BuzzFeed, once the go-to place for procrastination with quizzes like “What Kind of Pop-Tart Are You Actually,” is now joining forces with the rest of the liberal media.
On Tuesday, the news outlet tried its hand at teaching America a history lesson on bathrooms. The article, headlined “Gender-Segregated Public Bathrooms Have A Long, Ugly History,” attempted to prove that bathrooms separated by a person’s anatomy are a construct of American policy. According to BuzzFeed News, today’s bathrooms pose a “civil rights battle” not unlike racial segregation. And, of course, social conservatives are to blame.
For her story, BuzzFeed News’ LGBT editor Shannon Keating began by pointing to recent bathroom bills (or, in her words, “anti-trans” bills), such as North Carolina’s HB 2, which stop “trans people from using restrooms that match their gender identity.”
She likened this form of transgender “segregation” to racial segregation.
“[T]his brand of anti-trans panic is bound up in the natural evolution of American public restrooms, which have perpetuated gross inequities since their inception,” she wrote, “with racial segregation being the most obvious, and by far the most egregious, example.”
“Whatever civil rights battle is being waged at any given time in history,” she added, “you can almost guarantee that the bathroom will be a primary battleground: the place where the bogeyman lives.”
According to Keating, public restrooms were made for “one group of people” or “straight, white, able-bodied cisgender men, who alone in U.S. history have been able to pee in peace.”
While “[m]ost Americans consider bathrooms divided by gender to be a given born out of anatomical differences” Keating’s piece suggested that “a specific set of decisions made by a select few and governed by cultural values” played a role.
This bathroom issue began in the late 19th century “when the first law mandating gender separation was enacted,” according to Keating. She went on to list a number of U.S. laws and policies that have mandated “gender-segregated bathrooms.”
Keating, however, left out some key facts by shortening the “long history” of separated bathrooms
She conveniently failed to mention that the ancient Romans segregated their bath houses by sex, as did the ancient Greeks. Sweat houses in ancient Scandinavia were gender specific as well.
But that doesn’t work for Keating’s story where she claimed “segregated bathrooms” are a modern, American-created social construct. According to her, “gender-segregated bathrooms” give “credence to the illusion of innate binary gender distinctions.” (Catch that? Toilets versus urinals encourage the “myth” that two separate genders exist – the very self-evident “myth” that there are two different human anatomies. )
Keating went on to quote Yale professor Joel Sanders as saying that people shouldn’t be labeled “men” or “women” at all, but rather “embodied subjects.” Gender-neutral bathrooms are necessary because everyone has the equal need to pee, he quipped.
Thank goodness that’s one biological fact the Left can’t ignore.
The moral of Keating’s article: people shouldn’t be forced to identify as anything in particular in order to relieve themselves. Free and open toilets for everybody.
And when they aren’t, social conservatives are to blame.
“Under the pretense of ‘privacy’ and ‘safety,’ social conservatives are stoking cultural anxieties around bodily privacy, genitalia, and sexual deviance,” she concluded, “in order to keep trans people from participating in the public sphere, a fate of bathroom exclusion that befell women, people of color, families, and disabled people before them.”
She added, “The bogus fear of an aggressor is, at root, most likely the fear of the Other gaining power.”
Keating’s article is just the latest in a trend of media campaigning for the transgender movement. Last month, ABC initially ignored the massive boycott over Target’s bathroom policy. Another outlet falsely accused a conservative lawyer of threatening transgenders. NBC has spent a significant amount of time covering the lifestyles of transgender kids and adults. And several media outlets have dedicated time to advocating for more LGBT characters on TV.
Here's a thought: if BuzzFeed doesn't want to "identify" as another liberal news site, they should stick to the Pop-Tart quizzes.
