United States of Hysteria

Target has published a policy that permits “transgender team members and guests to use the restroom or fitting room facility that corresponds with their gender identity." Sort of makes me want to go shop at Target, but more than a million people have had the opposite reaction, signing a petition to boycott Target.

One brilliant writer opines that this will cost Target business and devalue their stock price, and that the people in question are not acting out of hatred or discrimination against transgender people, but for “the safety of women and children,” and “the loss of dignity and privacy that women and children expect when they enter a bathroom.”

“Loss of dignity and privacy”  I might buy, although it’s quite a stretch. A woman who believes she’s a man, lives like a man, dresses like a man and dates women looking at me while I’m fully dressed? Sorry, the idea just does not freak me out. Watching me urinate? Well, I wouldn’t particularly like having a man who is a man watching me urinate, but we have a sort of code that prohibits doing that, so…

And the “safety” concern? “The fears among those who oppose the policy,” the writer says, “stem from the potential problem of predators entering the women's bathroom.” And he thinks that “potential problem” is created by Target’s new policy and has not existed previously? It is a present problem, neither created nor exacerbated by Target’s new policy.

And safety is not really the writer’s concern anyway, because after a brief mention he drops the safety issue and goes on to discuss the so-called “privacy and dignity” issue at great length.

I have not used a women’s bathroom, but I am pretty sure that women do their thing inside a closed stall. Right? Anything that they do outside of that closed stall they will be doing fully clothed. Am I wrong?

The implication is that the “privacy and dignity” fear being expressed is not based on my conclusion being wrong, because this writer says, “If a woman gets out of her stall and sees a man washing his hands in the women's bathroom…” In the first place, since everyone is fully clothed at that point, while I can see that the event might be unsettling I fail to see why it would be traumatizing. More to the point, a transgender person is going to be dressed as a woman, so how is the person exiting the stall going to know that it is a man who is doing the hand washing?

This writer goes on to say that people are going to sell their Target stock, driving its value down, for the same reason that Chipotle's stock value dropped when people were repeatedly coming down with e-coli infections from eating its food; they felt that their safety was threatened.

Only in America would facing death from a deadly disease be considered comparable to being unexpectedly being confronted with a fully clothed person of the opposite gender.