Today's post might reap a screenful of hate. Well... it might if I had a readership. One poorly calculated word, and I might come off as a bigot. I'm hoping that this disclaimer will run interference - but it's hard to back-peddle and explain yourself once someone has gotten a two-handed grip on the idea that they are pissed at you. People also have a way of shutting down before they hear everything you have to say.
Anyway - I might as well get to it. Today's musing is on the word tolerance, and how it's used by the champions of political correctness. I am actually a huge supporter of 'tolerance' - in the sense that I believe that while, the multifaceted society we live in makes it impossible for people to embrace each other's lifestyle wholly, we can at least agree to tolerate each other. But it seems to me that the C.o.P.C.s use word 'tolerance' when what they really want is 'embracement'.
Case in point: I embrace gay rights and equal marriage. I tolerate transgenderism. I consciously understand what transgenderism is, and I have sympathy for the people entrenched in struggles that relate to their biological gender as opposed to the one they identify with. I get it, I really do. But when I read about people arguing to use public restrooms of the gender they 'feel' they are - something in my head wants to roll it's eyes. To be honest, I don't really know why there's a mental roadblock there... there just is, and I *am* working on removing it.
So... what does a 'tolerant' person do? First, we tell that intolerant part of our psyche to keep it's damn mouth shut, and we act in accordance with our higher conscience. In the case of the public restrooms, there is also a logical component. The only reason I would oppose a biological male using a women's restroom is because of the potential for freaking out the biological females who also happen to be in there. But thinking about it logically, what is weirder - a biological male dressed as a woman in the women's bathroom, or a biological male dressed as a woman in the men's bathroom? I also consider the fact that anyone who goes into any restroom is most likely going to go into a stall to take care of their business, so who really cares about exposed genitalia? And in the case of transgender males - using a urinal is kind of out of the question, so they're kind of forced into the privacy of stalls as well.
That's the thought that would help me keep my cool if I ever found myself in the men's room with someone I suspected to be transgender. (And to be honest, how would I really know? It's not like I size up everyone I pass in the men's room anyway.) I've probably shared that space with gay men thousands of times over without half a thought, right? Why is it any different? It isn't really, but I have a half-submerged part of consciousness that 'feels' that there is.
So here's where I am with that - I'm working on it. I really am. It means breaking out of a social construct I've lived with my entire life - it's not going to happen over night. In the mean time I'm going to be tolerant.
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The Private Life of a Would-Be Hero
1 comment:
In a completely "tolerant" world, one might assume that the restrooms are merely functional, so there's little-to-no need to segregate by gender. (I don't see men flopping their bits around for others to see, and I suspect the same is true for the ladies' room.)
In fact, the more I think about it, if we're going to be completely tolerant and grown up bout this: we integrated restrooms for different races, why couldn't we integrate the genders as well?
Because men sometimes attack women. And that's where the whole argument falls apart, really: the separation of restrooms, functionally, has almost nothing to do with gender identity, nothing to do with pee-pee methodology, and nothing to do with seeing someone else's naughty bits. It's about safety, I think.
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