We're having yet another heat wave this week, with highs of 98 and 99 and extremely high humidity. It will be relatively brief -- only three or four days -- and then we're back to usual summer highs of 89 and 90.
Five more weeks of summer. I swear this part of summer gets longer every year.
Meanwhile, the students have returned, so traffic has quadrupled and downtown Fayetteville (all six blocks of it) is swarming with fresh-faced young adults, glowing with the delight of being off on their own at college, far from their parents. That a big percentage of these are sorority and fraternity members probably accounts for how shiny they look.
My kid is starting his second year of graduate school. Our state has made it a crime for trans people to use the bathroom corresponding to their gender. Pushed as a way to protect women, this is actually a way to attack trans people.
My kid is a short, balding, bearded trans man. He looks nothing like a woman. If he tried to enter a woman's bathroom to pee, he would alarm all those shining sorority girls to no end. And Arkansas has made it a crime for him to pee in a men's room.
“The intention here is to make it so that trans people cannot exist in public,” said Maricella Garcia, Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families’ race equity director. “If you cannot use the restroom, you cannot go out in public.”
Evangelical Christians and MAGA bigots love to pretend they're being persecuted. This is what persecution looks like.
2 comments:
Ugh. I'm sorry. They really are setting up a no-win, actually potentially dangerous, situation with the bathroom restrictions (as opposed to the dangerous-only-in-their-imaginations one they're supposedly avoiding). My reaction tends to be to suggest making all bathrooms open to everyone, but I don't think that's going to fly (and there's probably something to be said for the present arrangement, as long as people get to use the bathroom that works best for them).
It's pretty upsetting. There are "family" restrooms in a few places on campus, but not enough and none near to where he works.
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