2016 April 23^rd

Today Mona Charen comes out in favor of North Carolina’s bathroom edict in which one can only use the restroom appropriate to one’s gender at birth. Her column takes some time to get around to that opinion. First, she has to bemoan the long restroom lines women must endure at various public events. Men, because of gender differences and accommodating restroom facilities, rarely have such long waits. Ah, but the DAR’s constitution hall gets around this nicely by providing women with twice the number of restrooms provided to men…. Surprisingly the DAR has not been sued for blatant sexual discrimination.

Most single occupant restrooms are gender neutral, but again poor Mona has complaints. She claims “men are messy and leave the seat up most of the time.” Mona has dug into the literature on restroom sanitation and found that 62 percent of men but only 40 percent of women failed to wash their hands after using the toilet. If you are a member of the right wing commentariate I understand that it is important to have a litany of complaints but this does seem to be excessively picky.

Charen finally arrives at her primary difficulty and that is the presence of males in females’ restrooms. She claims, and I’m sure it is true, that women change their clothes and do other things that require privacy in public restrooms. She is unhappy that these activities might be observed by a trans-gendered person. She then moves to the psychiatric literature, or at least to a retired psychiatrist who asserts that he opposes “gender reassignment surgery.” She mentions gender dysphoria, which, simply stated, is unhappiness with one’s gender. She then goes on to conflate that with body dysmorphic disorder, which is ones unhappiness with the image of one’s body. These are often women who misperceive themselves as overweight and struggle to eat even less as a result becoming dangerously anorexic. It should be obvious that these are very different problems.

DSM V, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, does not, repeat not, classify gender dysmorphia as a mental disorder. Many on the right desperately wish it were otherwise; it isn’t. The Republican Governor of North Carolina will now have to deal with the loss of jobs and state revenue produced by his ill-conceived foray into bigotry. Consider a law that requires anyone to use the restroom corresponding to his or her gender at birth: How will Governor McCrory enforce that law?  Will there be North Carolina State Troopers stationed outside every public restroom in the state checking birth certificates? Mona Charen would vote for that I’m sure but probably not for the increase in taxes required to hire the extra police. If you don’t require birth certificates on entrance how could anyone possibly know who was disobeying the law?