Policing The Potty, The Dark Veil Of Protection - 883 Words

Policing the Potty Legal discrimination is alive and well in the United States. All over the country, groups of people are being forced into situations that are converse to the very nature of their being, subject to extreme violence and hatred. The very narrow minded view of how the country sees sex and gender, as exhibited by the media, is causing immense harm to many American citizens, as the idea of a binary gender system and long-standing sexist views has contributed to the segregation of bathrooms under the thin veil of protection. Bathroom facilities should no longer be segregated by gender to prevent transgender-based discrimination, therefore decreasing the prominence of depression associated with transgender people because a binary view of gender is flawed. Western society has commonly viewed gender in a binary way: male and female. However, the emergence of transgender people in the media has challenged this core idea, publicizing the fact that gender is merely a social construct. Cultures all around the world recognize the existence of a third, fourth, or even fifth gender. For example, some Native American tribes recognized people of a third gender, believing they had the spirit of both a man and a woman. These â€Å"two-spirit people† were believed to more easily navigate between the feminine and masculine world. When Europeans discovered the existence of the Native Americans, they called the two spirit people â€Å"berdaches,† a word that means male prostitute, and