With all the insanity right now surrounding the "North Carolina bathroom bill," especially given McCrory's decision to wait until after 5 pm on the day of the federal deadline and then decide to sue the federal government, it seems like a good time to write about what this bill does to those of us who are not transgender. This is something I've been thinking about for a few weeks, and in fact Ana Kasparian of The Young Turks (with which I have a love/hate relationship), mentions it briefly here. But I don't think it's gotten nearly enough attention (and I say this not to detract from the impact of this law on transgender people. I say it to remind us that segregation is bad for us all).

I grew up in a place (Orthodox Jewish Brooklyn) where a lot depended not on what you did, but on your category of person. Whether you were male or female mattered a LOT. Whether you were Jewish or not Jewish mattered a LOT. Whether, even if you were Jewish, you adhered to a particular brand of being religious mattered a lot too. These three things pretty much determined almost everything about your life--who would talk to you, who wouldn't, who could be your friend, who would be willing to marry you, what school you could go to, where you could work. The result was that a huge amount of effort went into policing boundaries and appearances. As ultra-Orthodox Jews, we were already subject to a fairly stringent set of limits on what we could do and wear, but the fact that your ticket to almost anything depended on what kind of person you were made it worse. Nothing in Jewish law says that a woman can't wear a kerchief to keep the sun off her head if she's working outside-but I wasn't allowed to. Because it made me look like I was married but allowing part of my hair to show (in my parent's community, married women's hair was expected to be completely covered). There's no Jewish law against wearing those long chiffon skirts that used to be in style, but my friends and I got in trouble for it in high school. Because they were in style in the "outside world," so they made us look like goyim. We weren't allowed to wear even loose pants (which some Orthodox communities allow women to wear instead of skirts), because it made us look like we were trying to be men. The point is, we already were what we were--women, Jewish, Orthodox.  But it wasn't enough to be those things--we had to embody someone else's idea of what an Orthodox Jewish woman was, just to make sure that it was obvious to all possible people. The consequences of being mistaken for something else were just too great.

Of course, you could say that this narrowing effect when people are sorted by group only happens to those with less power, as women were less powerful than men where I grew up. But no, I don't think so. My girlfriend, who grew up white in a small Southern town, told me a story about how the music director at her (white Baptist) church was fired for having the church choir sing a song about Noah's Ark. (I happen to know this song from being the nursery teacher at a UCC church one year. It starts "God said to Noah, there's gonna be a floody, floody..."). He got fired because the song is catchy and fast and happy and was therefore too black. In the small town South, if you are white, most often your whiteness is your most precious possession. Like maleness or femaleness where I grew up, it determines almost everything about your life. But because it's so important, the members of the church couldn't take the risk of conflicting with anyone's idea of what a white person is or how a white church sounds. Of course white people can certainly prefer snappy church songs, just as black people can prefer slow ones--and if you live in a place where people are individuals first (if such a place exists, which it probably really doesn't), that's not a problem. But if you are first and foremost a member of your race, with privileges and oppression distributed accordingly, you lose that right to have a preference. What's most important is that you look and sound like the prototype of what you are.

So now back to HB2 and the bathroom situation. I am a woman who has short hair and likes to wear jeans and T-shirts. You could say that's because I'm a lesbian, but I don't think that's necessarily true--I've met straight women with the same style preferences, just as I've met lesbians who prefer to wear skirts and makeup. In theory I am not the target of HB2--yet every video I've seen over the past couple of weeks of a cop chasing a woman out of a woman's bathroom...has featured a woman who looks and dresses like me. I know that if I say, I was born a woman but have sometimes been mistaken for a man, conservatives would say, well, it's your own fault. You shouldn't wear your hair that way. And so the message spreads...it's not that you're safe if you were born a woman and are in the "right" bathroom . You're safe if you're careful to look, dress, and sound like someone else's narrow version of a woman. And so the allowable range of expression for women gets smaller, because our access to the women's room, no matter what genitals we were born with, now depends on whether we "pass."

Let me be clear about this--it's important to fight HB2 whether you feel you're the target or not, because it is an injustice against our transgender friends and family members and comrades and colleagues. Because it's an injustice, period. But lest you think, if your birth certificate matches your gender identity, that this fight is purely altruistic for you, I write this post to remind people of the impact of segregation even on those who are theoretically privileged by it. The rhetoric surrounding this bill is supposed to convince us that it makes "good" cis people safe by ensuring  that only people who were born of their gender are allowed into their bathrooms. But the real impact on cis people is likely to be that the gender codes they have to follow to be recognized as "real" men or women will get more rigid, and thus the range of options in terms of what people of a certain gender can be like will narrow for all of us.  Don't let the pols fool you--we've all got skin in this game.