Give it a rest(room)
An idea for a business struck me as I drove through Ohiopyle last weekend: guided tours to watch animals making whoopee in the woods.
Wild Kingdom, indeed.
What prompted my entrepreneurial rapture was a sign for whitewater rafting tours, “Wilderness Voyageurs.” Which I misread as “Wilderness Voyeurs.”
Sorry if you can’t quite shake the image of Papa Bear walking around clad only in black socks held up by garters – that’s just how my mind works.
I see my misreading as proof that the mind often sees not what is there, but what it thinks is there. For further proof, consider the case of Aimee Toms, who – according to the Danbury News-Times in Connecticut – was harassed last week because someone thought she was a transgender man using a woman’s restroom in a local Walmart.
A woman approached Toms from behind while she washed her hands in the lavatory. Toms was wearing a baseball cap over her pixie-cut hairdo – she recently donated her long tresses to a program that makes wigs for cancer patients. Toms said the woman told her, “You’re disgusting!” and “You don’t belong here!” The woman then extended her middle finger in the universal gesture that means either, “You have wronged me!” or “This is the only digit that I can’t use to pick my nose.”
Toms says she is sure the woman’s reaction was prompted by the national discussion that has sprung up around North Carolina’s “bathroom bill.” Passed in March and signed into law May 24 by North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, the bill attempts to force transgender people to use public restrooms that correspond to their gender at birth. It effectively nullifies an ordinance passed in Charlotte in February that, rather, allowed transgender people to use restrooms corresponding to the gender with which they identify.
Saying that the state’s action violates the U.S. Civil Rights Act, the U.S. Justice Department has filed suit against North Carolina, and the state has countersued. Rock stars have canceled concerts scheduled in the state in protest, and both NASCAR and the NBA have voiced their disapproval, with the NBA threatening to move its all-star game if the bill became law. So Toms probably is correct in believing that such high-profile protestations are behind her experience. And that is sad, in a couple of ways.
Sad first because while many believe the “bathroom bill” to be discriminatory, others think it gives them carte blanche to confront “deviants” and enforce their personal views of what is “normal.” Problem is, no one has come up with a single definition of “normal” that fits every situation. For example, in my family it just wasn’t normal to make a meatloaf that had a layer of ketchup on top. In other families, it was. But my mom didn’t tear around the neighborhood Sunday afternoons, wielding a spatula and kicking in kitchen doors while screaming “How now, ground cow?”
And it’s sad because ordinances like Charlotte’s have caused transgender people to experience even more harassment than before the changes were made. I liken this to increased violence against Southern blacks after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Measures intended to ensure equal treatment under the law sometimes provoke further violations of those rights.
In any case, such reactions are more logs on a pile that, if lit, may just burn down America.
Prior to the furor over transgender bathroom choice, I did not lie awake wondering if the person using the urinal next to me had once been a woman. I still don’t. Nor do I think it likely that any females I love will be assaulted in a restroom by a man so desperate to see a woman’s private parts that he went out and had a set of his own installed. Rather, I apply what I call “Mom’s Meatloaf Maxim”:
Loaf, and let loaf.