Peeing in North Carolina

Now, about that "save-our-Christian-women" bathroom bill (HB2) in North Carolina...Why in the world would a cis-gender male go to the trouble of dressing up like a trans-gender woman in order to sneak into the ladies' room and rape or abuse someone? All he would have to do is whip out his gun (or unbutton his trench coat), barge in, and grab a victim, without bothering about any disguise or lipstick shade. Trans or cis, dress or pants, with or without supplementary legislation, molestation in any venue is already a crime, isn't it? So what is the sense of this gratuitous and demeaning law that newly criminalizes (for some people) the mere act of peeing unobtrusively behind a closed door?

Obviously, HB2's claim to "protect our women from predators" is a clumsy sham--another bogus attempt to use "Christian love" to cloak blatant discrimination against people deemed to be "weird" or "unnatural"--people who, simply by existing and peeing in a neighboring stall, might somehow contaminate the flower of Southern Baptist womanhood. The folks who voted this bill know perfectly well that human rights ordinances do not threaten anyone's personal safety--rather they threaten something these bigots cling to much more tenaciously than their faux pearl chokers--their assumptions of moral superiority to "those people."

Again, therefore, Americans find themselves immersed in the murky depths of the cultural wars crapper: the holier-than-thou turds attempting to escape defilement by contact with the more irregular chunks that are merely thous. What is to be done? What IS to be done?

Well, one tactic quite familiar to both sides of this debate is the old American tradition of duping people with gimmicks. Americans love gimmicks, especially if they're very expensive (e.g., the new and useless B-21 bombers that cost $790 million apiece). The major attraction of such elaborate flimflammery is that the ingenuity of the gimmick generally bamboozles the quick-to-feel and slow-to-think into believing that "everything is under control." As the talentless, horn-tooting stripper Miss Mazeppa (in "Gypsy") sang so convincingly, "Ya gotta get a gimmick, if ya wanna get a hand."

Accordingly, in an effort to calm the Right to Pee controversy, I have devised a gimmick. It's every bit as unnecessary as the B-21 bomber, and every bit as stupid as HB2, but what the heck? It might be so confusing that, like Miss Mazeppa's horn, it will bamboozle us into applauding a bad show. Here's my proposal:

First, everybody must go to their local DMV (fun!) and register their Personal Potty Preference (PPP). This preference must be the individual's choice, not the clerk's haughty assumption. Next, a picture is taken of the individual, looking like he/she intends to look when entering a Potty Place. Then, a plastic Potty Pass--somewhat resembling a drivers license--is generated and an encoded magnetic strip is affixed thereto. Now, only one step remains:  all the restrooms in all the states must be fitted with subway-entrance turnstiles which can be activated only by appropriately-coded Potty Passes. This could probably be done for the price of oh, say two or so, B21s.

And voilà. Once all this falderol is in place, can you imagine what will happen if an individual, duly certified (by his own choice, remember) as a user of MALE facilities, suddenly and incongruously feels impelled to swipe his card at the entrance to a FEMALE loo?  Well, goodness! that will set off an alarm even more earsplitting than Miss Mazeppa's bugle. Swiftly, the Potty Police (an elite new force "dedicated" to this one task) will descend upon the perpetrator, confiscating his/her Potty Pass and arresting him/her for being "en situation irrégulière." Onlookers will either applaud or retreat bemusedly to their stalls--secure in their confidence that everything is all right. In short, the gimmick will have gotten a Miss Mazeppa-style hand.

Unnoticed will be the fact that nothing at all has actually changed: everybody will still be using the bathrooms that they feel comfortable using (for which they possess a Potty Pass encoded with the gender identity they chose), and everybody will still regard public toilets as rather unpleasant places that must, unfortunately, be visited occasionally. But maybe, our attention deflected by the spurious "legitimacy" of a government-issued ID--and lots of gates, barriers, bells and whistles--we'll all just do our business and get out quickly, without worrying overly much about the "moral" implications of Peeing Where We Want in North Carolina.