Victims, not predators

Tucker FitzGerald is the father of a transgender girl. Yesterday he had an opinion published in the Seattle Times.

My daughter is in kindergarten. She’s 6. She loves unicorns and mermaids and soccer. And I’m concerned about Olympia forcing her to share the restroom with men.

Currently she uses the girls’ restroom. But some Washington legislators want her in the men’s room — because she was born with a penis.

It feels uncomfortable writing about my child’s genitals. But I’m not sure how else to protect her.

Tucker acknowledges that some people will think that he is somehow resposible for his child being transgender.

[T]he truth is that I tried to raise my daughter as a boy. Complete with blue walls and Tyrannosaurus rex pajamas. I gave her my father’s name. Took her to church on Sundays. Her siblings have had no trouble with the genders assigned them. But it just didn’t work for her.

When I realized my child would only wear dresses and wanted to grow up to be a princess, I tracked down a support group for parents of gender-nonconforming kids. It turns out there’s a lot of them. And the parents aren’t who I imagined. Democrats and Republicans. Muslims and Catholics. Grandparents raising grandkids. Yes, there’s a lesbian or two in the mix, but even they are baffled about how this happened. All these parents were scared and confused at first.

I also talked to my pediatrician and read national psychological and medical associations’ positions. If my child was having mental-health problems, I wanted to help.

They all agreed: I need to let her be herself. If I love and support her, as a girl, she’ll be happy and healthy. But if I try to force her to be a boy, she would be in a very high suicide risk category.

So Tucker found that the only rational choice he had was to support his child as a girl.

And, of course, I want her safe from predators. I learned that transgender people are at extreme risk for sexual and physical violence. The Southern Poverty Law Center recently declared transgender women the most victimized group in the nation. Victims, not predators.

There are no documented cases in the United States of either a transgender person or a man pretending to be transgender assaulting someone in a bathroom.

But the current attempts at forcing transgender people to abide by their "biological sex" would force this woman (Geena Rocero) into the men's room...

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...and this man (Ben Melzer) into the women's room:

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Mr. FitzGerald posits that such laws will make it easier for the supposed evil-doer to enter the women's restroom because any man could claim to be a transgender man...whereas a man claiming to be a transgender woman would at the very least be expected to wear women's clothing.

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