Reversal of Rights Protection Sought
Gainesville, Fla., having voted to let men use the ladies’ room, now is embroiled in a fight over whether to let them stay there. See if you can guess which side of the debate the Associated Press is on:
GAINESVILLE, Fla. (AP) — A blond girl heads from a playground into a women’s restroom. A scruffy man, lurking outside, darts in behind her. “Your City Commission Made This Legal,” the words on the TV screen read.
The dark ad came from opponents of a gender identity provision added last year to the city’s anti-discrimination ordinance, which now allows the city’s roughly 100 transgender residents to use whichever restroom they’re most comfortable using.
Foes want to repeal the new protection with a March 24 ballot measure that has divided Gainesville, a generally gay-friendly university city surrounded by staunchly conservative north Florida.
Those who support the transgender protections say their opponents are really unleashing a broader attack on the rights of gay, lesbian and transgender individuals in general.
The city commission approved the restroom provision by a 4-3 vote a year ago. Before the ink could dry, Bible-quoting opponents angrily began working for its repeal.
“You are trying to operate in a realm you do not have the authority to operate in,” one pastor, George Brantley, told the commissioners.
The debate is expected to become noisier as the ballot nears with opponents resorting to more TV ads and campaigns pegged to such slogans as “Keep Men out of Women’s Restrooms and vice versa.”
Organizations defending transgender rights are mustering their own campaign.
OK, a man’s claim to be a woman is a right to be protected. Live and learn. I knew about the New York mass transit system granting men the right to use ladies’ rooms, but the recognition is more widespread than I thought:
The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force notes 108 cities and counties nationwide have similar transgender protections. An attempt to repeal an ordinance in Montgomery County, Md., failed when a court ruled opponents did not collect enough signatures to place it on the ballot.
Citizens for Good Public Policy, the group behind the commercial that aired last summer in Gainesville, collected more than 6,000 signatures last summer to win a referendum. If approved, the repeal measure would also prevent the commission from adding protections beyond what the state requires: race, color, sex, religion, national origin, age, disability and marital status.
Cain Davis, chairman of Citizens for Good Public Policy, said the issue is about regulating a “government gone wild” and ensuring public safety, charging that sexual predators could now simply enter a women’s restroom claiming to be a transgender individual.
“We know when men go into women’s restrooms, bad things can happen,” Davis said.
He may have a point, although it’s wrong to paint all men who dress like ladies with that broad brush. That’s quite apart from the disturbing creepy factor, and the question of whether little girls and grown women have a right not to be compelled to share facilities with guys, regardless of the guys’ intent or state of mind. No one has a fundamental right not to be creeped out, however, so that’s moot. I have yet to see anything addressing the question of who decides which guy actually thinks he’s a woman and which guy is just a perv, and how they decide that. That sticky problem suggests the only fair thing to do is eliminate gender discrimination in restroom facilities entirely and throw away all those hurtful, irrelevant ”men” and “women” signs. Everyone goes into one big room. Whether you want to use a urinal or not is your business, though urinals are discriminatory and unfairly take up a lot of space that could be occupied by unisex pots. They need to be phased out.
Anyway, separate, related, the AP has been pretty aggressively pro-delusion for some time, refering for example to a convicted murderer in Massachusetts as “she” in its advocacy of his legal campaign to have taxpayers underwrite his surgical and hormonal alteration. Oddly, a more recent report of another cross-dressing murderer who hanged himself in a Massachusetts prison the other day did not refer to him as “she” and in fact hurtfully described him as ”cross-dressing” rather than transgendered:
NORFOLK, Mass. (AP) — A cross-dressing Massachusetts dermatologist serving life in prison for killing his estranged wife has been found hanged in his cell.
A Massachusetts prisons spokeswoman says Richard Sharpe was found by his cellmate at about 7:30 p.m. on Monday. Department of Correction spokeswoman Diane Wiffin says Sharpe was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead.
The Gloucester dermatologist was convicted in 2001 of shooting his wife, Karen, with a hunting rifle. In 2007, he was acquitted of charges he plotted to kill the prosecutor in his murder trial.
His case drew national attention when photographs of him wearing slinky dresses and fishnet stockings were widely published.
Prosecutors said the millionaire dermatologist killed his wife in July 2000 because he was angry over the prospect of losing $3 million in their divorce.
AP may have a subtler understanding of the fine line between the sexes that enables surgical precision in its gender designations, I dunno. AP fails to add that Sharpe’s murdered wife had accused him in affidavits of stealing her birth control pills in an effort to enlarge his breasts. Also, that as a client of his own chain of laser hair removal clinics, Dr. Sharpe had entirely depilated his body, with the exception of his flowing chestnut locks.
Topics: transsexuals
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:13 am on Saturday, January 10, 2009
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