Bring Your Birth Certificate.....

This post has been "floating" around in my brain for weeks. Sometimes that's the way it is....I will hear or read something and it just won't go away.

There have been a lot of stories over the past year or so and laws contemplated. passed and then changed....all having to do with gender identity and bathroom use. Probably because our culture is coming to grips with the fact that sexuality is a lot more complex than giving birth to a baby and dressing your beloved newbie in pink or blue.

I'm no expert and at the age of 70 it can be a challenge to wrap my brain around all of the "classifications" and "terminology" that address our new world....and how people fit into it.

The most recent story that grabbed my attention was the fact that North Carolina had passed a bathroom bill. Apparently it was law in the state that an individual use the bathroom that corresponded with the sex documented on their birth certificate.  But NC started to lose a lot of business and a lot of income from sporting events.....so the law was rescinded and everything went back to normal.

And as I thought about it I thought about normal use of any bathroom. We have gender neutral bathrooms in every house/apartment/condo in America. I think of the small bathrooms on airplanes.....no one checks your birth certificate as you try to cram yourself in one of those while in flight. You, we all, have been in multi-stall bathrooms at theaters, stadiums, museums, airports, department stores.

We have all been in a bathroom at some point where....down the line in another stall....someone who's birth certificate does not match the logo on the bathrooom door is quietly taking care of business. And we didn't know and it didn't hurt us and it didn't matter.

I've heard the worries about women and children no longer being "safe" in a public bathroom if an individual transitioning from one sex to another might be in there and attack them. I don't know the statistics.....but can pretty much guarantee that more men, women and children are battered and sexually abused in their own homes than in any public bathroom. And pedophiles are a different category of predator anyway......not an individual who was born only to find that their concept of "self" did not match their "genitals".

So I guess I think it's a ridiculous non-problem. Laws that say you must use the bathroom that matches the gender on your birth certificate. Who's going to check? Who's going to force you to show the paperwork before entering the stall? The newly formed Rest Room Police?

On the other hand.....job creation......