on one side, Ladies on the other, or maybe alternating — it would have been easy to keep track of which loo to use. But they had some loos designated Gents, some as Ladies, and some as Unisex, for no earthly reason that I could see, and no pattern to their layout. It was just something one had to live with, and maybe if one was a regular employee with a set place to work, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But as it was, I had to stop to check the doors every time I went to a loo.
I ended up spending a month or so there, and the inevitable happened. I’d determined that the nearest loo was unisex while I was working in the studio on the ground floor, so I started using that while I was working there, not bothering to check after a while. I came back a while later, and the studio had been moved up a couple of floors. I continued using the loo I thought was unisex, but it turned out that I’d miscounted the half-staircases and I ended up going into the Ladies above that Unisex, which caused some embarrassment when I emerged one day and the female account manager who had been about to try the door had apoplexy at the sight of big masculine me coming out of the room.
The thing is, as I said, there was no difference at all between the layout of the loos or their facilities. They could only be used by a single occupant at a time, so there was no real reason to differentiate them. And they had Unisex loos there anyway, so why didn’t the firm just make them all Unisex?
Actually, there was one difference between the Gents & Unisex and the Ladies there: the Ladies had pot pourri.
Were I from NC, I’d be writing my elected officials to inquire why they thought discriminating against LGBT folks was a higher priority than, oh, I don’t know let’s pick something…maybe jobs in the local economy? Perhaps the crime rate in underserved communities? Or perhaps the underserved communities themselves? Or maybe the destruction of the local environment? Or maybe a thousand other things, that don’t directly discriminate against others…but no.
What makes this worse is that there are other legislatures doing even stupider things that are, amazingly, even less connected to an understanding of priority than the Bathroom Bill. The Oklahoma legislature comes to mind… (and yes, I know that particular bill was vetoed):
When you can’t actually fix the poor educational system and bad economy of your southern/near-southern state, you get yourself re-elected by passing or at least suggesting social laws that only appeal to the basest grumblings of the lowest common denominator of voters.
You attack abortion rights with building codes. You attack gay people by “protecting religious liberty.” You attack transgender people with “bathroom privacy and safety” laws.
“Praise the lord and pass the unconstitutional law.”
As usual the same people who demand “small government” have no qualms about trying to legislate other people’s lives.
I had hoped the NC debacle would tone down the appetite for “bathroom bills” in Tennessee and for a while it looked like it did. A bill failed to pass in the regular legislative session but now some lawmakers are calling for a special session just to try and pass a “bathroom bill”.
I hope the majority of voters realize what an unnecessary waste all this is but I admit the possibility that the majority of voters are at least as stupid as the people they’ve elected.
And in the shadows of this statement, an orange-haired bringer of destruction and chaos awaits the next five minute period to fill with outlandish accusations and demagoguery.
Just clued-in that Bill Watterson grew up in Chagrin Falls, OH…
It’s never gonna stop, you know…
Stupid bigots are a part of the human condition.
Were gonna have to debate God’s will for bathrooms and other inane shit with idiots on a national level for the foreseeable future.
Remember that monster with 12 broodyoung who trundled through Target screaming hellfire and brimstone? 12. Her twelve little stupid apostles are as full of high fructose corn syrup and bullshit as she is.
And obviously they are getting the good word out. To other dumbfucks. Who raise a Cheeto dust covered fist in solidarity.
In the European news now: 11 USA states to the court about/because of the letter from Obama to the schools about giving people the freedom of choice. Correct?
Arizona just joined Texas and a few other leading states in filing for the removal of the President’s anti-transgender bathroom declaration.
As an Arizona resident, I am sadly not surprised that our fine leadership is putting its foot where its mouth is.
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