The Politics of Transphobia

The TransAdvocate: Transgender, Intersex, & GenderQueer News & Essays

Bathroom Bills & The Dialectic of Oppression Political discourse situated around the minority use of bathrooms has featured significantly in numerous social equality struggles, from the fight to preserve racist Jim Crow laws to the sexist battle to keep the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) from being ratified. Rhetorical themes featuring bathrooms, privacy, and safety concerns are integral aspects of a specific and identifiable political dialectic used to incite, promote, and sustain the fear that an oppressed group may well rape, molest, harass or infect the majority group should equality between the two groups come to pass. In contemporary times, this political dialectic features prominently in narratives supporting North Carolina’s recently passed law mandating that transgender people who’ve not been able to amend their birth certificate use the restroom assigned to them at birth rather than the restroom that matches their transitioned status, irrespective of legal identification or phenotype. Proponents of laws like North Carolina’s so-called “bathroom bill” assert that these laws are needed to ensure that A.) the privacy of cisgender people is respected; B.) without these laws, rapists will dress in drag in order to molest little girls in the restroom; and, C.) transgender people are actually perverts and pedophiles who need to be prevented from accessing women’s restrooms... ------------------------------------------------------- Support the TransAdvocate at: https://www.patreon.com/transadvocate ------------------------------------------------------- Other versions: Article: http://transadvocate.com/the-politics-of-transphobia_n_18825.htm Video: https://youtu.be/OgPP00YLT8Q ------------------------------------------------------- TransAdvocate: Web: https://transadvocate.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/transadvocate FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/transadvocate ------------------------------------------------------- Audio: 1.) TheOperator by Malaventura is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License. 2.) Across the Sky by Kevin Hartnell is licensed under a Attribution-ShareAlike License. 3.) Night Owl by Broke For Free is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.