GENDER: Bias appears baseless

I’m getting tired of reading letters and comments citing safety for the young women and girls in our community as a reason to deny transgendered individuals the right to use restrooms conforming to their identified gender. Not only is this a manufactured threat based on fear-mongering, it strikes me as faux concern that is espoused not out of genuine concern for young women and girls but rather to advance the writer’s own distrust of transgendered individuals.

Where is this concern for young women and girls when heterosexual, non-transgendered men are the threat?

According to RAINN.org, the website of the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, “[g]irl’s ages 16-19 are 4 times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault.”

Yet despite this sobering statistic, I have seen multiple instances of victim blaming shown in the letters to the editor in this very newspaper. Just today, Mike Reno described middle school girls (i.e., children) who wear leggings as “provocatively dressed attention seekers” while boys are just helpless to “deny biological urges.”

There are plenty of examples outside our community as well, as the terrible story in Steubenville, Ohio, reveals. Despite an assault on an incapacitated child, adults were more concerned about the effect on the “promising” futures of the high school football players than the effect on the victim. The message is clear: Legitimate threats from football-playing boys need not be taken seriously. But hypothetical threats from transgendered girls are a different story.

LINDSEY SIMON

Coeur d’Alene