Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Enforcing The Gender Norms

All of these anti-bathroom bills are trying to enforce the gender norms, anyone who does not fit into the them is suspect.
I’m Proof Bathroom Bills Are Not Just a Transgender Issue
Time
By Sally Kohn
May 9, 2016

I’m a lesbian and I fear public restroom confrontations

I hate using public restrooms. Airports and rest stops are my least favorite. I avoid locker rooms whenever possible. But really every restroom is bad. In fact, it happened to me just the other day in my fancy office building in New York City. I was at the sink, washing my hands, when a woman walked into the restroom and did a double take, first looking at me and then looking back at the sign on the still-open door of the restroom. Was she in the wrong place? Or, implicitly, was I?

I am a biological female who identifies as a woman. I am not, for any intents or purposes, transgender. But as a non-gender conforming butch lesbian, I have my own tiny window into our nation’s current political debate about bathrooms—the always looming fear that easily slips into shame, and the occasional outright harassment, all because I have to pee. And that’s from using the bathrooms that I “should” be using according to vicious anti-transgender bills sweeping the nation.
[…]
What these “bathroom bills” are actually about is enforcing traditional gender codes and norms in an increasingly diverse and shifting America. Single-sex restrooms just like single-sex dormitories have always been rooted in compulsory heteronormativity and the sense that we have to protect women from men who can’t expect to be reigned in. This still echoes today, as when an all-male elite club at Harvard University suggested that allowing women to join would increase the potential for sexual assault. And notice that no one seems to worry about pedophiles being forced to use the little boy’s room instead. The point is that girls need protecting

And femininity must be protected, too. Or even enforced. A video that recently went viral shows a woman being forcibly evicted from a restroom because she looks more masculine. Should women not only have to be born women to use the ladies room but wear skirts? Maybe have their hair a certain length and curled?
As I have said before these bills are nothing more than "bathroom purity" laws that seek to enforce the gender norms, anyone who falls outside of these norms are suspect.



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