Bathroom Bills and Safe Spaces

Michelle Goldberg wrote a piece about bathroom-panic laws for Slate, arguing that the left had created problems for itself by supporting trigger and content warnings, because now conservatives could use them to hate on trans people.  If you can argue that a book makes you feel unsafe, then why can’t you argue that a person makes you feel unsafe?

This isn’t the first time cultural reactionaries have used trigger-warnings in culture-war skirmishes.  Fun Home, Alison Bechdel’s autobiographical graphic novel, sparked a protest at Duke University on the grounds that conservative Christian students shouldn’t have to read about gay stuff or see beautiful ink drawings of naked ladies.

Now, though, this strategy is a lot more elaborate – an organization calling itself the Alliance Defending Freedom has created a video called “The Unintended Victims of Bathroom Bills and Locker Room Laws.”  The video shows interviews with women survivors of sexual violence who feel traumatized by the idea of having to share public restrooms and locker rooms with trans women.  The women in the video consistently equate trans women with “males,” and one of them compares the presence of trans women in locker rooms to grooming children using pornographic images.

Goldberg points out that conservatives have not been staunch defenders of women who are mad about sexual violence, and that this sudden concern for rape survivors is pretty laughable.

But she thinks liberals might have a problem fighting it off:

Those contradictions, however, are real. There’s no coherent ideology in which traumatized students have the right to be shielded from material that upsets them—be it Ovid, 9½ Weeks, or the sentiments of Laura Kipnis—but not from undressing in the presence of people with different genitalia.

But sure there is!  Having to read a book is not the same as having to accept the presence of another human being.  An individual belief is not the same as a law.  A trans woman’s actual body is not the same as a subject for debate.

I don’t have a problem with a student refusing to read Fun Home on the grounds that his faith tradition says he can’t.  (The student who complained about Fun Home didn’t say that he was triggered, only that his religious beliefs deserved accommodation.)  This isn’t the same as a woman opting out of Boys Don’t Cry because she knows that she will have a panic attack in a lecture hall, but both problems can be solved without descending into fascism.  I don’t think we can have a pluralistic society, or a university system that serves as the gateway to a living wage, without acknowledging the perspectives of conservative and devoutly religious people who also go to college.

It’s also important to distinguish between the right to opt out on an individual basis and blanket censorship.  These students don’t have the right to take Fun Home and Boys Don’t Cry away from everybody.

But I feel like Michelle Goldberg’s inability to see the difference here, between the right of college students to opt out of course material and the right of anyone to exclude entire groups of people from the public sphere, is significant.  Trans women are people.  They exist in the world.  Their existence, and their need to go to the bathroom, is not political so much as relentlessly politicized.

The transphobic activists defending bathroom panic want to frame trans people as ideology incarnate, as nothing more than the symbol of perverted liberal gender politics.  When we put trans people on the same level as an incendiary text, we cede a lot of ground to this dehumanizing stance.

And just like the Alliance Defending Freedom, we turn a conversation about real violence into a debate about ideological purity.