What exactly do you think is going to happen in the bathroom if my transgender daughter, Samantha, is in there with your cisgender (meaning she identifies with the gender she was assigned at birth) daughter?
My memory of going to the bathroom as a little girl at school does not include showing my genitalia to anyone else. Mainly, I went in to the bathroom to pee. Sometimes I pooped. I often, fully dressed, looked in the mirror to make sure there was no snot hanging out of my nose or that my hair wasn't standing on end. And then I left. And guess what? That's what MY daughter does in the bathroom too. Transgender girls are just girls who got different genitals than other girls. They aren't perverts. They aren't confused. They aren't scary. They are just people who want to pee and check that they don't have anything in their teeth. Just like everyone.
There are lots of transphobic laws (some proposed and some passed) out there now which are based on the idea that a transgender person is some sort of pervert of one gender putting on the clothes of a person of another gender -- all to get into the bathroom.
That isn't it at all.
My daughter is a girl. No one would go through what she has to go through -- taking shots to stop male puberty, now taking hormones in small doses to begin female puberty (she is fourteen), having to constantly correct people who misgender her, having to constantly defend who she is -- if she were just trying to get into the girl's bathroom. Think about this. Any rational person can see this.
Sammy would never show her genitalia to anyone else anyway and here is the reason why: she doesn't like hers. She doesn't want it. She has been asking to get a vagina since she was seven years old. In fact, she didn't want a vagina at first. She wanted a tail, like from the film Avatar. In that film, the Na'vi all have tails, which, she realized at a young age, functioned as genitals for boys and girls alike. What a wonderful world, it seemed to Sammy, where boys and girls just had the same genitals. How easy that would be. So first and foremost, she wanted a Na'vi tail. Failing that, stuck with her boring human options, a vagina would do.
There is significant risk, in fact, for transgender people to self-mutilate, particularly their genitalia. As the mother of a mtf transgender girl, I am wont to remind her that she needs almost all the parts of her penis to make that vagina she wants (and will get, come hell or high water, when she is eighteen - I don't know how yet, but I will find a way). Luckily, my daughter is in a supportive environment where she knows I will do anything to help her. I will move anywhere, I will get any job, I will find the insurance that will cover paying for her complete transition.
Why am I so adamant? You are scared of my daughter but we are scared of you. Transgender people are more likely to be harassed, intimidated, homeless, unemployed, beat up, and even murdered than any other group of people. I want her to be able to pass if she wants to. I don't want her to have to pass but I want her to have the option to just walk into a woman's room with no eyebrows raised, even in North Carolina or Georgia or any one of the many states trying to deny her right to pee where she feels safe.
