Having a strict “girls’ room” and “boys’ room” is just as bad as keeping black and white bathrooms separate, claimed UCLA law professor Adam Winkler. In a New Republic article called “Bathrooms Are Not Separate-But-Equal,” Winkler sympathized with Maine high school student Nicole Maines, a 15-year-old “transgender girl” who was denied access to the girls’ restroom, since Maines is biologically a boy who wears female clothing and makeup.
Winkler decried the “intolerance” of the “insensitive” schools officials who aren’t comfortable letting the male Maines use the girls’ bathroom, and complained that these are “strict and outdated rules that discriminate in who can use which restroom.” He insisted that such standards are “acts of discrimination no different from those that prohibited black people from entering white bathrooms until the 1960s.”
Winkler also brought up several other cases of transgender or transsexual students --including a 6-year-old “girl” in Arizona--who were not allowed to use the restroom corresponding to their pretended gender in school. “The legal issues surrounding full acceptance of trans-people are likely to be messier and more confusing,” admitted Winkler, “and bathrooms are proving a familiar flashpoint.”
Messy and confusing? You bet. Let’s get this straight (no pun intended). The person in question is not a girl. He is a boy. Despite Winkler’s insistence on using “she” and “her” to refer to Nicole Maines, the fact is that “Nicole” is a boy who “identifies as” – read, pretends to be – a girl. No matter how you slice it, the truth remains that he is a boy.
But Winkler wants him to be able to legally indulge his delusion and use the girls’ bathroom. “Especially for underage schoolchildren, this shouldn’t pose a threat to anyone,” he claims. It didn’t occur to him, it seems, that there is something wrong with “underage schoolchildren” being transgender. Somehow, for Winkler, making boys use the boys’ room and girls use the girls’ room is discrimination. Really? Because it actually sounds a whole lot like common sense.
Well, then again, after “transgenders” demanded recognition from Obama’s inaugural address and insisted to have a place in opposite-sex beauty pageants, maybe the jump to using opposite-sex bathrooms isn’t so surprising after all.
