Peeing In Peace

It has always been about bathrooms.

During the segregation era blacks could not be trusted to use the restroom with white children.

In the late seventies gays couldn’t be trusted to use the restroom with children.

Now it us who can’t be trusted to use the restroom with children.

What do they all have in common?

They are all lies created by conservatives to protect the status quo and create fear of “others.”

Anti-Trans ‘Bathroom Bills’ Are Based On Lies. Here’s The Research To Show It.
Huffington Post
By Brian Barnett
September 11, 2018

[…]
Ignorance and fear of the transgender community repeatedly interfere with people’s ability to simply choose and use the bathroom that best suits their needs. And those in opposition are quick to defend their ignorance by arguing that transgender individuals are at high risk of committing sex crimes ― or that opportunistic men will take advantage of any expansion of transgender bathroom access by claiming to be transgender and sneaking into women’s bathrooms to commit sex crimes.

I’m a fellow in forensic psychiatry, so I spend a good deal of time navigating the spots where our legal system meets our cultural beliefs. I began to wonder if there were any data to actually support or refute these societal concerns. CNN and Media Matters have previously asked law enforcement agencies in states with anti-discrimination policies regarding gender identity whether they’ve observed increased rates of sex crimes in bathrooms, and none have. Other than that, there wasn’t much else out there in terms of empirical data.

So I, along with two other forensic psychiatrists (Renee Sorrentino and Ariana Nesbit) decided to figure out just how many times a transgender person has been accused of committing a sex crime in a public facility (bathroom, locker room, changing room, etc.) and how many cases there were of men dressing up as women in order to sneak into these facilities.

So what did he find?

We assumed the number of cases for either situation would be low, but we had no idea how low. Their rarity was noteworthy. We found only one instance ― one! ― of a transgender perpetrator in an alleged sex crime in a changing room. Likewise, we found just one case where a man (who, frankly, sounds like a provocateur) allegedly entered a women’s locker room without disguising his gender in any way and stated that a new local law expanding transgender bathroom access allowed him to be there.

And what about cases where cisgender men dressed up as women to enter bathrooms or changing rooms and commit crimes? We found a grand total of 13 alleged cases in the U.S since 2004 ― approximately one per year. When we included international crimes, five more cases were added to the tally going back to 2003.

All told, that’s 20 cases of alleged bathroom sex crimes involving either a transgender individual, cisgender men intentionally taking advantage of a law protecting transgender bathroom access, or cisgender men disguising themselves as women to gain access to women’s bathrooms.

Meanwhile,

“…during our research we found 154 cases in the U.S. since 2004 of cisgender men who allegedly committed bathroom sex crimes and did not attempt to disguise themselves as women or claim to be protected by laws expanding transgender bathroom access.”

When I was in grad school studying community organizing we learned that to break a primary emotions such as fear, anger, sadness and happiness is very, very hard if not impossible.

The fear mongers know that.

They know that bathroom create a feeling of vulnerability and children need protecting, those two things target fear and anger.

Fear is an extremely powerful force, but so is truth. As evidence continues to demonstrate that protecting the rights of transgender people poses no threat to our society, hopefully we can move closer to doing what’s right. Transgender men and women shouldn’t have to worry about violence or harassment when deciding where to relieve themselves, and they shouldn’t have to spend more than a millisecond figuring out which bathroom to use. It’s time for them, like everyone else, to be able to get in and out quickly and safely, so they can get back to focusing on life’s many demands outside the confines of a bathroom stall.

You know that in Massachusetts that the zealots will be targeting bathrooms to still up fear, that Keep MA Safe will try to create fear for the children of Massachusetts.


The Boston Globe has an article this morning by Stephanie Ebbert about another research paper…

A first-of-its-kind study being released Wednesday refutes the premise that the state’s transgender antidiscrimination law threatens public safety, finding no relation between public transgender bathroom access and crimes that occur in bathrooms.

Researchers at the Williams Institute, a think tank focused on gender identity at the UCLA School of Law, examined restroom crime reports in Massachusetts cities of similar size and comparable demographics and found no increase in crime and no difference between cities that had adopted transgender policies and those that had not. The data were collected for a minimum of two years before a statewide antidiscrimination law took effect in 2016.

Activists who want to undo that state law through a ballot question in the Nov. 6 election have focused their campaign message on bathroom safety concerns. They suggest that a new right for transgender people infringes on everyone else’s privacy rights, and could be abused by men who want to prey upon women and children in ladies’ rooms. The vote is being closely watched nationwide because it offers the nation’s first public referendum on transgender rights in the state that first introduced gay marriage.

Transgender activists bristle at the idea that the campaign casts them as potential sexual offenders and have argued that there is no evidence that the law threatens anyone’s safety.

Our best response to that will be that since 2016 when the law went in to effect there has not been a single incident and in the neighboring states there also haven’t been any assaults by trans people.

But we also have to beware of staged incidents by the opposition like they did in Maryland.