Today, you look at pictograms, predictable gender binaries, to guide you toward the appropriate toilet; a person in pants on the left and a person in a dress on the right. If you are a woman, you know to hang a right, while men go left. This only reveals how culture wants your gender to look, what door it wants you to walk through, and how it wants us to conduct ourselves.
The bathroom is a place where segregation based on gender is globally acceptable since it is within the conduct of common sense, for It is where we sort people depending on their gender for the protection of all; criminals from crime and the innocent from becoming a victim. Though civil rights battles have been fought there before — over blacks, over women, over people with disabilities but we must not forget that those civil rights battles are based on equality without a worrisome consequences.
Today, liberal views of who is a woman and who is not is devastating this culture that have locked away beasts from accessing potential prey they so wish to harass, abuse and violate. In United States, a simple need to visit the restroom is turning into a potentially hazardous urge, as irrational new laws are allowing men who ‘self-identify’ as women to access ladies’ bathrooms and changing facilities.
It is impossible for someone like me to comprehend irrational policies for irrational reasons in the name of rights from discrimination that are disastrously tearing apart the very fabric of societal values. After all, some things in life are so sacrosanct, glaring and are enshrined in the ‘Conduct of Common Sense’ that it is totally impossible to imagine life – normal and decent – without them.
It is agreed that sometimes laws and customs deserve to be swept away for more progressive ideas and sometimes they should not. Opening the doors of ladies restroom to sexual predators in the name of a very minuscule population of LGBT(less than 1% of American population) is definitely one of those ideas that does not deserve sweeping customs away for. This is so because the consequences of such decision will devastate the social life of our female population and exert psychological pressure which is undoubtedly counter-productive.
We will be wrong to dismiss the ongoing efforts by the LGBT community (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender) to desegregate public bathrooms and allow those males who ‘self-identify’ themselves as females to use women’s restrooms and locker room as harmless and liberal agitation. In fact, this represents the gravest threat to our civil society as we know it.
The question is: why are American liberals, mainstream media, obsessed about turning public restrooms into a free-for-all when only a minuscule segment of the US population describes themselves as transgender. Especially when it is 100 percent impossible to distinguish between those males who honestly identify themselves with the opposite sex, from those who do so for criminal reasons – reasons that only become clear after a crime has been committed.
It is very glaring that the major beneficiary of this irrationality will be the lawyers who will be reaping bountifully where they did not sow once the sexual assault season begins. This is so because how will the anointed gatekeepers differentiate the women who are trapped in male bodies from the ‘real’ men who are bona-fide menace to society and in desperate need of incarceration?
I’m not really sure how this latest American irrationality that aims another tear in the fabric of societal values will play out, but I am certain that ‘comfort’ is the very last thing Americans will feel once this madness becomes institutionalized.
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Op–ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija
Abiola Akintunde is a political commentator based in Nigeria. He blogs on www.abiolaoakintunde.wordpress.com, tweets at @AAbiolat on twitter and can be reached via paulakintunde@gmail.com
