Applying to jobs in schools, babysitting my 2 year old niece, and generally day-dreaming about the future, I’ve been thinking a lot about queer adults and kids— mainly how the public at large seems to think the two must be kept separate. In the 1970s we had Anita Bryant’s crusades to keep gay and lesbian teachers out of public schools with such illogical declarations like, “As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children.” We can laugh at the absurdity, but there are still many barriers preventing LGBTQ and single-parent adoption and in many areas there is significant discrimination and pressure against LGBTQ people in professions where they work with children.
So perhaps it should be no surprise that the Tennessee lobbying group against a gender identity non-discrimination ordinance would push their case by conflating trans and genderqueer folk’s safe bathroom use with child molestation. Don’t get me started on how ridiculous it is that non-discrimination always gets reduced to the bathroom issue and how upsetting it is that feminists and queer folk tend to end up opposing each other in a debate refocused around sexual violence. It is doubly upsetting that the sexual violence in question is that of cis women and there is a silencing around the sexual violence enacted upon trans people in bathrooms that makes non-discrimination ordinances so necessary.
In the television spot, the motif is accompanied by the pithy “Gender differences matter.” Let’s assume that this is meant to be more than a plug for traditional gender roles and is attempting to be relevant to the ad. What they’re then saying is “gender differentiation [in bathrooms] matters,” (though I do think the “gender differences” language serves as a dig at trans folk for not respecting the gender identity thrust upon them at birth when a doctor assigned their sex). To follow that “gender differentiation” train of thought to its conclusion, we would have to believe that there are male and female bathrooms because all men are sexual aggressors and women must be protected from them. I’m disconcerted to reread that and wonder whether that is exactly what the lobbying group believes. But even if they do, I certainly do not and I’m upset that a discussion about violence prevention is being reduced to a heterosexist, Catherine MacKinnon-inspired, man-on-woman form of violence. Gender differentiated bathrooms are currently physically and verbally violent spaces for many people, including but not limited to people with disabilities and gender-non-conforming folk. And even if we were to toss out all of these marginalized people and focus on the presumably white, upper-class, able-bodied, straight women the group is focusing on protecting, this framework misrepresents sexual violence by locating the threat in strangers in the outside world, once again preventing a conversation about the overwhelming level of violence that women face from people they know. What if the spot had ended with a statistic about how much more likely that little girl is to suffer from child abuse or sexual abuse? Or her likelihood of being sexually assaulted or raped by an acquaintance when she grows up?
If we could stop assuming we know the face of the perpetrator (strange man), maybe admit that violence occurs within our own communities, homes, and relationships, perhaps we could stop scapegoating and perpetuating violence against vulnerable groups (queers) and actually fight violence where it happens.
