The Anti-Transgender Bathroom Laws Echo Race Segregation
Raina Lipsitz decided to look into the similarities between the current anti-transgender “bathroom laws” being proposed in the US, and the former racist Jim Crow laws. She found a lot of similarities:
The bathroom laws targeting transgender people and African Americans have both been portraying the relevant groups as “sexual predators”.
In both cases, the supporters try to portray the victims as some kind of contamination (which was also Hitler’s tactic when portraying Jews):
Phoebe Godfrey, associate professor in residence in the sociology department at the University of Connecticut, tells me that when it comes to the anti-trans movement and the anti-segregation movement, “the parallels are direct and obvious.“ She explains: "White parents were hysterical about the integration of bathrooms from the point of view of protecting white women … The language is very similar. It’s all about uncleanliness, disease, intrusion, and a sense of personal space and privacy being violated by The Other.”
Many white people also feared that desegregation would encourage interracial marriage and thus lead to the eventual destruction of “whiteness” itself. The parallell to the TERF fear of transgender women undermining the concept of woman is clear.
During World War II there was resistance to hiring black women at production plants because they would have to share bathrooms with white women. They were considered to be diseased. The idea of having black soldiers also met fierce resistance, in the way Trump tries to ban transgender troops today.
The anti-trans propaganda insists that trans women (and to a lesser degree trans men) are mentally ill and emotionally unstable, and may “infect” others – especially kids – with their condition.
Lipsitz writes:
By now, we know that the desegregation of public bathrooms did not lead to the increased sexual victimization of — or a syphilis outbreak among — white women. Is there any credible evidence that allowing transgender people to use whichever bathroom they want will increase violence against women and children?
The answer is, of course, no.
In both cases the supporters of this kind of discrimination refer to traditions and “the way we do things” (which basically means upholding existing power structures and prejudices).
Gavin Wright, William Robertson Coe professor of American economic history at Stanford University says to Lipsitz that in the 1960s, “establishments feared that desegregation of lunch counters and restrooms would drive white customers away. But after the fact, customers got used to it in a matter of days or weeks — maybe a year or two in smaller towns and rural areas.”
Prejudice is overcome when people see that “The Other” is very much like themselves. This is what happened when gay men and lesbian women become more visible too. They were clearly not the perverted, degenerate, predators portrayed by the bigots.
And that is also how the right wing extremists and their “radical feminist” allies will be defeated.
You car read the article here.
