I just typed the word "bathrooms" into my blog's search function, and the first post is from 2016. Seems fear of who was peeing next to you started in the '40's in reaction to nascent civil rights efforts. Now that we accept skin color (legally, anyway, if not in reality) and haven't yet figured out how to ban religious groups from bathrooms, we turn at last, as Popehat says, to trans persons.As it became much more socially unacceptable to express hatred and revulsion for gays and lesbians in vivid and creepily masturbatory terms, it seems like the people who used to really enjoy doing that switched to trans people, and are leaning into it.https://t.co/HAEjlq776x
— Giantsecretspacehat (@Popehat) February 1, 2021
Reading down, the problem goes back to 2015; in Houston, anyway. I think it was kicking around in North Carolina about that time, too, but I haven't done the research to pin that down.
Dan Patrick tried to make himself a national figure with it in 2016; by 2019 he was on to Trump's border wall, and through with bathrooms (he got nowhere with it, although he holds a statewide elected office and didn't lose that office either, not to the present day).
And now somebody in the WSJ wants to revive it? Why?
"These things that pass for knowledge I don't understand...."
It's almost like there's a strategy to scare people when Democrats are in control in DC, isn't it.
ReplyDeleteI've worked in and frequented any number of small concerns which had ONE rest room that was used by people of all genders. Usually the issue was whether or not they were ADA compliant.
One of my earliest memories of a public bathroom was in a small restaurant where, armed with my new found ability to read (which distinguished me from my younger brother, who had to count letters still (“Gentlemen” was always a problem), found a sign on the door: ”Co-Ed head. Enter at your own risk.” When I returned to the table I asked my father what the sign meant. He dissolved into laughter before he could tell me.
ReplyDeleteBut it never occurred to any of us that this single room used by all was a problem.