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U.S. Rep Nancy Mace, R-S.C., Wants Gender Confusion

According to MSN, Fox news reported today that Nancy Mace, R-S.C., "is introducing a resolution to ban transgender women from using women’s restrooms at the U.S. Capitol." This year, the first transgender woman, Sarah McBride, was elected to the House of Representatives. One cannot imagine many more unwelcoming gestures to a new colleague. Rep Mace's proposed legislation makes the same intellectual oversight as all these bills. It assumes that one can discern a person's birth-assigned sex based on their gender presentation. These bills might be effective if people could reliably tell what sex a person was assigned at birth. Perhaps Rep Mace has stereotyped transgender women as burly men wearing dresses and makeup. This is nonsense. Last year, for example, two Miss Universe contestants were transgender women who won their nation's beauty pageants. Beautiful women are unlikely to be confronted for being transgender because they conform to society's ideals of women. However, this legislation can harm cisgender women (assigned female at birth) whose appearances are perceived to be more masculine, perhaps approximating the phenomenological boundary within which we attribute gender to individuals. For example, in an Arizona case I am familiar with, a woman bodybuilder using the women's restroom during a football game was arrested by an off-duty police officer who demanded to see her genitalia to confirm she was a woman. Rep Mace's proposal would foment this kind of gender confusion and cause more harm to cisgender women than to the far smaller number of transgender women. It is a women's issue, not a transgender issue. The legislation would cause women who do not appear as feminine as society demands to be "called out" and humiliated because they do not sufficiently approximately sociocutural ideals for how women "should" appear. The legislation would cause gender confusion and suspicion for anyone who uses what some might perceive to be in the "wrong" bathroom. The gender confusion would be in the eyes of the beholder, not the individual who is being scrutinized for indices of gender incongruence suggesting they are transgender.


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