Seriously. We have a terrorist attack a month. A near daily massacre of innocent citizens by someone who bought an assault rifle at a flea market, a self medicated jobless populace and a presidential election that George Orwell might have imagined, yet we are fighting about where we lay our turds. I could not have made up a more fitting name than Luther Strange, the Alabama Attorney General who worries that using the bathroom according to gender identity will “challenge the personal privacy of America’s school children.” So how’s this transgender bathroom law going to be enforced? Are the kids going to have to pass through an x-ray machine like so much luggage and have their nether regions identified by a laid-off airline employee? Now there’s some protected privacy. Will they have to wear gender identity collars like our doggies perhaps with flea protection built in?

North Carolina’s governor Pat Mc Crory is concerned about ladies getting molested in bathrooms.  I for one am no Scarlett O’ Hara who needs protecting from the unlikely prospect that a man who looks like a woman and wishes like hell he was a woman is going to glimpse my bare ankles under the stall, decide that well, in that case he’ll quick switch back to a chest thumping molesting kind of man and pounce on me in a flurry of toilet paper and foamy soap. I’m ok with taking my chances that won’t happen.

In the Salisbury NC school system, students will be allowed to carry pepper spray this Fall which one board member said could be “useful for students who encounter transgender classmates in the bathroom.” Hold on to your tatas ladies! The solution to concern about bathroom assault is to give license for bathroom assault. Will these mace wielding mammas spray girls who have short hairdos and reached for a flannel shirt that morning or will they conclude that transgender males will try to fem it up and douse tall gals donning pink lace and pearls. I feel safer already.

I get it that people are scared and confused. Apparently we can identify as whatever we want these days. Rachel Dolezal resigned her presidency of the Spokane NAACP when it was revealed that she was a white person who identified as black. She was accused of “cultural appropriation.” I once knew a homeless man who identified as a subway grate. Again, cultural appropriation. No one seemed to be  concerned that this subway grate used the Men’s room to pee and sometimes, though too rarely, to bathe.

This election year we may very well have folks who identify as one party and vote as another.  Why can’t folks just admit that it is fear of a topsy turvy world that is behind this potty politics. It’s not ladies in the loo that are in danger, but the old way of doing things that might get violated. An African American could be president, a Muslim could be on the Supreme Court, a woman could join the Marines, a man could wear lipstick, a billionaire with orange hair could be serenaded with “Hail to the Chief”. Hold on to your pepper spray, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

– Margaret Baker, Hashtag #79. July 2016