Transgender Rights: Bathroom Access Debates

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Let Them Pee
Recently, in a poorly written article for The Federalist, Mrs. Nicole Russell let her feelings about allowing transgender people in the bathroom that best matches their gender identities known. In her uneducated opinion expressed in “The Sexes: Don’t Put My Five-Year-Old Girl In A Bathroom With A Transgender Boy” Mrs. Russell claims that transgender people should stick to the gender, and by default, the bathroom that was assigned to them at birth.
Nicole begins by quoting Ms. Jenner’s speech about respecting transgender individuals, including herself that she gave while receiving the Arthur Ashe Courage Award. She then proceeds to talk about how uncomfortable the presence of transgender people, both inside and outside the bathroom, …show more content…

Russell first goes wrong is claiming that transgender people are not the gender they identify as. She seems unaware of the fact that transgender folks are similar to their cisgender counterparts mentally and emotionally even if their genitals are not. In fact, according to an Amsterdam-based study found in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology conducted by endocrinologist Richard Swaab found that forty-two brains of transgender individuals that had gone through hormone replacement therapy, showed similar nucleus structures to their cisgender counterparts (p 47). Nicole also seems to be under the impression that transgender youth rely on fleeting emotions to determine their gender when that is not the case. All transgender individuals, regardless of age, are required to attend gender therapy for a minimum of six months in order for them to receive a referral to an endocrinologist who will decide if they are mentally stable enough to understand the full effects of taking hormones. During that time the therapist works with the individual to break down why they may want to transition. The therapist goes over the person’s past, they talk about any forms of abuse they might have faced, and attempt to have the patient build a support group that can help them during their transition. The same process is also required to receive any sex-changing surgeries because doctors will not preform them without written consent from a certified …show more content…

That battle being when African Americans were forced to fight to end segregation between them and the white community, which of course, included segregation in restrooms. Oppressors then would also claim that allowing desegregation would lead to an increase in bathroom violence, perpetrated of course, by the oppressed group seeking their basic civil rights. Their fears turned out to be false then, (that’s not to say bathroom harassment and abuse doesn’t happen just that the rate did not see a particular spike due to desegregation when it came to African Americans being the perpetrators), and it seems that the same can be said to be true thus far of the “penis scare”, as many Americans have come to call it, occurring from transgender women and men being allowed to use the bathroom of their

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