In keeping with their time-honored tradition, the so-called conservatives (cough)*bigots* (cough) of the United States – having lost at the highest court in the land – have shifted a certain amount of the focus of their jaundiced gaze away from the “issue” of marriage equality, towards the transgendered community.
They have created a yet another neo-con myth wherein sexually confused predators (almost invariably men, but occasionally the odd woman), put on contragender garb so as to ogle and molest women and children (but almost never manly, manly men) in public restrooms. This mythical predator exists only in the twisted, perverted minds of its creators.
A: it simply does not happen. Not a single case has been reported in Houston, Texas, the nation’s third largest city with a 3.3% LGBT population. Austin, Dallas, and El Paso similarly have never had a case of Transgendered Assault in a public restroom – People in Texas have been raped by strangers, Uber Drivers, and Sheriff’s Deputies, but never by a Transgendered person.
B: the times that these overly suspicious misanthropes have claimed it has happened have been proven false. The supporters of the bathroom panic laws have provided absolutely no real-world evidence to support a single claim.
and
C: Nationwide there are virtually no cases of transgendered sexual predators benefiting from anti-discrimination laws. Experts nationwide have argued that the myth is just that, a myth created in the fevered minds of fear mongering homophobes and transphobes. Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, and a host of other states have all had their own anti-discrimination laws on the books, sometimes for years, with ABSOLUTELY NO CASES of transgendered sexual predators taking advantage of them.
One would think that even accidentally, this would happen, right? Well, by most estimates, there are between 0.2-0.3 percent of the population in the United States that are transgendered. So to start with, the population is tiny. About 700,000 people. The population that fully transitions is …. smaller is not the right word… infinitesimal, nearly imperceptible is the right word, since 1936, 135,367 people have changed their name from one gender to another. By 2010, (the last census date), only 21,833 had also legally changed their sex. That means that all this uproar is over 0.006% of the population as a whole. Really? REALLY???
In 2012 (the latest date stats are available) the FBI reported 346,830 rapes of people 12 years old or older. In the same period, 62,939 cases of child sexual assault were reported. It’s safe to assume that there were more rapes and child sexual assaults that remain unreported. Statistically though, given the rate compared to the general crime rates, there should have been at least six cases of transgendered sexual predators reported in the same period. Except of course, there was not. Because it does not happen.
It seems to me, listening to the neo-con pundits, that they don’t even comprehend what exactly transsexual means (an issue I’ll address in a future post). More importantly, they, like most bullies, have to pick what they perceive to be the weakest among us, and attack them to further their own sick, often perverted, goals.
Sources:
http://mediamatters.org/research/2015/10/15/texas-experts-debunk-the-transgender-bathroom-p/206178
http://jezebel.com/houston-detective-12-year-old-raped-by-stranger-in-pub-1740506278
http://www.chron.com/houston/article/Houston-Uber-driver-accused-of-rape-6177712.php
http://www.theestablishment.co/2016/02/17/raped-by-the-deputy-a-texas-case-a-u-s-problem/
http://www.livescience.com/50635-bruce-jenner-transgender-prevalence.html
https://www.nsopw.gov/en-US/Education/FactsStatistics?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1
http://www.med.monash.edu.au/gendermed/sexandgender.html
strollingthroughmymind 