Did the Obama administration really think it through before issuing a regulation permitting people who claim to be transgender to use the restroom or locker room that corresponds to their sexual identity rather than biology?
University of Virginia professor emeritus Stephen Rhoads has a sobering piece in the Weekly Standard that does think through the ramifications. I urge you to read it.
Rhoads tells about the Seattle man who used the women's locker room at a swimming pool. He wore male clothes and did not self-identify as a woman. However, when asked to leave the women's locker room, he said that the law now allows those who are biologically male to use the girl's locker room.
He left eventually but Rhoads asks: did those working at the pool have the legal right to ask him to leave? Are verbal claims or physical attributes relevant in whether somebody with male biology gets to use the girls' locker room? And what if he had said he was transgendered?
Rhoads writes:
If he had been in fact a transgendered female, the authorities at the pool broke Washington's rules. State regulations forbid treating the feelings of transgender people and alarmed women equally: "If another person expresses concern or discomfort about a person who uses a facility that is consistent with the person's gender expression or gender identity, the person expressing discomfort should be directed to a separate or gender-neutral facility, if available."
In other words, if the man at the Seattle pool had been a self-declared transgendered female, the authorities should have followed the example of Washington's Evergreen State College. A few years back, parents of girls on a high school swimming team that practiced at the college pool complained about the presence of a transgender woman, Colleen Francis, in the women's locker room.
Ms. Francis, who has male genitalia, was walking around the women's changing room when not lounging with legs asunder behind a glass door in the adjacent female sauna. She calls herself bisexual with a special attraction to women. The girls on the swim team were told that they could use a small changing area nearby while Ms. Francis used the larger women's room.
One writer on GenderTrender, a feminist site skeptical of the transgender movement, pointed out the Evergreen State situation was reminiscent of pre-Title IX America, when girls' sports teams frequently used facilities notably inferior to those available to male athletes: "The Washington state law is being used to attach a condition to Title IX equality for females, and that condition is that equal access to facilities for teenage girls is predicated upon their willingness to undress and shower in front of a self-described 'kinky,' 'horny' middle-aged heterosexual man who refers to himself as 'a teen girl.' "
In Washington state, the strong feelings of a number of girls and their parents count for nothing compared with the feelings of a single transgender woman with male genitalia.
Only about 0.03 percent of Americans are transgender. But in time, under the new regime, many males who are not transgender will be using women's rooms. That's because in the real world, many men—maybe most—like to look at naked women. Too many of these men get special pleasure from looking at undressed women who are unwilling to be, and frequently unaware of being, observed. Voyeurism, like exhibitionism, is an overwhelmingly male phenomenon.