Bigoted right wing homophobes and transphobes across the country have insisted that we must criminalize transgender bathroom use because normalizing it will lead to "men using the women's restroom," dogs and cats living together, and mass hysteria.
To protest the Target store chain's decision to announce that transgender customers and employees should feel free to use a bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity, right wing activists have demonstrated that Target's policy will lead to men using the women's restroom by doing exactly that -- sending men into the women's restrooms.
In an interview this morning with “Breitbart News Daily,” the American Family Association's director of governmental affairs, Sandy Rios, said that activists have been “testing” Target’s policy by sending men into women’s rooms at the retail chain. [...]
The program’s host, Stephen Bannon, contended that rather than being inclusive, Target is “trying to exclude people who are decent, hard-working people who don’t want their four-year-old daughter to have to go into a bathroom with a guy with a beard in a dress.”
And yet no abstract children would encounter a bearded man in the women's restroom if these "activists" had not sent a bearded man in there.
This is a crystal clear demonstration that they don't understand anything about anything. Transgender women do not have beards. Some transgender men do. What they fear -- a four-year-old girl running into a bearded man -- is far more likely if the law forces transgender men to use the women's restroom. Under a "bathroom bill," a transgender man's birth certificate may dictate that they use the women's restroom, but they may have ceased to resemble a woman a long time ago.
The same is true of transgender women. Forcing them to use the men's restroom could lead to a wide variety of embarrassment, harassment, and possibly even violence against them.
To send a 'beareded man in a dress' into a women's restroom just to make a point is no different than James O'Keefe dressing up like a comic book character and wandering into ACORN or Planned Parenthood. It's no different than the Center for Medical Progress doctoring their videos to make it appear as if Planned Parenthood is selling body parts.
These supposed problems wouldn't exist if right wing assholes didn't invent them.