No. of Recommendations: 10
Part of what I said was in jest.
Of course. But making "jokes" that an appropriate response to a trans woman in this situation is to surround her and threaten her with violence to a sufficient level of credibility that she would be afraid to return to a place that she has a legal right to be is....well, again, that's not a great joke. It goes a long way towards explaining why when you find yourself in conversations with trans people, you might feel there's things that you can't say, even though you want to. Because those kinds of "jokes" are so self-evidently dismissive of the humanity of the person you're talking about that they're going to be hurtful and cruel to the person you're talking to.
Joking about physical violence towards an already-disfavored minority isn't a "live and let live" type of thing, and it's certainly not living up to the Golden Rule. It's cruel, and not something that someone who genuinely supported the equal treatment of that minority would ever do.
Just don't trample on the rights or intrude where they most certainly will create an uncomfortable situation as noted in the examples of the OP.
Ummm...you've got it entirely backwards on the "rights" part. It's not trampling on the rights of others to go to a place where you absolutely have the right to go, and they don't have the right to exclude you. It's the opposite. The owners of this facility were trampling on the rights of the transwoman. She has the legal right to use their establishment.
As for the "uncomfortable" situation, there's a long history of people using the argument that the presence of a disfavored minority makes them feel "uncomfortable" as a way of justifying continuing to discriminate against them. People have historically expressed being "uncomfortable" around certain racial minorities, religious minorities, the disabled - even women being in positions of authority or responsibility. You name it. It's not the trans woman's responsibility to constrict her life activities to make other people feel less uncomfortable if she has a legal right to use those facilities.
Again, "live and let live" doesn't mean shaming, shunning, or (worse) scaring transwomen into staying out of places they have every right to go. Nor the Golden Rule.
