Guns, not the transgendered, are the real threat to America’s children

There has not been one case of a little girl being molested by a transgender woman in a restroom anywhere in America.

Ever.

But to hear Governor of North Carolina Pat McCrory or Lt. Governor of Texas Dan Patrick tell it, America's restrooms are suddenly seething hotbeds of transgender molestation, or if they're not they soon will be, though they can't point to a single example in the history of the United States.

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory blames Democrats for the state's "bathroom bill" https://t.co/QkFtgtlHmc pic.twitter.com/rGANJHEnwj
— CNN (@CNN) May 11, 2016

Nor has there been one example, despite all the dire warnings from these two partisan blowhards, of a man using the “but I'm really a transgender women” argument to gain access to a women's locker room or to a women's bathroom, or to indulge in illegal conduct, in any of the hundreds of jurisdictions in the nation that have expanded legal protections to transgender people.

So the question is are the governors talking facts here or urban legends?

If conservative legislators believe that gun restriction bills won't prevent criminals from shooting people, what makes them think bathroom bills will prevent predators from indulging in misconduct?

Why, if they're making these arguments, can't conservatives be consistent?

It's increasingly clear to most observers that conservative legislators don't believe that these bathroom bills will work any more than they believe gun restrictions bills will work. How do I know this? Because they have seen the schoolroom full of dead children at Newtown, CT and failed to act, or even appear to act. Where was all their moral outrage then?

In the aftermath of that unspeakable horror they marched in lockstep, telling us that greater gun restrictions could not have prevented it from happening. Nothing could have prevented it. No need for legislation.

There was no dramatic all-night debate. There was no hurried bill-crafting carried on into in the wee hours. There were no round the clock TV debates.

There was only silence. Total, abject, craven silence.

If the conservatives in these states actually cared about children they would tackle the real threat that's attacking and killing them, and it's not from transgender people.

An investigation of child and youth deaths in America between 2002 and 2012 discovered that at least 28,000 children and teenagers 19-years-old or younger were killed with guns.

28,000 children and teenagers. Where were our outraged legislators then?

Meanwhile it’s increasingly obvious that these so-called bathroom bills are really just a semi-covert operation by the Christian right, targeting some of the most vulnerable people in the nation, in a desperate last ditch attempt to harpoon the bigger prize, LGBT equality. But that train has left the station.

Ask governor McCrory or Patrick how many transgender people they have taken the views of – or ever spoken to in their lives – and they can probably count them on one hand, if at all.

Where there is no debate there is no wisdom, hence these heinous, unenforceable and unconstitutional bills.

No one in the governor's mansions in North Carolina or Tennessee or Texas is asking how much danger these bathroom bills have placed transgender people in. They should start.

No one is asking exactly how these sex-checking bathroom bills will be enforced. They should start.

Over 250 organizations that work with the victims of sexual violence (including the North Carolina state coalition) recently signed a statement in opposition to the state bathroom bill, saying that it only promotes violence against transgender people and does nothing to protect women or girls.

Who would know better than these groups who is really targeting women and children? Hint, it's not the transgendered.

4 million - # victims of gun crime in past 10 yrs 30k -# annual gun deaths in US 20k- # suicides w a gun annually pic.twitter.com/TGqJbqH3fh
— Kris Castner (@Culture_Kris) April 25, 2016

Segregationists in the 1960's used to say allowing white and black people to mix freely would result in black men sexually assaulting white women. They used to say that integrating bathrooms would result in black women giving white women diseases and STD's. These claims are being echoed again in 2016, this time against trans people in ways that threaten their dignity and ultimately their lives.

Last November, Congress held the first-ever forum on violence against transgender people. They had good reason to, in 2013 a staggering 72% of hate crime murders in the United States were of transgender women.

Nearly 80% of trans people have reported experiencing serious verbal or physical harassment at school. Most shocking of all, the number of transgender people murdered in the U.S. last year was the highest in U.S. history.

What is increasingly obvious is that McCrory and Patrick et al have picked the most easily maligned and marginalized community in America as sock puppets to score bigger political points on the national stage. Pariah’s always make the best pinatas.

But the truth – and the growing transgender murder statistics bear this out – is that transgendered people have always had much more to fear from the rest of us than we ever did from them.

We must stand against this grotesque season of intolerance.

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