Toilet patrol is nothing new in Texas. Our elected officials assume our moral compass—carrying on every odd year like that big fat-mouthed, uncouth, boastful cartoon rooster Foghorn Leghorn. This year in the Texas Leghorn, job number one is not ensuring public schools are adequately funded but instead plunging head first, eyes and nose closed, into the ethically and morally divisive issue of forcing transgender students to use a male or female restroom based on their birth certificate instead of their maturing rational human brain.
In Texas when it comes to complex physiological matters like s-e-x—and all other cutting edge scientific research that ends up radically changing moral presumptions while eroding blissful ignorance—our legislators remain shamefully behind the times. From civil rights to women’s rights, children’s rights, gay rights, workers rights and just plain human rights (air quality for instance,) the suits in Austin have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. They insist on being seen this way nationwide.
Biological scientists nowadays are proving that the transgender brain is different [not necessarily abnormal, but if this is easier to understand, then fine]. It has to do with brain and chromosome development in the womb. Wehhl … such advanced medical advancements are way above the average elected official. But when these findings were made well known nationally on a major and lengthy TV news report centering on Caitlyn Jenner (former American Olympic champ Bruce Jenner), the Obama administration summarily mandated all public schools in the U.S. will not discriminate from that rare student who is transgender, thereby allowing said student to use the restroom of his or her brain’s choosing and his/her emotional comfort.
Look what I’ve stepped into here! And in my beloved Texas where legislators wouldn’t understand this even if they could.
Small town toiletries
Another Texas toilet controversy I inadvertently stepped into occurred when I was a city government reporter in a small Texas town. Having been on the job a few months, one day some old feller called me to get down to city hall. He would not give details but could not contain his mischievous laughter. I called city hall, having no clue what to ask. No one answered the phone. Though my tipster had been laughing, I never assumed anything along the uncomfortable moral sphere.
So I got in the truck and drove a few blocks to the town square and walked into city hall. Sure enough, everyone was gone—all four of ’em: the city manager, city manager secretary, city secretary and office assistant. The police station was next door, so I walked over there and asked the police chief if he’d heard anything about city hall. The seasoned chief remained poker faced with a slight smile, his usual countenance, and as he put out a cigarette said nonchalantly he had no idea what the matter could be.
I returned to the paper and summarily called the mayor at his cable TV outfit. In his usual stiff manner, he claimed to know nothing unusual and added all was well at city hall. “Yeah, but nobody’s there and this man called,” I pressed.
Not ten minutes later the mayor with the city attorney walked into the newspaper office, darting at me while meeting the editor for a private conference. I couldn’t hear anything. But after the guys left, my editor quietly motioned me in, barely able to contain his laughter. Red faced and in a joking manner, he told me that the city manager had bored a peep hole between the men’s and women’s restroom at city hall.
I was speechless, maybe with a slight smile to fit in. I didn’t see anything funny about it at all, felt sorry for the city manager’s all-female staff, then recalled the time when the city manager asked if I needed to use the facility before an interview. I felt sorry for the city manager, too. He was young, educated, professional, clean cut, church deacon, married with kids, committed to his very serious public job—and I often noticed his vehicle still at city hall way after hours.
Of course he was taking no calls even when my editor left numerous messages at his home. We wanted a comment for the inevitable article. The media storm was immediate with area TV and radio calling me for information. The city council was trying to stifle the story, trying to be gentlemen and not get into a rather disgusting matter. They did not want to go public, preferring the city manager just leave his position (and town). That night the city council held its monthly meeting, and I was there covering anything that might come up off the agenda. The councilmen could not look the city manager in the face as he read through ordinances and other business, keeping his voice monotone.
Then the next day, the city council realized they were going to have to go public and called a special session with the media. All of us showed up, one radio personality jokingly calling the ordeal ‘pottygate.’ The mayor proceeded to tell everything: how pieces of sheetrock kept peeling off the wall around the women’s single-stall toilet, how a hole was discovered when the paper towel dispenser above the toilet was removed to restock, how the city manager denied any knowledge, how his staff believed him, how they all laughed about it at first. Then a private detective was hired, unknown to the city manager, and the report came back: He was the only one who ever used the men’s toilet at city hall. The two restrooms were side by side separated by a wall in a building built decades ago. The city manager confessed. He explained to his female staff that he just had to ‘see something.’ Embarrassed and humiliated, the women tried to file charges for ‘peeping Tom.’ But there was no crime other than defacing public property.
A few months later, Texas Monthly called me about the incident, wanting to include it in the annual Bum Steer awards. The writer asked my perception of the former city manager. He came across to me as ‘tightly wound,’ all business and no pleasure, always talking water and sewer lines and budgets and city improvements. And that should have tipped me off because small town folks love to shoot the breeze and get to know people. In that way he was odd.
A friend of mine in the big city read about the ordeal (the editor sent the articles to the Associated Press). She told me about a book she had read on male predators. Men of this nature start with an obsession with pornography. Then they need to spy on females in their private moments, may start acting out by driving in the nude or engaging publically in self gratification, before finally attempting to assault a female for sex.
The three-letter word
Sex and sexuality are as wild as nature itself: complex, unexplainable, against the rules of some societies and religions, compulsive to some extent, sometimes haunting our very dreams. There are laws against molestation and rape, and for the most part females are protected and certainly encouraged to alert police of assaults or suspicious behavior even a gut instinct. Women know very well about the creepy man, the weirdo who may stalk us in a public restroom or lurk around in the next stall. We teach our girls to always be on the look-out for such strange men. But our biggest fear is that a man, in his craven desire to rape, will don a wig and women’s apparel in order to walk right in our public restrooms, waiting for the right time to attack.
I imagine this happens, but I do not know for a fact that it does or ever will—not with all the cameras and cell phones and mirrors and females with their guards up. When and if a man masquerades as a woman to enter the women’s restroom to spy or attack, it’s a crime. The very thought is one of our many fears as women.
Getting back to our state Lege, some of our officials may think that allowing transgender women (who physically still may be men) to use the women’s or girls’ restrooms would be a temptation to molest us, especially little girls in our public schools. A transgender man or boy thinks he is a female. He/she would not want to harass or assault or even bother us.
Flip the scenario: A transgender boy (who physically is still a girl) is forced by state law to use the girls’ restroom at school. Not only would girls be uncomfortable and maybe even malicious toward a student in their restroom who looks and acts like a boy, but the transgender student would be going against his/her nature, too.
Texans like everyone else are going to have to keep an open mind about advanced discoveries in biology, chemistry, sexuality and brain science. New information sometimes forces people to change their thinking and how we treat fellow human beings. Perhaps we should start testing political candidates, too—allowing only the top ten percent on the ballot.