Let me be clear: I fully support the rights of transgender folks and the rest of the LGBT community to be free to live their lives fully, without facing either discrimination or bullying. Many have suffered for their unconventional gender proclivities. This must come to an end. There is a solution to this that’s so self-evident that only our knee-jerk partisanship keeps us from acknowledging and adopting it. Stay tuned.
But let me also state that there is something silly about “The Bathroom Wars,” typified by Ted Cruz accusing Donald Trump of seeking to dress up like a woman in order to sneak into the “Little Girls’ Room” and spy on Ted’s cute little daughters.
Nor is the silliness limited to evangelical conservatives who seek yet another “wedge” issue to inflame voters by appealing to their basest (and emphatically baseless) fears. There seems to be no end to the promulgation of the Culture Wars – by both sides.
NPR news and news programs have been obsessing over this issue (as has the New York Times and other “liberal media.”) Like Fortinbras attacking the Poles in Hamlet, it is a battle joined in pursuit of “a little patch of land / That hath in it no profit but the name.”
President Obama has foolishly sent out a severe warning to every school district in America that they stand to lose federal funding unless they allow all students to choose the bathroom that comports with their gender preferences. In doing so, he has unwisely added fuel to the Culture Wars fires by seeking to stick it to his conservative adversaries over the heads of an outraged Republican Congress. It’s the “Gay Marriage” issue of the first decade of the 21st century all over again, but with far, far less at stake.
What does Obama and other staunch advocates of transgender bathroom privileges hope to gain? A few more votes for the Democrats from the transgender community? What do Hillary (or Bernie) stand to lose? Millions of voters who will now find common ground with Trump? It just seems like a foolish and self-destructive cause.
The problem, here, is one of proportionality.
Remember the Ebola crisis? How many Americans actually died of Ebola? You can count them on the fingers of one hand. How many millions have died, or seen their lives tragically shortened and degraded, by pollutants in the air, by cigarettes and by the lack of good primary care for the poor? Yet Ebola was touted as a monumental threat to American well-being as is, nowadays, the danger of terrorism by Islamist radicals.
The argument gets joined by those on both sides who see an advantage in blowing things out of proportion.
I can understand conservatives wishing to do so – look at how Ebola undermined confidence in Obama and the federal government. What I can’t fathom is that better-educated Americans of progressive persuasion can’t seem to keep themselves from piling on.
I believe the huge outpouring of support for both Trump and Sanders is, at heart, a backlash against mindless partisanship whose victims are those whose lives have actually been degraded by stagnating wages and the gross income inequality they produce, by the failures of federally pushed education reforms to really change the culture of schooling for children from minority and low-income households, by the inability of advocates for free trade and carbon sequestering to make their case to their fellow citizens in a way that doesn’t seem careless of those likely to lose their jobs, those least equipped to adapt.
The result has played into the hands of conservative, anti-union, anti-environmental, anti-tax and anti-government forces.
These “hot button” issues, like bathrooms, allow the conservatives to control the policy conversation while the “real” issues get bypassed and the anger builds. That the level of this anger has taken the Democrat and Republican hierarchies by surprise is shameful to both.
And the solution to the “transgender bathroom” issue? Let the students in each school talk about how to prevent anyone from being threatened. (e.g. opening up “faculty bathrooms” to transgender students, creating a student-run group to hear complaints). Obama would have been far wiser to send out an advisory to schools, outlining some of the necessary cautions to be observed and inviting student groups to come to Washington to present their solutions.
And then, maybe, we could get on to the real issues.
(Robert L. Fried is a retired educator, a contributing columnist to the “Monitor,” and the author of “The Passionate Teacher” and “The Game of School: Why We All Play It; How it Hurts Kids; and What it Will Take to Change It.”)