Sometimes Reality is Stranger than Fiction

Are we not living in a surreal age? Has there ever been an era in American history where elected officials and commercial organizations determined a nation’s people’s morality mindset? It appears to this writer that we are living in such an age of “what’s up is down” and “what’s right is wrong.” Do you sometimes feel as I, that we are living in an alternate universe? Or maybe my cogitation capacity is in need of fine tuning. If I did not know better, it seems reality has become stranger than fiction. North Carolina’s bill refusing to allow transgender persons into opposite bathrooms has met with fierce resistance from cities and states across the nation. 

What’s in the bill that has so many on the left so worked up about? For the sake of brevity, it is the “restroom/bathroom provision”, which in itself is simply common sense. It leaves players in the private sector free to do what they think best with their bathrooms, and it states municipal-run facilities will operate according to biological sex as noted on a birth certificate.

Big business and special interest groups are threatening boycotts. The Mayors of several municipalities, to include San Francisco, DC and several Governors to include NY and Connecticut have issued orders to “bar any publicly-funded city/state employee travel to the State of North Carolina.” Other organizations supporting censorship include IBM, PayPal, Apple, Facebook, Google, Salesforce, etc. are all against the law. The ACLU, has even lodged a federal lawsuit against North Carolina. In short, these mayors, governors and CEO's do not like that North Carolina simply said: males use the men’s room and females use the ladies room, based on anatomy, not how one labels themselves.

The NBA has said North Carolina’s law might make it move the 2017 All-Star game out of Charlotte. Does one not find the NBA’s threat over the All-Star Game piteously amusing if not particularly absurd? “The NBA (and its sister organization, the WNBA) apparently think bathroom access shouldn’t be based on biology”, but basketball leagues should. The NBA and WNBA, of course, are free to have gender-neutral basketball teams—and to have gender-neutral bathrooms at those games. That they are threatening the state to impose a policy that even they haven’t voluntarily adopted is the height of hypocrisy.

Ask yourself: Why do we have sex-specific bathrooms and locker rooms in the first place? It’s because of biology, not because of “gender identity.” Separate facilities reflect the fact that men and women have bodily differences; they are designed to protect privacy related to our bodies. So the North Carolina bill continues the bathroom/locker room and may I add, gender shower policy America has always had.

Who in their right mind would oppose such a policy? Did I just suggest those in opposition to the “Bathroom Bill” happen to be a few cards short of a full deck? I suppose I did. Realistically, some people and organizations who oppose the bill do so out of ignorance. I say this, not with ill feeling but with awareness that not everyone knows what they think they know, to include me. In brief, let us examine the term transgender and by doing so, define it.

Do you know that the term, transgender has many definitions? It is frequently used as an umbrella term to refer to “all people who do not identify with their assigned gender at birth or the binary gender system." This includes "transsexuals, cross-dressers, genderqueers, drag queens, drag kings, two-spirit people, and others." Some transgender people feel they exist "not within one of the two standard gender categories, but somewhere between, beyond or outside of those two genders.” Hopefully, both opponents and proponents of the “Bathroom Bill" are less ignorant and more knowledgeable than they previously were prior to reading this post.

In summation, North Carolina, as should any other state enact policies that best serve the people of the state—not the special interests and cultural cronies. What Americans need now is strong political leadership to stand up to the cronies and their cohorts and do what’s best for a state’s residents in particular and the American people in general.