Cops: Man Choked 8-Year-Old Girl in Restaurant Bathroom

Laws seeking to force people to use the restroom related to their birth gender is a solution in search of a problem. And this primary argument that allowing transgender people in the restroom of the gender they identify with will pave the way for an increase of bathroom assaults is flawed. Somebody who is intent on harming another person will seek out opportunities and if we are going to argue that a man can easily disguise himself as a woman and prey on children in restrooms, alternatively, that same person could forego the disguise and simply claim to have been born a woman and proceed into the women's restroom, as North Carolina and other laws are instructing.

The point is rather simple: If a man wants to assault women and children in a public restroom, laws either way aren't likely to make that easier or more difficult. The disturbing incident that started off this discussion is clear evidence of that.

The real issue isn't that efforts to accommodate transgender people will lay the cover for bad people to do bad things; the real cover provided by these laws is in stoking an irrational fear for people to hide behind, as they protest the accommodation of people and lifestyles they find morally objectionable.