Musings from my everyday life...

One of the reasons these bathroom bills demonstrate they don’t come from the intellectually gifted is that you cannot actually perfectly enforce them. Imagine a young and feminine pre-op transsexual woman entering the woman’s bathroom. Are you going to give her a genital inspection before she is admitted entry?

I suspect that most young transsexuals already use the ladies’ room without incident and these bills are really more about late transitioners who don’t pass well. But remember that there are also a number of genetic women who actually look and dress quite masculine. Are you going to inspect their genitals as well just to be sure?

We know that transgender people just want to use the facilities and get out of there and I have been doing that now for many years when I am out as Joanna without any incident. I suspect that even if some women suspected I might not have been born female they could see by my respectful attitude and body language that I was not there to do anything inde…

There is unrest over transgender people and most of it is coming from deeply conservative pockets of society where the notion of not fitting perfectly within a prescribed binary does sit well.

The problem is that many of these people are not well educated and tend to see things like homosexuality or being transgender as a conscious choice as well as an abomination before God. Some are even the types that, half a century ago, would go to church on Sunday and yet would have little trouble denying a black person the right to sit on the same bus or drink from the same water fountain.

In the southern United States it took a great deal of bloodshed to finally settle things and give some semblance of dignity to African Americans.

Our population is somewhat smaller and more fragile. We are not well organized or as united amongst ourselves so we cling to the LGBT umbrella for support even if it does not fit us entirely well. Without their assistance however, we would clearly be far worse off.

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Cyndi Lauper is doing country music days and she chose education instead of not coming to North Carolina in protest over their discriminatory bathroom use legislation. Here is an excerpt from a recent interview:

Unlike Bruce Springsteen and others, you chose not to cancel your June concert in Raleigh, North Carolina despite your opposition over an anti-LGBT law passed by the state recently. Instead, you announced all profits are to be donated to a LGBT charity there. What was your thinking?

Fear is fear. And education is the way. Educate people on the facts and how to protect their civil rights; that there’s all kinds of people in the world and room for all of us. I lived through the civil rights period, I’m still living through the women’s rights period, because obviously all our rights are being stripped, one by one. So I felt that we could go down to North Carolina and teach people how to help themselves and each other – and also at the venue where we were playing we insisted on a t…