Transgenders, all in the family

The Nebraska Family Council and Family First have merged into the Nebraska Family Alliance. (Slogan: “Just One Group Now But Still All the Paranoia, Bible-thumping and Demagoguery You’ve Come to Expect from Two”). And its first target? Yes, you guessed it, right there on the website, it asks:  “Transgender sports coming to your school?” Visitors are encouraged to write the Nebraska School Activities Association.

Well, sure, clearly it’s important to take aim at young, vulnerable, already outcast people as your organization’s first target because they so threaten the very fabric of family life.

Look, I don’t understand the whole transgender thing, how some people feel trapped inside with the wrong physical parts. Honestly, it all sounds pretty freaky to me, but then I’m a 50something square, white, middle class, straight guy from Nebraska. If I start hating all the things I don’t understand, I’m gonna be awfully busy hating. Hell, I might even have to form my own group with the word “family” in it just to keep up. Instead, I’ve decided to make room in my consciousness for things I don’t understand and to believe we should find ways to accommodate them as long as they don’t threaten me.

(Actually, when I first heard the word “transgender,” I thought it was like a transformer, only people with the power to change genders at the flip of a switch which, honestly, sounds kinda cool.)

Anyway, the kerfuffle over the transgenders among us, wherever the discussion comes up, always seems to come down to bathroom use. Not to get all Freudian, but one might even suspect the Nebraska Family Alliance and its ilk are stuck at the anal stage of psychosexual development, what with their fixation on toilet habits.

See, I really don’t care who uses the men’s room. Men, women, women becoming men, men becoming women, women who used to be men, men who used to be women. Let’s just all have a big pee party, as Jerry Seinfeld once said. 

I do remember when I was a lad, some buddies and I snuck into a women’s restroom just to see if it offered some clues into what the hell girls were all about. The vending machines on the wall frankly hinted at way more than we were prepared at that age to know, and we skedaddled out quickly and never spoke of it again.

To this day, I cannot speak for the behavioral standards for women’s restrooms, but I can for men’s. In the interests of perhaps salving some of the fears, herewith are some urinal rules that all should follow, whatever their original gender, hoped-for gender or new gender:

-- Eyes straight ahead.

-    -- Don’t choose a urinal immediately next to one occupied unless you have to, and if it’s a three-urinal men’s room and all are unoccupied when you enter, choose one of the end ones, lest you leave the next arrival with no choice but to stand next to you.

     -- Do not put foreign objects in a urinal, but if one already is there – a cigarette butt, gum, a bug -- you are duty bound to aim at it.

In any case, I don’t imagine transgender sports are coming to many schools in Nebraska, so perhaps we should keep our powder dry on a statewide war over them. Where the issue does come up, let us deal with it with sensitivity, compassion and understanding.

You know, the sort of qualities you might expect an organization with the word “family” in it to practice.