This World We Live In (#3)
There has been buzz on the issues of public bathrooms on and off for a while now. Transgender people are often permitted to use bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity instead of their physical gender. If you had asked me 10 years ago if a debate would one day ensue about who may use the women’s bathroom or the men’s I would have told you no way! It doesn’t mean I am discriminating; it just never occurred to me that a person might want to use a bathroom that does not correspond to their physical gender. Certain bathroom equipment corresponds to certain equipment on your body. If a man (physically speaking) told me, in a public place, “I feel more comfortable in the women’s restroom. Mind if I use the other stall?” I wouldn’t particularly mind. That’s what individual stalls in the restroom are for, and a woman peaking through the gap in the stall would creep me out about as much as a man would.
That being said, I have read many articles indicating that this is only the beginning of this issue. It continues into school bathrooms and school locker rooms. This is where I start to get upset. I never in a million years would have thought there would be a debate about whether someone who is physically male should be allowed to shower with teenage girls. As a mother of daughters, I simply do not want someone with a male body undressing in the same place as my daughters. I don’t want a male to see them undressed and I don’t want them to gain personal experience with the naked male body until they choose to do so in their own good time (you know, when they are 30 years old and married…). Modesty is a big deal to our family. For us modesty is intrinsic who we are. It’s part of our religious beliefs, which are even more intrinsic to us. WHAT we choose to show (or not show) to others, particularly members of the opposite sex is not nearly as important as WHY we make that choice. A person could be modest because they are ashamed of their body, or (like us) a person can be modest because they believe the body is a sacred gift from God only to be shared with appropriate people at appropriate times. Whatever gender a person identifies with, I do not want my children to believe it is acceptable to be undressed with a person whose body is of the opposite gender.
Individual stalls are something I can get behind. I would not ever want to discriminate against another person, and I will do my best to accept every lifestyle choice of the people around me, and to do it with kindness. That being said, I can only accept the choices of others as long as they do not take away my own choices. I don’t want to deny you the things that make you ‘you’. Why would you want to deny me the things that make me ‘me’?
Instead of trying to find compromises the battle is fought (at least in the media) with an ‘all-or-nothing’ mentality on both sides. Based on the media I assume there are many people in the world who would accuse me of being a close-minded, discriminating jerk. To those people I would ask, how is insulting me for my values different than me insulting you for yours? That is maybe the biggest problem; every group forgets that almost everyone holds their personal beliefs as near and dear as almost everyone else. Some days I want to beg the whole world, “please just let me be me, let me believe what I believe and live accordingly.”
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