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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.
