Despite a lot of hand-wringing, gasping and grimacing over where boys and girls, men and women and those who blur or cross those lines go to the bathroom, the potty’s been over for a long time.
The recent transgender bathroom faux-fury had pretty much been limited to odd southern states like North Carolina and Mississippi. Those are places where people profess regularly to be free-thinking, fair-minded and sober and then regularly elect leaders that are anything but that.
Here in Aurora, as well as Cherry Creek and Aurora Public schools districts? This got taken care of long ago and is not a problem, despite a handful of Colorado conservative leaders trying to use this reborn controversy to throw shade at the Obama Administration.
In typical Southern fashion, North Carolina, pretty much out of nowhere, recently started writing state laws preventing cities and counties from writing laws to uphold federal laws stating that transgender people can’t be discriminated against, especially in public schools.
Hysterical talk about little girls being accosted in bathrooms by burly men in or out of dresses fired up the tin-foil-hat brigade, even prompting some folks in places where this kind of thing is sport — READ: Texas — that a true, ‘Murican deputy would shoot any dude sporting some XX genes in the little girls room with their little girl.
Since then, a host of headlines list serious economic and dignity slights North Carolina has suffered.
The fun factor went off the charts watching these odd folks realize they have to use the word “transgender” instead of their usual slurs, and that trans people had been using public and school bathrooms for a long time without any incidents whatsoever.
I first wondered just how much time anyone actually spends in public restrooms that this would be an issue. And I get it that they’re extremely sensitive to the fact that children, sadly, are sometimes sexually accosted by adults. Seeing, however, that a good many of those in their right-wing religious ranks spend time in court answering to molestation charges and scandals, the trans-bathroom fury is misplaced. The Catholic Church will be doing penance for their global scandal far past our lifetimes.
But either through fear, ignorance or misinformation, too many people confuse people who dress and act differently with position-of-trust predators and the tap-tappity tawdry bathroom behavior of people like former GOP Idaho Sen. Larry Craig, whose wide stance on the toilet and narrow stance on homosexuality led to the end of his career.
The transphobic are easy targets to buy into right-wing talk radio theater and not real life and real laws.
The laws protecting the rights of transgender people hail from the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and more recently a 1989 Supreme Court case making it clear that gender “stereotyping” violates that act. Subsequent federal court rulings have made it clear that transgender discrimination is a natural extension of that ruling.
It was controversial and fodder for all kinds of interesting arguments — years ago.
The controversy came home to Colorado this week after the Obama Administration weighed in on PottyGate and essentially reminded people that public schools had to comply with transgender bathroom accommodation policies, because that has been and is the law.
Happy to find any reason why Obama has ruined something in this country, a cry went out across the land that this is nothing more than a another fine example of government overreach.
Not here in Aurora.
“As a school district, we respect the rights of transgender and all students,” said Cherry Creek Schools District Communications Director Tustin Amole. She said she’s been fielding reporter phone calls all week after the controversy started anew.
“This was pretty much decided back in 2009,” she said, and Cherry Creek was dealing with it long before that. “It’s just not a big deal.”
Aurora Public Schools spokeswoman Patti Moon said the same thing.
“Our practice and training is consistent with the Obama administration’s directive,” Moon said. “It has been for at least four years now.”
Both districts have transgender students they are and aren’t aware of. No big deal.
Even the Colorado High School Activities Association, which runs school athletics, has long had policies in place making accommodations to prevention discrimination against transgender students. Nobody even knows who or how many that could be, because it’s not an issue to anyone.
Except for a few expected folks, like the Colorado Springs Focus on the Family, GOP state Sen. Owen Hill and a few others Republican state lawmakers, this produces yawns.
“I’m embarrassed for my government right now,” Hill told KRDO-TV in Colorado Springs and anyone else who would listen. “We’re telling moms and dads they have no right to run your own schools. You guys and your kids have no right to decide what’s the best policy for a complicated issue.”
No. The feds were just reminding Colorado and the rest of the country what we already know: That the rights of all students — including transgender boys and girls — matter, and that North Carolina is a fine example of what happens when the government ignores that.
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