Mark separate restrooms for gender confused with a '?'

Opponents of North Carolina’s law restricting transgender students to bathrooms according to their sex at birth are warning the state could lose federal education funding. But that result is not clear. The Education Department has found such restrictions illegal, but has yet to yank a state’s funding because of the subject and the Supreme Court has yet to weigh in on the issue. Toby Talbot AP

Much of the debate about gender identity is ideologically and politically inspired. We are told to accept gender confusion as the new norm. There have been movements to change the designation of public restrooms to gender-free facilities.

Although somewhat uncomfortable, I was able to accept mixed female and male restrooms in Japan, but the facilities had no gender identification on the door. In most places in America, a public restroom is designated men or women.

Shakespeare must have been thinking of gender confusion when he wrote in "Romeo and Juliet," "Art thou a man? Thy form cries out thou art: thy tears are womanish; thy wild acts denote a beast: unseemly woman in a seeming man! Or ill-beseeming in both."

We can solve the problem the way segregated facilities were maintained by race in the segregated south, where I grew up, by instituting separate facilities for gender-confused individuals. In lieu of a sign on the door designating it as men or women, simply emboss a question mark on the door.

D. Merrill Adams

Palmetto

This story was originally published May 7, 2016 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Mark separate restrooms for gender confused with a '?' ."

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