“Jesus loves me…” and evidently spends a lot of time thinking about bathrooms. ChiccoDodiFC/Thinkstock
Some very strange shots were fired on Monday in a brewing transgender-bathroom war in Horry County, South Carolina, when a woman defending transgender rights at a school-board meeting was interrupted by a roughly 500-person chorus of “Jesus Loves Me.”
In January, a high-school senior who has used the boys’ restrooms since seventh grade was suspended for a day for refusing to switch to the girls’ (or the nurse’s) restroom in his last semester of high school. Until last fall, when a teacher discovered that he was born female and complained, the school had never taken issue with his use of the boys’ bathroom; according to CNN, his family had “reached a decision with school administrators to use the boys’ room to make everyone more comfortable” five years ago.
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Which brings us to last night’s epic school-board meeting.
In the video, which is worth watching in its entirety, a lone woman tries to defend the rights of transgender students amid a sea of angry citizens (many of whom look far too old to have school-age students, incidentally).
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Even before the thundering “Jesus Loves Me” coda (which gets underway at 6:19 in the 7-minute video), this chaotic school-board meeting offers an amazing inside look at the circular, nonsensical reasoning that the anti-trans contingent deploys to defend “the word of God” and the “order of Nature” against the rights of kids. Because, as Mark Joseph Stern wrote on Tuesday, anti-trans Americans are losing the moral and legal argument, big time, they’ve got nothing but cockeyed gender-binary absolutism to keep them afloat. As one audience member puts it, “A male dog has a male body part. If we see a dog with two body parts, we all know that there is something wrong with the order of nature and the order of God when it comes to that dog.” Uh… amen???
Sorry, I could not watch very much of that. I respect you for having the stomach to endure it. The bigotry and idiocy of regressive religious people infuriate me. It seems that there will always be something upon which they must focus their hate. The language is always the same even though the target is different (minorities, women, gay people, transgender people, etc.). When they “move on” from the open hate of a group (by hiding the hate, not by eliminating it), they must direct that open hate to another target. Hate is their fuel. Privilege is what they want to protect. It appears that most of the people in that video are white. I would hazard a guess that most of them have never been the target of concerted and/or systemic discrimination. Their lack of empathy is so depressing.
Most of them are likely capable of empathy, it’s just conditional empathy. You know, for members of their tribe. Instilled from decades of anti-critical thinking.
Siobhan:
Yep. That can change, too, as the Face Time Works study showed. For most of these people, transgender or any LGBT person is alien to them, not a part of their lives, their town, their world. When that changes, and they get to know someone, very often, attitudes change.