The Great Bathroom Controversy

There is more than a little oddness in having  a political controversy over restrooms. In a sane world private persons and organizations would be free to make whatever rules they liked for restrooms they owned,  governments would be required to make restrooms – as with other facilities -   on government property available in an unprejudiced manner while taking reasonable  account of prevailing mores, and  that would be it. No non-nutcase would get worked up over the issue.   Since our world is far from sane however, we’ve got such a controversy, most recently about laws either restricting men’s rooms to biological men and women’s rooms to biological women or requiring choice in the matter.  It’s not  a small controversy either. Presidential candidates and the President of the United States have jumped into it, and there are boycotts and all sorts of things going on.

The first thing  to do in considering this fight, if a person wants to consider it at all,  is to limit the political discussion  to  restrooms owned by the government -  leaving private persons and entities to make the decisions they like and their customers and others to react as they like. It seems to me the next thing would be to  take the real transsexuals - the people who have been surgically and hormonally altered into the opposite sex -  off the board. They should be treated just as other men and women are treated  which would mean leaving them free to use restrooms designated for people of their present gender and  restricted from using those designated for people of their former one.

That leaves the delusional people who biologically fully of one sex but think they are members of the other (as opposed to potential transsexuals who realize accurately that they are still of one sex  but may want to change) and the pretenders who, for whatever reasons,  claim falsely to “identify” with the opposite sex. It is hard to see  a justification  for accommodating them at the expense of offending  the sensibilities of so many more other people.