Serious matters

The New York Times seems to think there's something entertaining, certainly unserious, about Republican South Carolina Congresscritter Nancy Mace trying to bar her new colleague Delaware Rep. Sarah McBride from the House bathrooms. As you might know, McBride is trans.

In Washington this week for new member orientation, Ms. McBride was still sitting through mandatory cybersecurity trainings, setting up her payroll, selecting district offices and learning how to introduce a bill when her new Republican colleague, Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, announced plans to introduce a measure to bar transgender women from using women’s restrooms and changing rooms in the Capitol complex.

Ms. Mace did not try to pretend that she was doing anything other than targeting one individual with her resolution, even though it would apply to all employees and officers of the House.

“Sarah McBride doesn’t get a say,” she told reporters on Monday night. “I mean, this is a biological man.” She said that Ms. McBride “does not belong in women’s spaces, women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms — period, full stop.”

Nancy Mace is a a bigoted attention-seeking pig. Full stop. And should be confined to remedial kindergarten. 

Congresswoman Crockett knows what really matters -- as she usually does.

The NYT finds a Democratic Congresswoman who sticks up for McBride (there were others):

“There was no women’s restroom off the House floor until the 1990s,” said Representative Melanie Stansbury, Democrat of New Mexico. “For my female colleagues to go publicly after another colleague, and openly attack her, I find disgusting, disgraceful, irresponsible and anti-democratic. Why are you here in this institution?”

So the reporter gives the last word to a male Republican: 

Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma and chairman of the Appropriations Committee, avoided questions about the news of the day. “I’m trying to avoid the great bathroom debate,” he said.

Very cute, the whole story. Except to the woman who has to live inside it. 

Presumably McBride has seen it all before. You don't win a statewide race for Congress without well-honed toughness. But the sheer lack of courtesy and willed ignorance from the Republicans reminds, as if we needed reminding, that these people aren't mature enough to be in government.

• • •

By far the most insightful effort to unpack the issues around transwomen participating in youth and adult womens' sports I've ever encountered comes from Parker Malloy. This is a terrific instance of READ THE WHOLE THING.

Since we're, once again, focused on the fraught matter of bathrooms, here's a section of this article I found particularly lucid: 

What laws around things like restrooms and restrictions on updating identifying documents do is to create a world in which trans people are obligated to out themselves as trans to people all day, every day. 

Should a trans woman have to announce to bouncers and bartenders that she’s trans before getting a drink? 

Should a trans man have to decide whether to break the law by using a men’s restroom or loudly signal to everyone in a restaurant that his birth certificate says “female” by walking into a women’s restroom?  

Because that’s what these bills are advocating for: a world where trans people have to essentially wear a big neon sign disclosing their medical history to everyone around them. That sort of extremely private information is not the type of thing strangers two tables over have any inherent right to know. If someone isn’t your doctor or romantic partner, there’s no legitimate argument for why that person has any right to know what kind of genitals you were born with. That’s just the truth.

When you create a legal system in which trans people are forced to repeatedly out themselves, you’re creating a system designed to never fully accept them as people.

In 2016, a Wisconsin school reportedly forced a trans boy to wear a bright green wristband to ensure that school security guards (who had been instructed to be on the lookout for “students who appear to be going into the ‘wrong’ restroom”) could catch him if he used the boys’ restroom. This is about surveillance and social exclusion.

As someone, not trans myself, who routinely gets yelled at by blue-haired ladies in public bathrooms -- accused of being in the wrong one for my apparent gender -- I feel this to my core. And, nowadays, at 77, in still-civilized California, I snap back at my accusers, politely if they seem merely confused, furiously if they are aiming to erase me. It's always been my schtick that "this is what a woman looks like -- get used to it." If I'm feeling accommodating, I'll cede that "this is one way a woman looks." There seem to be a close to infinite supply of these women with a bathroom problem. Now that is serious.

November 20 is the Transgender Day of Remembrance – a day to commemorate the transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming persons who are targeted and killed for living authentically and courageously.