On April 8, 25-year-old Ally Robledo, a transgender woman, was given a no-trespass order shortly after leaving Rosauers grocery store in Lewiston, according to several stories published on local news stations in the Lewiston area. Her horrible crime? Using the bathroom.
“When I did use the male’s (restroom) there would be people that would harass me in school,” Robledo said in a story by KLEW. “I would feel really embarrassed and there were times when I found myself in a lot of dangerous situations.”
Despite the growing body of scientific research supporting the idea that transgendered individuals are “born this way,” as Lady GaGa would put it, and a normal functioning aspect of human sexual and gender identity, discrimination against transgendered individuals is startling and atrocious. A first-of-its kind survey aimed at uncovering the inequities and injustices transgender and gender non-conforming individuals face on a regular basis was published in 2011. Entitled “Injustice at Every Turn,” the survey was conducted by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
The results of that survey are astounding. Fifty-three percent of respondents reported being verbally harassed in a place of public accommodation, 22 percent were denied equal treatment by a government agency or official, 19 percent report being refused medical care because of their gender identity. Even more astounding is the 63 percent who experienced a “serious act of discrimination” based entirely upon their transgender or gender non-conforming status, including loss of job, eviction, bullying, physical assault, sexual assault, incarceration and more.
Not surprisingly, with such rampant rates of discrimination and abuse, a staggering 41 percent of transgender or gender non-conforming individuals reported attempting suicide, as compared to 1.6 percent of the general population.
“A male subject who was using the female restroom, and that made some women customers uncomfortable because of the appearance that a male was using their restroom,” said Lewiston Police Captain Roger Lanier in the same story by KLEW.
Except it wasn’t a male subject. It was a female subject. Robledo looks like a woman, has been living as a woman, and has even had the first stage of reconstructive surgery. She might not fit into the constrictive binary gender roles society has shoved upon us, but she’s a person with the same needs as any other person — including the need to use the bathroom once in awhile.
The only thing wrong, unhealthy or perverted about a transgender person using the restroom that matches their gender identity is the vitriolic attitude of cis-gendered people towards it. Unfortunately, our country is slow to catch up to the rights of these individuals, with only 13 states having laws that protect transgender people from discrimination in public accommodations. Not surprisingly, Idaho isn’t one of those states.
Discrimination and bigotry stem from a place of fear and hatred of what is unfamiliar and unknown. Rather than promulgating our closed-minded, socially constructed, heteronormative belief systems that are harmful to a large number of people in our society, let’s begin to recognize the damage our attitudes can inflict on them. Transgender and gender non-conforming individuals are just trying to live their life like everyone else, free of discrimination and harassment.
Put your bullying away and let the girl use the bathroom in peace.
Kaitlin Moroney can be reached at [email protected]