Bathroom Bills In Britain
By Bob Small
The issue of male-to-female transexuals visiting women’s bathrooms is controversial not only in Pennsylvania but apparently in the U.K.
In Britain, the issue of access to women’s bathrooms for male-to-female transexuals has even cropped up in the question of who will replace disgraced Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
In the British system, the party in power — the Tories — nominates candidates to replace a resigning Prime Minister. A series of elections among the Tory Members of Parliament reduces the number of candidates to two, and then all the Tories vote and choose the winner. The Tories are closest to the Republicans in the USA, with political positions ranging from liberalism to Jacob Rees-Mogg, who’s been dubbed “the member of Parliament for the 18th Century”.
In the first TV debate, when the race had been reduced to five, the three remaining female candidates debated the concept of transexual self-identification: that is, the concept that if a male-to-female transexual says they are a woman, they then should be allowed access to a women’s restroom.
Earlier in July, Equalities Minister Kim Badenoch –one of the five — had announced that “single-sex toilets [were] to be mandatory in all new public buildings”.
What has not yet been determined in any country is this: in the absence of self-identification, who then exactly decides who is a woman. Would there be inspectors? How would they be chosen and vetted? Any ideas?
How would I feel if a pre-operation transexual who is wearing a dress stood in the adjacent water closet. If it were in Philly, I’d just assume it was a local drag queen and not need to think about it further.