But before you dive in — there are many great websites and books that can help you navigate this issue. I refer to many below. Was that strange o r unusual? Discrimination, exploitation and worse exists and always has. The powerful use and repress the less-powerful, and this happens in a web of racial, sexual, socio-economic and cultural identities.
Ask any woman or minority group member trying, say, to work in predominantly white male environments in the past or in the present. The harsh, contemptuous, lurid male gaze cast upon women is real, something most young women can tell you about in distressing detail. But what this rambling post is about is not that. The Catholic world has met contemporary gender questions and turmoil with its own set of movements and gathering spaces, where feminine and masculine virtues are celebrated and reinforced.
But to recognize the risks with all that. So many of us have felt this. Not like other girls. Let me the heck out. Several years ago, when I first started observing these movements, the following popped into my head. What all of these thinkers — as well as pro-life feminism — emphasized wast the cultural and social temptation to, as it were, castrate women to make them more productive cogs in male-defined social and economic structures — make them easier to sexually exploit, with little fear of pregnancy — and render them more efficient workers.
And so it is with bathroom bills. Especially with gender self-identification. It is not saying that a transgendered person must want to hurt a woman or girl in a restroom just because of who they are.
Raised in a material, appearance, emotion and achievement-oriented culture — despair for the dis-oriented might seem to lie just on the other side of every door, around every corner. But consider another way — formed to value this life and who you are, but also understanding that, because of weighty mystery, you — along with everyone else on earth — is broken, sees through a glass darkly — including yourself — and that as hard as it is, it is also okay, because this is not your home.
