Just how degraded is the language we use in public discourse? Consider: an anchor on a major news network didn’t bat an eye Friday when a guest claimed it is a “civil rights issue” when a fraction of a percent of students don’t want to pee the way nature intended.
CNN New Day’s Alisyn Camerota interviewed a transgender student named Gavin Grimm for a one-sided reaction to the Trump administration reversing Obama’s transgender school bathroom guidelines.
But before she got to that, Camerota invited Grimm, a girl turned litigious boy (Is that the other “L” in LGBT?) to talk about he (?) bent the local school district to his will.
Grimm “came out” during sophomore year (an age kids mostly aren’t competent to make the right choices about school electives, let alone whether to pretend to be someone else for the rest of their lives). The brand-new he used the men’s room “for a period of about seven weeks,” and it “looked like I was going to have a normal high school experience.” Um, that ship sailed kiddo.
When someone complained, the school gave Grimm a unisex bathroom. That wasn’t good enough. He got the ACLU involved.
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“An accommodation is an exclusion,” Grimm said. “I’m a boy like any of my other peers and I should be able to use the boys’ room like any of my other boy peers.” The dictionary lists synonyms for accommodation as arrangement, understanding, settlement, accord, deal, bargain, compromise, with nary a mention of exclusion. Perhaps that’s why Camerota was – uncharacteristically – just the teensiest bit skeptical, saying “Sometimes we all make special accommodations for our own circumstances, and if there was a unisex bathroom for you, why … why did that feel bad to you?” (It’s all about the feelz.)
Grimm reiterated that it was “an exclusion.” Having your own restroom (which every normal high school kid would give up a prom date for) “is saying I’m not fit to be in communal spaces with my peers. It’s saying I’m different from them …” Ya think? More sensibly, he said that separating him treats him as if he were a danger to other students.
Camerota then moved on to the real point of the segment: beating up on conservatives. “You know, we’re heard some of the surrogates for the Trump administration say” (and here she did everything but roll her eyes and spit “what-ever!” to convey her contempt) “Oh, well, wait a second. This does actually possibly expose other students to harm. It can make, say, female students vulnerable if they’re in the bathroom and somehow a boy takes advantage of this and goes in.”
She let Grimm ignore her actual question and respond that there’s no history of transgender people preying on others in bathrooms. Camerota then played video of White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer sensibly saying that the reversal of the Obama guidelines was simply a matter of federalism, and that school bullying was an issue for states.
That’s when Grimm uncorked the “civil rights” trope. “Civil rights are, uh, not state issues. They’re everyone issues, and if you leave civil rights up to the states, people will wait very very extended amounts of time to get their rights."
Yeah, remember when the governor of Alabama stood in the door to the men’s room and the 101st Airborne had to take that confused kid in to pee? Old Civil rights struggle: water cannon and Rottweilers. New civil rights struggle: private bathrooms. Talk about progress!
CNN’s video ends there. To recap what we learned from this segment:
- accommodation now means exclusion;
- states can’t be trusted to make their own plumbing arrangements;
- a girl in the boys’ room is a “normal high school experience”;
- Grimm’s argument with biology is a “civil rights issue”;
- And private bathrooms are wasted on the wrong students.
