South Dakota Governor Vetoes Bill that Would Discriminate Against Rapists

“As if gym locker rooms weren’t creepy enough already” – Stephen Kruiser

At least, I’m pretty sure that quote is attributable to Kruiser – I recall him saying it on an episode of PJTV a while back. South Dakota’s governor just vetoed a bill that would protect girls from having to see male genitalia in their school locker rooms. From Emma Brown at the Washington Post:

South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard (R) has vetoed a bill that would have been the first in the nation to restrict transgender students’ access to school restrooms and locker rooms, a move that came after LGBT rights activists waged a furious campaign against the measure.

These stories are becoming all too common, as Mlive’s Jessica Shepherd reports on how a Planet Fitness displayed tolerance:

A Midland County woman’s gym membership was canceled after she refused to stop telling fellow gym members “a man” was using the woman’s locker room.

Yvette Cormier said the incident occurred Saturday, Feb. 28, when she entered the women’s locker room at the Planet Fitness location at 701 Joe Mann Boulevard in Midland.

“I was blocked, because a man was standing there,” Cormier said. “It freaked me out because, why is a man in here?”

Cormier said an employee at the front desk told her that the individual identifies as a woman.

Before Little Bob came along I used to hit the gym each day immediately after work, occasionally hitting the sauna for a nice detox. Even though clothing is optional, the thought of packing some pair of shorts drenched in my own sweat in a plastic bag was never too appealing. And so I would always go in naked, with just a towel or bandanna to sit on (protect from splinters, easier to wring out than shorts), a bottle of water (technically prohibited, but allowed me to stay & sweat longer), and a magazine to read. The magazine had a twofold purpose: 1) Stave off boredom, and 2) Make it clear that I was in my own world and had no interest in anyone around me. The DC area has a significant gay population, and occasionally I would see signs outside of the saunas warning guys not to harass other members in the sweat room. I never saw anything blatant, but that still never deterred the occasional guy who would try to strike up a conversation with me. No, nothing suggestive or lewd, save for one time the nimrod who followed up attempts at conversation by toweling off while standing directly in front of me. Still, it was always a bit creepy. When I’m completely naked there are only two acceptable phrases for another man to say to me:

1) Turn your head and cough
2) You have the right to remain silent.

My point is that if, as a man, I could be made uncomfortable by other men in the locker room what would it be like for a woman in my situation with a male approaching her while she’s naked? Schools are a logical extension of the gyms, as PJ Media’s Rod Kackley reports:

Kids in that school system are allowed to choose which restroom and locker room they use, depending on their “sense of gender,” regardless of which sex they were assigned at birth.

“I think there’s a lot of unnecessary fears around this. For our son, who started his transition in high school, he used the boy’s bathroom and it was honestly a non-event,” Laticia Miller, parent of a transgender student, told WKEF-TV after the school district held a public meeting led by the head of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital’s transgendered clinic to help parents of the rest of the kids deal with their fears.

“We need to understand showering or dressing next to a member of the transgendered is nothing to get excited about,” a social worker explained to parents during a similar meeting in an upstate New York school district.

“Gender originates in the brain. It has nothing to do with external genitalia at all and it is not a choice for transgender people,” Patricia Jordan told WICZ-TV.

I always love getting lectured on being “anti-science” by people who’s understanding of gender would fail a 7th grade biology quiz. This story also hit in my own back yard, when the Falls Church School Board inspired this piece by Stella Morabito at The Federalist, This is why voting in off-year elections is still important

“The board voted 10-1 with one abstention to shove the policy down the throats of startled parents. There was no discussion and no consideration given to the concerns expressed. Instead, the parents were in effect smeared as intolerant bigots.

The ten board members voting in compliance with this federal harassment behaved like a bunch of cronies who seemed most interested in securing their places of privilege in a coming nomenklatura by regurgitating Orwellian-style talking points about “equality” and “non-discrimination.”

Tim Harigan at the Fairfax Free Cirizen followed up by pointing out how the school board ignored several FOIA requests regarding discussions on this issue until after the board’s elections:

This time FCPS has failed to deliver by September a report on how schools will accommodate transgender plans and students—a report that was promised after the School Board hastily voted to add “gender identity” to its list of groups to be protected against discrimination. As readers may recall, FCPS and its ever acquiescent School Board voted for this policy on short notice and in the face of hundreds of protesting parents last spring—with implementing details to follow.

They in no way want those parents and other citizens of the county to understand fully the extent of the gender identity program being planned and how it developed.

Why the need for this? Steven Crowder came close when he discussed Wanda “I wish I was black” Sykes back when her story broke:

Have you seen the pictures? I gotta tell you, I expected to see like a bi-racial looking Hally Berry type thing.. It’s not even close. She looks like a whiter version of the cousin from Arrested Development.

If you’re going to fake being black.. why go full Wanda Sykes?

At this point and it’s likely to change, the top three hashtags Rachel Dolezal #TransRacial #WrongSkin on twitter have been, for several hours. yet no liberal site is covering it. HuffPo, Vox, Slate, Salon, MediaMatters. NOTHING, nada zip.

You know they had to convene and determine “oh my gosh, which victimhood status supersedes the others in this case.”

None of them are covering it. Why? I’ll tell you exactly why. Because in trying to blur/eliminate gender lines, while widening America’s racial divide through identity politics, leftists have found themselves in an incredible dichotomy.

It’s not as much a dichotomy as he thinks. As Hillary Clinton painfully learned in 2008, race trumps gender on the grievance totem pole. And now, the LGBQwerty movement trumps both. The one identity group that remains at the top of the grievance food chain are Muslims, and they will only be displaced when some other group murders enough leftists. To get a better understanding of the Radical Left’s motivation, the Federalist’s Stella Morabito and Joy Pullmann co-wrote a must-read piece, The Transgender War Against Human Rights, Science, And Consent

These lawmakers’ common-sense stance was totally non-controversial about a year ago. Now all of a sudden schools that have boys’ and girls’ bathrooms are being propagandized as “extremist.” Why the rush? Because this logical extension of the LGBT agenda is so obviously anti-reality that to succeed they must push it through, fast and furiously. In this case, the method is to smear the legislators and the vast majority of South Dakotans they represent, claiming they are “attacking transgender children.”

Nothing is further from the truth. South Dakotan legislators and their compatriots across the country are standing up, both to protect the vulnerable women and children of America who comprise a majority of the population and to protect rights for everyone that are far more important than forcibly rearranging private spaces to accommodate feelings that are probably best resolved through psychotherapy, not enabling self- and other-abuse.

The great irony of the gay rights agenda is that, ultimately, it’s not about gay rights or transgender rights. They always follow censorship with further centralized power in the state.

Using law to suppress free speech in the name of equality is characteristic of the urge to use centralized state power to promote unique and, frankly, warped agendas. This sort of equality requires having resentments to cultivate and victims to exploit—and state power that “protects” said victims by suppressing all opposing points of view.

Read the whole thing.

Because victimhood is an end in itself for the various Radical Leftist gender/race grievance-mongers, they can never be satisfied and must find new ways to expand their cottage industry. For example, wer’re now seeing a push for the government to grant favored status to LGBQwerty owned companies for government contract wards. In one of the more impressive examples of being sheltered from reality, the NY Times’ Claire Caine Miller ponders why there aren’t more gay Chief Executives. This isn’t too hard to puzzle out – if I were to take a guess I’d assume that the percentage of gay executives is probably around the same as the rest of the population. But they have a very good reason to not be openly gay – they prefer to be judged by the merit of their words and actions, rather than those superficial traits preferred by the bigots from the Radical Left. So that leaves us with the big question of what actually occurs when these laws are put into place? To paraphrase the great Joe Theismann, it doesn’t take a Norman Einstein to predict what happens next. PJ Media’s Leslie Loftis relates the story:

Recently, a man who did not claim to be a trans-woman just walked into the women’s locker room at a Seattle public pool and started changing and watching the women change. A woman reported him. Staff asked him to leave. He resisted, asserting he was allowed to be there. He went for his swim and then returned to the women’s locker room when he was finished. A girls’ swim team was using the facility. Mothers complained, and he eventually left. The police were not called because if he identified as a woman, then he was within his rights, and if he did not, then the staff preferred to settle the issue without involving the police. The story got out when a witness called a radio station.

It looks like Seattle Parks were pretty clueless about this:

As far as policy to protect everyone, Seattle Parks spokesman David Takami says they’re still working on the issue. Right now, there’s no specific protocol for how someone should demonstrate their gender in order to access a bathroom. Employees just rely on verbal identification or physical appearance, and this man offered neither.

“This didn’t seem like a transgender issue to staff – someone who was “identifying” as a woman,” Takami said in a statement. “We have guidelines that allow transgender individuals to use restrooms and locker rooms consistent with their gender identity. We want everyone to feel comfortable in our facilities.”

“Really bizarre,” MaryAnne Sato said. “I can’t imagine why they would want to do that anyway.”

Norman Einstein could probably imagine. It’s almost as if the Radical Leftists wanted women to get raped. The University of Toronto has learned its lesson the hard way, but thankfully with only minor offences, via Pardes Seleh at Daily Wire:

The administration at the University of Toronto was recently enlightened on why two separate washrooms are generally established for men and women sharing co-ed residencies.

The University is temporarily changing its policy on gender-neutral bathrooms after two separate incidents of “voyeurism” were reported on campus September 15 and 19. Male students within the University’s Whitney Hall student residence were caught holding their cellphones over female students’ shower stalls and filming them as they showered.

Keely Triller writes a great essay at The Federalist speaking out on behalf of that group forgotten by the Radical Left, actual rape survivors:

Is it ironic to no one that being “progressive” actually sets women’s lib back about a century? What of my right to do my darndest to insist that the first time my daughter sees the adult male form it will be because she’s chosen it, not because it’s forced upon her? What of our emotional and physical rights?

And Benny Huang gives us the money quote:

Have you ever noticed that whenever liberals say that something won’t happen, it happens? Yeah, I’ve noticed that too.

I’ll leave you with two great comments from that first Washington Post story that I cited, the first of which helped to inspire the title of this post:

G-burg

Judging from what many commenters have written here, society may as well eliminate gender-specific restrooms/ shower facilities. Look at the economic benefits this would provide business owners.

Don’t be concerned about male sex offenders using the the same shower facility as young girls. Hey, sex offenders were born that way, so we must not discriminate against them.

DrPepperAndMilk

Will the “voices of fairness” allow girls who do not wish to share shower areas and bathrooms with biological males request a “reasonable accommodation” of their own bathroom and locker rooms?

If this were the '80s, C Thomas Howell would play a randy kid who pretends to be transgender so he can get into the girls' showers with them

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) November 3, 2015

@iowahawkblog @Akhildesai This is why, if I had kids, I'd homeschool.

— The Sailor Harry (@TheSailorHarry) November 3, 2015

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