Rape Survivor Brings Up Legitimate Concerns With Gender-Neutral Bathrooms

We’ve talked about the whole gender-neutral bathroom issue and how transgender advocates want people to be able to go into any public bathroom, regardless of what gender they’re feeling like that day. The discussion has gone everywhere from the ridiculous to the serious – and this is probably the most serious of all.

Kaeley Triller is a survivor of rape and sexual assault. She has written a column over at The Federalist warning against the dangers of caving to groups demanding gender-neutral bathrooms, all in the name of diversity and inclusiveness. The entire column is well-worth a read – she talks about how she was sexually abused as a child through the lens of seeing a photograph of her ten-year-old self –

I’m about ten years old in the picture, with scraggly hair, pale skin, and a vacant expression. I’m wearing my mom’s oversized knit sweater and Oxford shoes my dad had bought me. In my hands is a piece of green felt I’d cut into the shape of New York for a school report about a U.S. state. Coincidentally or not, New York is the place my abuser had recently moved. I think I wanted to be closer to him. Don’t try to understand it. I still don’t.

[…]

The invitation to engage as a child had revealed my whole dilemma: I didn’t hate the little girl in the photo. I hated her need. I hated her anonymity. I hated the visible proof that she loved her abuser. I hated that she didn’t know any better, that it took her another ten years to figure out why she still slept with the light on and showered in her underwear and vigilantly lined the crack under the bathroom door with a beach towel and destroyed her teeth with gum she relentlessly chewed as a means of escaping the recollection of his breath on her face. I hated that he fooled her. He fooled everybody. He was really good.
“Wake up!” I wanted to scream at her. “Can’t you see what’s going on? Do something about it!”

 

It’s the same desperate inclination I’m fighting today. Everywhere I read in the news, there’s talk of another school or gym or business that is boldly adopting “progressive” new locker room policies designed to create equal rights for people who identify as transgender. These policies allow transgender individuals to use the locker room consistent with the sex they identify as their own, regardless of anatomy.

Obviously, Kaeley knows of which she speaks. And it’s absolutely heartbreaking.

But this is the part that got to me – mostly because it’s something I’ve been saying as well –

I read these reports, and my heart starts to race. They can’t be serious. Let me be clear: I am not saying that transgender people are predators. Not by a long shot. What I am saying is that there are countless deviant men in this world who will pretend to be transgender as a means of gaining access to the people they want to exploit, namely women and children. It already happens. Just Google Jason Pomares, Norwood Smith Burnes, or Taylor Buehler, for starters.

 

While I feel a deep sense of empathy for what must be a very difficult situation for transgender people, at the beginning and end of the day, it is nothing short of negligent to instate policies that elevate the emotional comfort of a relative few over the physical safety of a large group of vulnerable people.

 

[…]

 

Why would people knowingly invite further exploitation by creating policies with no safeguards in place to protect them from injury? With zero screening options to ensure that biological males who enter locker rooms actually identify as female, how could a woman be sure the person staring at her wasn’t exploiting her? Why is it okay to make her wonder?

 

[…]

There’s no way to make everyone happy in the situation of transgender locker room use. So the priority ought to be finding a way to keep everyone safe. I’d much rather risk hurting a smaller number of people’s feelings by asking transgender people to use a single-occupancy restroom that still offers safety than risk jeopardizing the safety of thousands of women and kids with a policy that gives would-be predators a free pass.

Exactly. How do you keep creepers from taking advantage of gender-neutral bathrooms and locker rooms? ESPECIALLY since we’ve been told it’s rude and triggering and bigoted to ask people about their gender identification? All a predator has to do is cry about how he FEEEEELS like a woman today, and then it’s totally okay for him to go into the women’s bathroom. These kinds of people are very tricky about how they target their prey, just like Kaeley says in her column. Whether transgender advocates mean to or not, they are actually handing these dirtbags just another tool to continue in their disgusting activities. It’s not about dismissing their feelings or their struggles or because it’s weird to have guys in women’s bathrooms or girls in men’s bathrooms – it’s about protecting innocents who could become targets from those who seek to do harm.

Something to think about.