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If a schizophrenic hears voices telling them to use the wrong
restroom,* should everyone else just be cool with it? If I right now decide I am trans…and now I am not…and now I am, which restroom may I use during each phase of that process? —Arik S.
My first inclination upon reading your letter, Arik (which included lots more transphobic wharrgarbl), was to suggest you take advantage of your rapidly alternating genders to go fuck yourself. But that would be churlish—everyone is ignorant until they're not.
Thirty-plus years ago, when I was 9 years old, I lived in a farm town about 30 years behind the times. In terms of social progress, it was basically the Eisenhower era.
My fellow fourth-graders and I knew there was such a thing as "being gay," but we had no idea what that meant. We conceived of gays as strange, leprechaun-like beings so consumed by lust they felt compelled to penetrate any orifice that presented itself. We made this into a game—God help us—running around pretending to insert our penises into everything from crayfish burrows to electrical outlets. (Make of that what you will, Dr. Freud.)
Later, I moved to Portland and learned that gay folks were (like me!) complex, multidimensional individuals with rich, varied lives that did not generally involve fucking the ground. I tell this story because, like Arik's letter, it illustrates how you can take a few garbled facts and twist them into a juvenile, bizarro-world caricature completely divorced from reality.
If you actually met some trans people, Arik (I admit this might be difficult, given how obnoxious you insist on making yourself to them), you would realize that transitioning isn't something you do on a whim because there's a line for the men's room. You would also know there are literally no cases of actual trans folk taking advantage of the restroom to stalk, rape, psycho-kill, kidnap or otherwise harass their cisgender counterparts.
On your deathbed, do you really think you're going to look back and say, "Gee, I wish I'd been less tolerant of other people's differences?" You don't even use the ladies' room. Where's the harm in minding your own business?