Many people have preconceived ideas regarding what it means to be transgender, and these ideas tend to be misinformed most of the time. For the longest time now, the media has portrayed transgender people as being defiant or freakish. Images of men dressed as women and wearing clown-like makeup and bad wigs are all over the internet and movie screens. It is not uncommon to see transgender individuals who are portrayed as serial killers, pedophiles, or streetwalkers. For this reason, there is extensive misinformation and negative stereotypes that have weighed down on the transgender community. These stereotypes have resulted in major questions regarding the issue of bathroom access for transgender individuals. Transgender people are currently being affected by the policies that restrict their access to public bathrooms. However, transgender-inclusive policies are not in any way a safety risk, and most of these policies are misinformed 1 .
Let us begin by accepting the fact that the recent issue regarding the safety risk of transgender-inclusive policies is completely unwarranted. If there really was any d\safety risk, then we would have known by now because transgender individuals have been using locker rooms and public bathrooms for decades. The policies allowing transgender people to access public bathrooms (as long as it matches the identity of the individual) do not legalize stalking, harassment, sexual assault, or violence. This kind of behavior has always been against the law regardless of the identity of the individual. Furthermore, there are several schools districts, cities, and 18 states that protect the right of transgender people to access restrooms, and none have reported the issue of any malpractices.
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Without a doubt, isolating transgender people from using separate private bathrooms is not legal, and it is not the best solution. A separate or private bathroom is a great way of ensuring that anyone using them is comfortable, regardless of whether they are transgender or not. However, private bathrooms are sometimes inconvenient to use, and they are not always available. Besides, forcing transgender individuals to use separate bathrooms from other people is isolation, and it strengthens the notion that transgender people are indeed harmful and they should not interact with other people. The proponents of the bathroom bill argue that ensuring that everyone uses the public restrooms that are proper according to their sex is the best way to protect and ensure public safety. According to analysts, these are just thinly disguised attempts to stigmatize and discriminate against transgender people with an aim of scoring political points 2 . One of the key claims is that sexual predators usually take advantage of the public accommodation policies and laws regarding transgender people to attack women and children while in the bathrooms. However, the truth is that anti-discrimination protections that cover gender identity are not a new thing, and there is no proof that they promote attacks in the public facilities.
A report by CNN on March 2017 stated that the District of Columbia, over 200 municipalities, and 19 states have anti-discrimination ordinances that allow transgender people to access public facilities correlating to their gender identity. Every time this subject comes up, prosecutors, law enforcement agencies, and state human rights commission steadfastly deny the relationship between these policies and a rise in cases of assault. The most notable argument is that by civil rights activists that there is a higher occurrence of assault of transgender people in the bathrooms that are not in line with their gender identity.
There is a lot of anxiety that is related to transgender people and the ‘bathroom issue,’ and the sad thing is that there is more fear than facts. For this reason, it is very demoralizing to see that the federal government and several states are making a conscious effort to treat transgender people like outsiders and with a sense of hatred 3 .
Bibliography
Barnett, Brian, Ariana Nesbit, and Renée Sorrentino. 2018. "The Transgender Bathroom Debate at the Intersection of Politics, Law, Ethics, and Science". Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law . http://jaapl.org/content/46/2/232 .
Johnson, Dwan. 2018. "Transgender Bathroom Debate". Mnpsych.Org . https://www.mnpsych.org/index.php?option=com_dailyplanetblog&view=entry&category=industry%20news&id=207:transgender-bathroom-debate .
Larsen, Henrik Gert. 2016. "The Antecedent of Fear in the Public Discourse: From Donald Trump’s Nativism to Transgender Bathroom Access". International Journal of School and Cognitive Psychology 3 (2). doi:10.4172/2469-9837.1000177.
1 (Barnett, Nesbit and Sorrentino 2018).
2 (Johnson 2018).
3 (Larsen 2016)
