A transgender advocacy group known as the “Movement Advancement Project”—a name redundant on so many levels it’s distracting—is paying to run an ad on Fox News during the Republican national convention. The ad features a transgender narrator being denied the use of a ladies’ room and explaining that being forced to use a bathroom that corresponds with his or her biological sex “puts me at risk for harassment and violence.”
While there might be some truth to that argument, it requires a lot of brass to make it. That’s because the risks for violence and harassment do not run only in one direction. Last fall, the University of Toronto temporarily suspended its policy requiring all campus bathrooms to be gender-neutral after discovering that some men were using it as cover to film women who were showering. University officials should have known better. In 2014, a rapist in Toronto was arrested for pretending to be transgender so he could get into women’s shelters, where he sexually assaulted two women.
And now, just as the Movement Advancement Project is moving and advancing its big PR campaign, a “transgender male who identifies as female,” Shauna (Sean Patrick) Smith, has been arrested in Idaho Falls for holding an iPhone above a dressing-room partition to film an 18-year-old girl trying on swimwear at the local Target. According to East Idaho News,
The fact that this took place in a Target dressing room is not without irony. Earlier this year Target formalized a policy of welcoming “transgender team members and guests to use the restroom or fitting room facility that corresponds with their gender identity.” This prompted a boycott from Christian groups that included a petition with over one million signers decrying the policy. Over the next month, Target’s stock plummeted from around $85 a share to $65. It still hasn’t recovered—the Dow is soaring at the moment and Target is trading at $73.
The question before us regarding transgender bathroom policies is pretty simple. Is obliterating the convention of single-sex bathrooms, locker rooms, and changing rooms necessary to protect the exceedingly small minority of people that identify as transgender? Or should we preserve this convention to protect the over 50 percent of the population that is female from harassment and violence? The Scrapbook is no mathemagician, but the utilitarian calculus in favor of sticking with convention is pretty compelling.
