Let me surprise you with the following statement: I sympathize with transgender individuals that they would prefer to use the bathroom of the gender they have selected. If you’ve gone through that kind of transformation, I suspect that it is generally a one-way street and you never want to go back.
The problem is public restrooms and locker rooms exist for a specific purpose and not as a lab for social policy experimentation. Government should not let bathrooms be infiltrated by members of the opposite gender, enabling violations of privacy and safety.
Now, LGBTQ activists want the other 99.5 percent of us to accept their demand and “reject the gender binary.” They want to condescendingly explain the difference between sex and gender. Here’s a truth bomb: The term “gender identity” has no real meaning. It makes some people feel good, offering them an unscientific justification for the choices they have made in their lives.
Men should not be in women’s restrooms. It really is that simple.
Are bathroom law supporters really worried about transgender sexual predators entering bathrooms and attacking women and children? No. We are worried about predators using this confusion to do so.
“But predators never attack people in bathrooms.”
In the last month alone:
- A peeping tom was caught taking cellphone video of women in a restroom on a college campus in Maryland.
- A man raped a woman in a park bathroom in Los Angeles.
- A jury in Hawaii found that the state’s public school system “failed to protect” a special-needs student from being raped by a classmate in a bathroom in 2013.
- A 17-year-old boy raped a girl in a high school bathroom in Angelina County.
Bathroom laws have become a national debate because of legislation passed by the state of North Carolina. The Justice Department incredibly issued a threat to the state over the law and when they didn’t give in, both sides sued the other.
We’ve been told for years that the Democrat Party is the “party of science.” Will they recognize biology as fact? We are all born male or female. You can choose to cross-dress, but that doesn’t change your biological makeup.
It seems to me that if you are biologically capable of committing a sexual assault on the opposite gender, you shouldn’t be in the bathroom of that opposite gender. This is common sense.
Now, North Carolina did not go looking for this fight. It was brought to them by radical activists in Charlotte who passed an ordinance allowing transgender people to choose which bathroom they wanted to use. North Carolina responded by passing a law that requires all persons to use the bathroom of their biological gender.
Perhaps North Carolina should have responded by passing a statewide pre-emption law - which would have invalidated the Charlotte ordinance - rather than passing an affirmative statewide law.
Just last week, the superintendent of schools in Fort Worth took unilateral action similar to the Charlotte ordinance. This issue is not going away. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has pledged to pass a Texas bathroom law during the next legislative session.
The choice between protecting women and children in private restrooms and letting a very small percentage of transgender individuals choose which bathroom they want to use is no choice at all.
Bathrooms have a specific purpose. You expect privacy and security while you are in them.
Sometimes, common sense is enough.
Mackowiak is an Austin- and Washington-based Republican consultant and president of Potomac Strategy Group, LLC. He has been an adviser to two U.S. senators and a governor, and has advised federal and state political campaigns across the country