I recently listened to an Iowa Public Radio session about the Houston, Texas "Bathroom Ordinance" that was recently voted down in city elections. The ordinance is a measure to ensure that no group can be discriminated against, and provides a direct route through city services to address complaints without involving lengthy trials. There are scores of other cities across the country that have laws like this and they suffer no ill effects.
The lynch pin on the Houston ordinance being voted down was that the law would entitle trans-gender individuals to use the bathroom, shower, or locker room facilities of the gender with which they identify, and not the gender that they were born with. An aggressive campaign against the ordinance insisted that this would open the door for male predators to pose as trans-women and enter women's bathrooms to assault women and girls despite a lack of evidence that this eventuality would occur..
There was a commentator in the IPR session that kept speaking about "common sense" solutions to this problem, something to assuage the LGBT community while not upending the status quo. He suggested we build additional, separate bathrooms for trans-individuals to circumvent male/female bathroom issues. He called it a common sense compromise to maintain equality.
That phrase sounded familiar to me, and I recollect that I heard it during the height of the campaign to bring about marriage equality. I heard many "common sense" compromises that involved a separate institution, like a civil union, for same-sex couples. A middle ground that opponents and supporters alike could stomach.
I want to address this. This fallacy of a middle ground on equality. Equality is a binary condition, meaning that one is either totally equal under the law with all other citizens or we are all unequal to varying degrees. There is no in middle ground. Forcing a trans-gender person to use a separate bathroom than the gender they identify with because they have a medical condition is inherently discriminatory.
To be more broad, anytime you create an institution or laws that prescribe behavior for a person or group of people that is determined by characteristics that they cannot control you are promoting inequality. It does not matter if it is under the guise of perceived safety, it does not matter if the majority of the country is opposed to it. The constitution guarantees all citizens be held equally under the law regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, etc.
We have fought over this basic fact for decades in this country. Whether it be women's suffrage, or the civil rights movement, marriage equality, and now trans-gender access to bathrooms, we have fought over who the freedoms and rights in this country apply to time and time again. Is it now time for us to realize that we should extend the rights to all citizens, regardless of any detemerining factors over which they have no control? If we are not all equal, we are unequal and that must not be tolerated. It is the duty of the government to extend the rights and freedoms of this country to all citizens regardless of popular opinion.
