The boy likes nothing better than the odd fart joke. No. Scratch “joke”: as far as he is concerned, there is next to nothing funnier than a fart. Or poo. Or mention of same. Or the idea that grown ups and the like may be involved in matters scatalogical.
There was a time, and we’re talking many, many years ago, when i, too, had an obsession with what went on in toilets. I still burn with embarrassment at an episode in my primary school: someone had left a rather impressive floater – a little like a large, brown, iceberg – in the bowl of one of our toddler-sized loos.
Well, i may have found that funny, as might my school friends, to whom i announced this amazing find all too loudly – before turning to find that the toilet area was being patrolled by the school’s scariest Latin teacher. And he definitely was not amused.
Still, my excuse – and i am sticking to it – was that i was all of six years old. A bit like the boy, now.
Religious refusal
I only mention this as i read of yet another furore in the US about a trans woman using ladies’ facilities (actually NOT the loo). Or rather, as far as i can tell, NOT getting to use same.
The incident went down in Macy’s, whose company policy is to allow leeway to trans men and women, permitting them to use whichever fitting rooms they feel comfortablest with. But this counted for little with at least one diligent and, er, assertively Christian employee, who refused to let a trans woman use the women’s fitting rooms.
The employee has been fired, both for their rudeness to a customer and for the breach of company policy. But this is not good enough for Liberty Counsel, a reactionary Christian organisation that claims to stand up for the rights of victimised Christians.
Not only are they sticking up for the employee, but their leading light, Mat Staver, was out and about yesterday on Christian radio prog, Crosstalk, objecting.
His somewhat hypocritical argument was that if Macy’s wanted to respect trans folk, they should create a third category of fitting room: so they’d have men’s, women’s and trans’s.
Not only, but – shock! horror! – that Macy’s policy could lead to an adult going into the kiddie’s restroom. Well, that’s a new one on me: do US folks really have separate loos for children. How weird!
Bigotry in action
Here’s the exhcange, twixt Staver and show host Eliason:
Staver: This was a man, everyone recognized it’s a man, going into the women’s restroom. Now whether that person has good or ill intentions towards women, no one knows, but the fact of the matter is when you defy common sense and when it says ‘women’s fitting room’ and you allow people other than women in that fitting room, you’re just asking for trouble. This is just an absurd policy, this is the so-called LGBT sexual anarchist agenda gone awry, I mean this is the absurdity to which this agenda goes when you ultimately follow it to its logical conclusion.
Eliason: If I envision myself as being a kangaroo, I mean let’s go outside of the gender of humanity, somebody might think I’m a monkey or a walrus, you’d say ‘Vic if you said that they would send you to the nut house, they would send you to the insane asylum.’
Staver: Well what happens if someone says, ‘I’m an adult but I identify myself as a child, I can go and use the little kiddies restroom,’ or silly things like that. But that’s where it goes to.
So much hate! Another of those things i really don’t get, because i go to a Christian church – and this sort of vileness just wouldn’t be recognised there.
A little light witness
So let’s fillet this. I really don’t remember the bit in the New Testament (perhaps Staver would enlighten me) where Jesus chased the trannies out of the women’s restrooms. I’m not altogether clear that the NT is especially big on toilets at all.
And like, you’d think, if it was a real issue, it might have got a mention. Did that Bethlehem stable really have separate His and Hers facilities? Did Jesus nip dowwn off the cross to take a pee?
Guess what: i think people back then…and indeed, throughout most of history…really did not care.
I’ll pass on Staver’s arrant hypocrisy: if he’s as Christian as he claims, he’ll know very well that the reactionary christian position on trans is that there’s no such thing. That you are what you were born. So the proposal for a trans loo or fitting room sounds like nothing more than window-dressing.
Another of these fine efforts to look as thugh they are engaging with the issues when they are doing nothing but.
Its about safety, stoopid…
In the end, i have but two out-takes from this outburst.
First is the pointlessness of it all. Trans men and women go to the loo, like everyone else, to use the loo. The number of instances where cis folk have been molested by genuinely trans folk in loos is vanishingly small. In the last two years i have uncovered just one instance in the UK of someone infiltrating a female loo for sexual motives, while wearing a dress.
And they weren’t trans, not even attempting to pass as female: it was just part of their overall sexual deviance.
Meanwhile, the record of trans folk being assaulted in toilets makes a long and dismal list. Not that that seems to bother any of the caring Christian commentators.
…and the Christian obsession with sex in the toilet
No. Because here’s the second peculiar out-take from this episode. I get that somewhere buried in this all is the idea of modesty and exposure – though presumably those who get so het up have never been in a women’s changing room or loo.
Oh! Well, not lawfully, anyway.
Because nowadays, female facilities – again, i write from UK experience – are a model of modest non-exposure. Local changing rooms? Cubicles. Women’s loos? Cubicles.
Basically, to get an eyeful of anything you ought not to, you need to be peering under doors or drilling holes thru walls. Which is kinda obvious.
But no matter. These Christians are obsessed with toilets and sex. As though, in their own minds, the two just naturally go together. As though, if you’re looking to seduce someone, you don’t go down your local bar.
Or rather you do. But then you head in to the nearest restroom and presumably chat someone up over the partition.
What a bunch of freaks and weirdos!
Oddly, there is nothing about that behaviour in the Bible either. But if the Bible ever did mention toilets, i rather feel that’s the sort of thing that would have been up for condemnation, rather than the rather more demure usage of trans folk.
jane
xx
