By George Templeton
Gazette Columnist
Fractured We and the Bathroom Conundrum
Gazette Columnist
Fractured We and the Bathroom Conundrum
The relationships of gender identity were shown in the comedy movies Tootsie with Dustin Hoffman and Mrs. Doubtfire
with Robin Williams. They reveal its malleability. They were not
about a permanent, innate and consistent behavior rooted in the mind or
that some feel that they don’t belong in the body they were born into.
It’s
different than the slippery slope alleging that our Federal Government
authorizes any curious fourteen year old boy to use the girl’s rest
room. We have serious laws about sexual assault, and this isn’t that.
Transgender people are not imposters intending to deceive unsuspecting
girls.
A
“cisgender” person’s sex matches their birth certificate, their
biological genome, their bodies, and their personal identity. It does
not depend on appearances, orientation, mental, or physical
characteristics. By this definition, everyone of an original gender
group is and always remains the same. Laws based on this assumption
guarantee problems because they require a manly female to use the
woman’s rest room. They are self-referential because they create the
problem they are supposed to fix. They exist within the tension between
narrow legal precedent and broad morality.
Some
people are born differently. They would have to prove what they are.
What they look, act, and sound like is not enough. If you are
different, they’ve got you trapped, identified as one of those people.
Transgender
people can’t feel comfortable unless they use the bathroom
corresponding to their gender identity. Otherwise, they would be viewed
as “out of place” and could be harassed by laws requiring them to prove
their gender. What does one do if they don’t look male or female
according to expectations or were born with blurred characteristics?
What if they are a female muscle builder or a long haired male? Rock
Hudson, the manly movie star, was gay. He did not look that way.
Elected
It
is part of election politics. New state laws would roll back and
prohibit anti-discrimination policies in employment, the public square,
the marketplace, and municipalities. The law is authoritative, taking
away personal responsibility. It implies that it represents the “will
of the American people”, so why should anyone buck the tide?
John
Kavanagh, Arizona Republican, introduced a 2013 restroom bill that
would have prevented transgender people from using the restroom of their
chosen gender identity, but it failed before reaching Governor Brewer.
Now conservative lawyers in the deep pocketed Arizona Alliance
Defending Freedom are manufacturing problems by writing laws for state
legislators that divide Americans. They are interested in “reasonable”
fees and want people to be able to sue for $2500 plus psychological and
emotional damages resulting from seeing a person who does not belong.
The police must cringe at the likelihood of being swamped by calls from
hysterical girls. Lawyers are the only winners when the states, Federal
government, and people who have always got along in the past sue each
other.
Now’s Their Chance
This
hullabaloo could be a reaction to “legislation from the bench”,
allowing gay marriage. Strict conservatives will never be able to
accept that.
Some
folks are deeply worried about the possibility of inappropriate
exposure to the opposite sex. State’s rights mean this can play out
differently depending on the situation. It matters whether bathroom
policies result in discrimination at schools receiving federal funding
or whether you might be called upon to “Show me your ….” to use a public
bathroom. Some state regulations would go so far as to require you to
dress according to the sex shown on your birth certificate.
Absolute Truth
Pat
Robertson depersonalizes transgender people, forgetting that the last
will be first. He claims a greater discrimination against the bulk of
the American people will occur if there aren’t laws that roll back LGBT
protections.
The
TV preacher explained to this enthralled mega-congregation that if you
had doubts about all the animals coming out of Noah’s ark and the sun
and moon stopping at the battle of Jericho, you were persecuting his
tribe. It was an unconstrained supernatural war with liberals, and his
congregation would be either in the light or dark. There could be no
in-between. His religious freedom required you to have no doubt that
God did not make those kinds of people.
Tony
Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, reaches further from
the Bible than any justice when he chastises his opposition saying,
“For them, truth is all relative. There is no absolute truth anymore,
so they can bend the rules and twist it however they want to push their
agenda.”
There Is No Doubt about It
God’s
laws are revealed in the simplest things. In power electronics, a
good question is, where does the energy go? Conservation of energy is
fundamental to the ac current we have in our homes and it manifests
itself in motors, transformers, power supplies, and the complex math
that describes ac power by separating stored energy from losses. It is
in the earth and moon’s motions and how they appear from our frame of
reference. The sun does not move around the earth. The earth’s mass,
orbital, and rotational motions contain a lot of energy. It does not
make sense that God would choose only one time to violate his own laws
as a publicity stunt.
How
we know anything at all is a very old question going back to the
beginnings of philosophy. Most people think that we can intuitively
know the concept of identity. Descartes claimed, “I think, therefore I
am.” It becomes increasingly unclear as we move away from such simple
ideas.
The
ancient Greeks gave us the logic that mathematics and rational thought
are based upon. We once thought that it was the path to understanding
and absolute truth, but not anymore. Math is a universal language,
coming from geometry. It is a way of thinking that is much more than
just a set of repeated boring operations.
The
gambling casino works because of the mathematics of expectation, but
that is based on independent events that are equally probable, can be
intuitively identified, and are countable. There are “after the fact”
tests for randomness, shown by the bell curve, but they do not have
complete certainty.
When
nature imperfectly aims at a target, the bell curve emerges in the long
run. It is the link between intuition and experience, between thought
and observation. Probability helps us, because it bounds the
uncertain. Statistics are an abstraction, especially when they concern
polls, people, and pills. It is the individuals that are real.
To
make use of the statistical functions of the bell-curve’s random
variable is to in some way know them. They are numbers that can’t be
known, but to know that they can’t be known is to know them. It goes in
circularity, round and round, regenerating and paradoxically feeding
back. Our thoughts are self-referential and incomplete, containing
ambiguity that denies an absolute truth.
The
distinction between truth and belief is blurred in books written by PHD
philosophers who see no difference. You can believe anything you want
to. It is only in the simplest relationships, like the conservation of
energy, that truth can be separated from belief. The deeper reality is
that self-referential ambiguity is precisely what unites us in faith.
In a way, this partly justifies Mr. Perkins contention, but it cannot
fix the transgender bathroom dilemma.
Global Commodes
The
ancient Greeks had communal baths and toilets, often with no privacy.
Their culture viewed gender in terms of relationships instead of body
parts. Could it be that they were partly right?
Greek
baths reflected a culture answering to technology that had no sewers,
plumbing, and little understanding of disease. Two thousand years later
those problems have gone away, but many reality demons remain.
In
India, tens of millions of people have no bathroom. It is not the
focus of the bathroom leading to sexual assault, but its lack.
An
old-fashioned bathroom in China consisted of a bare concrete floor that
slopes toward a hole in the middle, with a garden hose to accomplish
the flushing. People who can’t squat were discriminated against.
In
contrast, the expensive Tokyo hotel had a toilet that was so
complicated that you needed to consult the user’s manual before going.
Where
I grew up, some families were still using out-houses. They were not
heated. The better ones had two holes and a seat that you sat on. No
flushing was necessary.
The
overseas night club had a second floor urinal. It splashed into the
open sewer along the street below. It works well in places where it
often rains.
The
only restroom at the tropical train station had a twenty foot plugged
latrine that was overflowing leaving urine everywhere to ankle depth.
There was no cooling and it was 110 degrees with near 100 percent
humidity. The only ventilation was a tiny window at the far end, about
the size of a sheet of paper. The sun shone through it revealing a
green fog that condensed and dripped from everything.
It’s
not nice! In Europe, they put bathtubs in hotel rooms but not
commodes. There was only one, serving all the hotel rooms, and it was
located one hundred yards through the snow, outside, containing barely
enough room for one person. There was no problem with voyeurism, but
you could be attacked traveling between your room and the toilet.
When
I told the waitress, put lots of hot sauce on those tacos, I made a
mistake that would hit me three quarters of the way between Seattle and
Yuma. Thank God, the roadside rest area had a toilet. Imagine my
dismay when I found that it was filled with feces extending two feet
above the toilet seat and there were beer cans imbedded in what was like
a large pile of modeling clay.
Then, there is the only rest-stop between Phoenix and Payson, closed for years, leaving just the road side bushes.
What Really Matters
We
have selected leaders who would destroy what has always worked, and
what we should appreciate, just to divide us. It’s time to let them
go. Sanitation, health, and availability matter more and are less
expensive than the inherent discrimination of creating special bathrooms
for fuzzy classifications of misunderstood human beings.
2 comments:
Why have a comment button if your're not going to post comments?
Or, do you only post comments you agree with?
And don't use the excuse that the comments are anonymous because profiles can be and usually are faked.
If your comment wasn't posted, it's because it wasn't received. We do not discriminate against bigots.
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