Today, an appeals court in Virginia said, in essence, "The fuck are you wasting our time for? Go shit where you want." The ruling says that a transgender boy can take a dump in his high school men's room, and that five states, including motherfuckin' North Carolina, have to allow the same.
The decision itself is like a primer on how this situation gets so fucked up. In consultation with the parents, the school in Virginia was totally cool with Gavin Grimm using the boy's room. He was getting hormone therapy, identified as male, and, really, fuck it, piss wherever you want. He "used this restroom without incident for about seven weeks. [Grimm]’s use of the boys’ restroom, however, excited the interest of others in the community, some of whom contacted the Gloucester County School Board (the Board) seeking to bar [Grimm] from continuing to use the boys’ restroom." Do you get it? The kids just didn't fucking care. But someone told a parent and then everything went batshit.
There was a school board meeting which went about as well as expected. "Many of the speakers displayed hostility to [Grimm], including by referring pointedly to him as a 'young lady.' Others claimed that permitting [Grimm] to use the boys’ restroom would violate the privacy of other students and would lead to sexual assault in restrooms. One commenter suggested that if the proposed policy [of forcing students to shit in the bathroom of the sex they were born with] were not adopted, non-transgender boys would come to school wearing dresses in order to gain access to the girls’ restrooms."
Putting aside the charming notion that every transgender person is automatically suspected to be a rapist in waiting, what's actually true is that the girls didn't want Grimm peeing in their bathroom because they saw him as he was: as a transgender male or, you know, a boy. And having a boy pissing in the girls' room made the girls uncomfortable. That ended up stigmatizing Grimm, causing him not to piss at school except when he could get to the single stall in the nurse's room, causing him to get multiple urinary tract infections.
The dumbfuckery involved in this whole dispute leads to this discussion of teenage genital exposure, in a concurring opinion by one of the judges: "Moreover, students’ unintentional exposure of their genitals to others using the restroom has already been largely, if not entirely, remedied by the alterations to the school’s restrooms already undertaken by the Board. To the extent that a student simply objects to using the restroom in the presence of a transgender student even where there is no possibility that either student’s genitals will be exposed, all students have access to the single-stall restrooms."
You got that? It's kind of a brilliant solution. If you have a problem pissing in a urinal with a transgender student present, that's on you, not the trans kid. So you go piss in the private john. But, frankly, if you're waving your dong around in the boy's room, you're probably the problem. And if you're checking out the dongs while they're pissing, well, you probably have some introspection you need to take care of that has nothing to do with your gender and everything to do with your shortcomings.
Oh, conservatives have their underwear in a wedgie about this whole thing, as if it's some cataclysmic fight to cling to precious gender identity (when, really, one of the things that transgender identity does is, to an extent, reify gender constructions, which ought to appeal to conservatives. [Sorry. That's the post-structuralist professor speaking. Back to the rudeness]). Over on Real Clear Politics, idiot writer Heather Wilhelm writes idiotically, "Bathroom law opponents 'are crusading against a tiny minority that poses no real threat,' Jillian T. Weiss, a transgender rights lawyer and activist, wrote in Wednesday’s USA Today. In a way, she’s correct: Demonizing transgender people is unfair in any light. But Weiss also misses the bigger picture behind the bathroom brouhaha. It’s not a fight against people. It’s a fight about reality, and whether the government can dictate a certain version of it. Ultimately, it’s a fight about freedom of thought."
Really? It's not just about shitting where you feel comfortable? It's not about people going into a bathroom stall and locking it so they can drop a deuce in peace? No, says Wilhelm, it's about the guvmint getting all up in yore bidness: "If the government agrees that trans men and women can access the bathrooms of their choice, they are officially validating the view that gender is no more than what you feel or believe it to be."
Except that gender dysphoria is not just a "feeling," like, "Oh, today I shall have ice cream for lunch just to be a bit naughty" or a belief like, "Man, I just love Ariana Grande, but I can't say why." It's a gut-level, traumatic condition that does deep psychological harm in the form of depression, anxiety, and even suicidal thoughts and actions. So how about not belittling those who have that condition, just as a start?
Luckily, as North Carolina is learning, many, many more people do believe in a "Shit where you want" ethos. And that's the future, a crazy world where you can drop your pants or hike your skirt in a bathroom and no one cares if you've got the right junk in order to be allowed to pinch out that loaf.
