Why do they care so much?
For 60 years I have not thought about "men in women's bathrooms"
About a year after we moved to our house on the little airport, our neighbors invited us for dinner at their beachhouse. They were devout Christians and I had become friendly with the wife; I liked her, and often asked her things about her faith. As an agnostic, I was quite fascinated by it, I had never met anyone who brought up Jesus as casually as we would talk about the weather.
The dinner was amicable and we learned more about each other’s stories, how we met our spouses, family life, and I shared a little about my liberal German upbringing, which was so different. At one point, however, things took an unexpected turn when our neighbor started talking about gays and trans people. It was a little out of the blue, and I wasn’t sure where that was coming from.
He basically said he can just about accept that some people are homosexual, but he drew the line at transgenders, especially men who liked to dress up as women, probably because they could not get a girlfriend or wife. I am paraphrasing here, but that was the gist of it. He went on an on about it, the whole spiel about men in women’s bathrooms and sports, and about boys coming home from school as girls. Honestly? I wasn’t quite sure how to react other then “live and let live, what is the big deal if people want to make decisions about their own lives?”
What I hadn’t realized was that “men in women’s spaces” had been a big topic in rightwing circles for years. It is a THING. And then of course I saw it everywhere. Trump talking about it on the campaign trail, social media posts, the scandal over a female athlete being accused of being a man during the olympics. That’s when I learned about the term ‘culture wars’ for the first time.
In my decades of traveling around the world, living in four countries, and meeting lots of different people, I have come across transgender individuals and some of my friends were gay. I knew that historically the LGBTQ+ community was persecuted and deemed ‘too different’ to be accepted into a society that was still dominated by religious principles. But I also thought that we had moved past that and that the world was, finally, becoming more open, inclusive, and accepting of the diversity that has always been a part of the human experience.
Clearly, I was wrong. And probably a bit blue-eyed about it all, too.
Maybe it’s because I am a peace-loving Enneagram 9, or a Human Design Projector who sees a world beyond the Generator-driven grind, ambition, and need for social constructs that only work for those who conform — but to me our differences are what makes life interesting, and I have always believed that our diversity enriches and complements our experiences rather than inform our value or place in society.
When I chatted about all of this with an online friend the other day, she mentioned that allowing transgender women into women’s bathrooms is a problem because now perverts can use this ‘loophole’ to dress up as women and gain access to women’s private spaces. Right. And nope. This is obviously not a problem with trans people, but with men. The man is the predator here, not the transgender woman.
This war on vulnerable minorities and people who are perceived different breaks my heart. Most trans people just want to live their lives and have a chance at being happy and safe. We already have guidelines for transgender individuals in sports, and overall they make up less than 1% of the population, so why do these conservative Christians care so much?
Of course we know why. It’s politicians taking advantage of people’s homophobia and bigotry to cause division and distract from their corruption, grift, greed, and the dismantling of our democracy. We have much, much bigger problems than sharing our bathrooms with the odd transgender woman, or having a very small fraction of women competing in sports being transgender.
As for our neighbors, they eventually moved away and we lost contact. But I will always be grateful for that evening because it opened my eyes and made me even more determined to fight for a kinder, better world for everyone.