Shortly after the city of Phoenix passed a law broadly outlawing discrimination against transgender people, Republicans in the Arizona state government responded by proposing a law criminalizing the use of gender-designated bathrooms by people whose birth certificates don’t match that designation.

The justification given for such legislation is that, if people born male were allowed to go into women’s bathrooms, it would open the door to sexual predators sharing bathrooms with women and girls.

Evidently, boys are not worthy of protection.

Nor, it seems, are transgender people.

The legislation proposed by the state of Arizona would insist that a trans woman choose a men’s bathroom. She has to effectively announce to the world that she is a man, when she doesn’t feel that way, look that way, nor live that way. It is embarrassing, humiliating and dangerous, especially because there are people – like those politicians who oppose equality legislation and the people who vote for them – who may be in that bathroom.

Incidentally, no word on why FTM trans people can’t use the men’s room.

Conversely, in Canada the conservative government just passed a bill outlawing discrimination against transgender people. In point of fact, the Prime Minister and most of the conservative party voted against the bill, but there were enough members of the governing party voting with the opposition to result in passage of the bill.

Shortly before Wednesday’s vote, Calgary MP Rob Anders tabled a petition “on behalf of thousands” of Canadians opposed to what he called “the bathroom bill.”

“These constituents feel that it is the duty of the House of Commons to protect and safeguard our children from any exposure and harm that would come from giving a man access to women’s public washroom facilities,” Anders said.

Note the petition’s total disregard of a transgender person’s identity and reality by referring to trans women as “men.”

Again, the canard of safety for women and girls is used, as if quarantining male pedophiles together with boys is an acceptable price to pay.

Also, the reduction of the issue of equality for transgender people down to a question of who gets to go into the Women’s Room is shameful and idiotic, not to mention disingenuous. Cut out the bathroom protections from the equality legislation watch these people find a different reason to object. Clearly, respect and protection for transgender people is not something with which they are concerned.

Anyway, we have our law in Canada now… I am hoping it will at least serve to invalidate the previous rule preventing a person who presents as a gender different from that on her identification from boarding an aircraft. Even the U.S. is more progressive than that. [I wrote about that issue in a post called All Aboard – Except the TGirl.]

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