No, Gov. Reynolds, trans people are not marginalizing anyone

In 2018, my best friend was dragged out of a school bathroom by a group of male students, barring him from entering. For the rest of his time at the school, he says he had to use the bathroom in the administrative office.

The reason?

He was trying to use the restroom.

"I wish I could say that I was brave and didn't give a damn," he told me. "As a kid I was frightened. In my sophomore year I'd already had someone relay to me that the best cure for me would be a bullet between the eyes."

He was not peeping, he was not taking pictures of others and uploading them onto the internet, he was merely attempting to use the bathroom for a quick three minute interval between classes.

There was perhaps another reason — a big reason, perhaps, that I'm glossing over — my friend is transgender. He does not feel comfortable with his body, he does not feel comfortable being called a woman, being treated like such. It is something that I have seen him struggle with for almost two decades now, an out-of-body experience I can somewhat relate to myself.

I didn't understand what it meant to be transgender at the time. I didn't really get why someone would want to put themselves through all that, why they couldn't just accept themselves for who they are — the problem with that logic is that, no, at the end of the day, that wasn't who they were at all. Their assigned gender at birth, for whatever reason, they are incredibly uncomfortable with. It's something a lot of people don't understand, can't understand, for the simple reason that they've never experienced gender dysphoria. I feel like that's where a lot of this lack of empathy comes from — a lack of experience.

As for my friend, he had been struggling with his identity for as long as I can remember. It wasn't something forced upon him by his parents; in fact, his father seemed to utterly despise this line of thinking.

Even when I didn't understand it, I could see how it made him feel. Every time he was called a girl, every time he was called a she, I could see how uncomfortable it made him, and after some time, I learned to respect this fact. I learned to start using the pronouns he was comfortable with, I learned to not make certain disparaging remarks. I really do believe that people are capable of learning, of changing, but unfortunately not everyone is so willing to learn new things. To many, these new things are alien, they're scary, they're hellbent on taking over our beloved country.

We often tout that America is the land of the free, where others are free to express themselves in whatever way they please, so long as it is not bringing harm to others — however, there has been a disturbing increase in the amount of people who seem to be obsessed with the genitals of others, obsessed with every in and out of their personal lives. There is an uptick in violence against individuals for merely affirming their own identity. Just this last year, a non-binary student was victim to a similar incident, beaten close to death and dying shortly afterwards in the hospital.

And people, rather than express sympathy, rather than acknowledge this person as a fellow human being, instead decided to mock the murdered child and justify the bullies who had enforced their dated viewpoints.

Trying to do something as simple as use a bathroom has become incredibly contentious in the United States, as made evident by our ever-courteous governor and attorney general, both of whom use dehumanizing language to describe these very real human beings. "The radical left," "the Biden administration," "those extremist liberals and their extremist gender ideology" — they speak about how the acceptance of transgender individuals is "destructive" and "marginalizing women and children," how it's setting back gender roles by a few dozen centuries. They make something as simple as someone's identity, something they should be free to express in the United States, out to be some sort of terrorist conspiracy to encourage sex offenders. In reality, these are just people, like you and me, who want to feel comfortable in their own skin.

Frankly, it puts the same bad taste in my mouth as segregation; as early 1900s America and their similar rhetoric when it came to black students intermingling with whites. The same rhetoric, this notion that black people were unclean, that they carried diseases, that they threatened the lives of women and children, it's the same exact arguments these people nowadays are making toward transgender individuals. Accusing them of being perverts, rapists, pedophiles and the like — I have to ask, do any of the individuals accusing these people of said things actually know a transgender person? Have they ever met one? Have they ever tried, even for a second, to understand their side of the story?

This prudent "us versus them" mentality of the right and the left has utterly poisoned this country, to the point where a person's identity is seen as "woke politics" and "virtue signaling." This is where giving basic human rights to others is seen as a federal offense, as a betrayal of the country, as a dictator president "forcing his woke policies" upon the good red-blooded American people.

We often forget that many who suffer from gender dysphoria are children themselves.

Are there going to be bad actors that go into the wrong restroom? Yeah, of course there are. But guess what? Whether or not the law says trans people can use the bathroom they want to use isn't going to change the fact that criminals will do illegal things. No matter what the law says, you're going to have creeps sneaking into women's restrooms, and it's pretty obvious who those creeps are (pro tip: it's not the transgender women who are just trying to use the john.) It's as dumb as enforcing strict gun laws knowing full well that criminals are still going to get their hands on guns if they really want them.

There are going to be bad actors in any circle.

That should not translate into hostility for an entire group of people, people who cannot help the way that they feel.

These are not pedophiles trying to indoctrinate your children, they are children. These are not creeps trying to grab snapshots of the women's toilet, they are women who want to use a bathroom they feel safe in.

If the presence of another person who's just minding their own business is bothersome for you, I've got some bad news.  

I think people nowadays always assume the worst in others before even knowing them, and assume that this whole identity thing is just a way for trans people to get whatever they want. Personally, after years of knowing my best friend, I don't think that's the case at all.

I think we all just need to be a little more kind.