Which public toilet a person uses shouldn’t be that big of an issue. If you are male, you use the men’s. If you are female, you use the women’s. If you are neither, like me, you use the— oh, wait… Well, a rant on the lack of unisex toilets will be shelved for use at a later date. The point being, it shouldn’t be that big of an issue. It really shouldn’t, and yet… It is.

Transgendered people have been dealing with stress and apprehension concerning which loo to use for, well, probably as long as the public toilet has existed. Issues of how well one passes arise; worries about someone being too nosy and then calling you a pervert creep in. Will you be attacked? Will someone call the police?

Will it get you six months in prison? I ran across this article by the BBC yesterday, in my Twitter feed. Apparently Arizona, that joyfully insane state in the Southwest, is proposing a law that would require tansgendered persons to use the public toilet, or any other gender segregated public space, associated with their sex as stated on their birth certificate. (Apparently people in Arizona are required to carry around all their legal papers with them, at all times.)

According to John Kavanagh, the Republican lawmaker sponsoring the bill, allowing transgendered people to use the toilet associated with their gender, regardless of genitalia, could open the doors to creepy pedophiles misusing the system to expose themselves to their opposite sexed targets. This is nothing more than fear mongering. Want to get a discriminatory bill passed into law, mention how it can save your children and profit! Problem with that is creepy pedophiles (which aren’t the epidemic the media wants you believe they are, by the way) are going to do what they want anyway. That’s what makes them creeps.

What this potential law would do, far from protecting your children, is create a very unsafe environment for trans people who have to use a generally gender segregated public space. A trans woman, for example, being forced to use the men’s room because her birth certificate still says “male,” runs a very serious risk of being attacked. And, for the ladies, imagine how you’d react if someone came into the women’s loo who looked like a man, acted like a man, and perhaps even sounded like a man. Chances are, he’d get reported to security or the police. Also, and I do so hate to break it to anyone who assumes that the female race is all sugar-spun and dainty, women are not strangers to violence, so these trans men also run the risk of being attacked for being different.

It isn’t exactly the easiest thing to get your sex changed on your birth certificate; some states don’t even allow such a thing. Chances are, even if you can get it changed you’d have to undergo gender reassignment surgery first, and not all transgendered people can afford that. Hell, some transgendered people don’t bother changing their genitalia, being perfectly content to live their life as their proper gender without changing their sex.

While reading the article I spent a good deal of time rolling my eyes in a very pronounced and exasperated fashion. Aside from being absurd, it’s also rather insulting to anyone who is of a deviant gender, including Mr Kavanagh’s quote, “This law simply restores the laws of society: men are men and women are women.” So apparently I am chopped liver. Huzzah.

It, of course, did manage to get even more ridiculous. The article goes on to say that Kavanagh has proposed that, were the law passed, that police would be left to their own discretion in the case of women (by which I am assuming he means trans men, considering the context) who use the men’s loo in order to avoid a queue. I’m going to type that out again, just in case the blatant sexism didn’t settle in the after the first read through: police would be left to use their own discretion in cases where a woman used the men’s room to avoid a queue.