Today, I take a look at the claims made by one of the "resources" that nobathroombill.com hosts, the "MFO Brief 1728" pdf file.

This was put out by the Massachusetts Family Institute, "Dedicated to strengthening the family".

So first - Who is the Massachusetts Family Institute?

Would you be all that surprised to find out that this 3-person fundie-values "Institute" is behind nobathroombill.com?

Here's a side-by-side comparison of part of the current home page of nobathroombill.com and the "Bathroom Bill" text posted on mafamily.org under the name of Kris Mineau President, Massachusetts Family Institute. Judge for yourself.

As promised last week, I will begin dissecting the contents of the latest transphobic hate site - nobathroombill.com. The ACP ( American College of Pediatricians) has issued a statement against the proposed legislation protecting transgenders (including trans children, and children whose parents are trans). You can read the ACP statement at the nobathroombill.com site - or you can read it in its entirety below - along with my critique.

A front for bible-based intolerance

The American College of Pediatricians is a small splinter group that broke away from the American Academy of Pediatricians a few years ago. It has no regulatory authority, and is a front for religious fundamentalists to continue to espouse their "bible-based" agenda against same-sex marriage, anti-abortion, abstinence instead of real birth control, corporal punishment, "cures" for gays, lesbians, and transsexual, and all the other craziness that has been discredited in the last few decades.

What they say - and what it really means.

Fortunately, the people who oppose laws against discrimination are dumb. How else to explain yet another attempt to scream "men in bathrooms" so soon after the failure of notmybathroom.com - and with a site that, if you remember the original white text on a black background, looks so much the same ...

Einstein said it best

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Over the next little while, I'll be doing the same analysis to nobathroombill.com that I did with the claims of notmybathroom.com.

They've learned a few lessons from their predecessor - for one thing, they already hide the site's true owners behind an anonymizing service - the same tactic spammers and malware vendors use to help hide their true identities. They want to spread their message of fear, but they don't want to be accountable for it. So much for having the courage of their convictions.

The people running notmybathroom.com claims that they have a legal opinion that the Missoula anti-discrimination ordinance will cause all sorts of problems, but they refuse to actually publish the opinion - and from the ineptness of what they've said, it's doubtful such an opinion exists.

Read a real legal opinion from a real lawyer - not some crackpot from notmybathroom.com

If anyone needed any more convincing that the person or persons behind the notmybathroom.com scare campaign are liars, you can read the plain text of the legal opinion of record from the lawyer for the city of Missoula to the town council (reproduced below) or download a copy from here.

Why does this matter so much?

If you scroll to the bottom of the article, I've reproduced an open letter I wrote elsewhere in response to a man who said that he would punch transgender "perverts" in the face if they were in a womans' washroom.

Note: Part one is here

In a News release dated March 23rd 2010, the now-anonymous person running notmybathroom.com makes many claims, which I will take apart on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis.

ALLIANCE FORMS TO STOP MISSOULA ANTI-DISCRIMINATION PROPOSAL

Deep Concern is being expressed about the safety and freedom issues

Keep this first point in mind. Nowhere is there any evidence that this "alliance" is more than a single person, using a domain registered by Brett Rodli and now hiding behind an anonymous domain registration service.

As promised, this is the first part of a series debunking the claims on notmybathroom.com

The source is located here, and an archived copy will be made available should the original soure "disappear".

But first, for the record - what actually happened elsewhere

For the record, we have gay marriage where I live, and we have laws that let transpeople use the bathroom of their target gender, and the world hasn't fallen apart,

straight people aren't being forced into same-sex marriages, churches aren't required to marry anyone that they don't want to, little boys and male teachers haven't been scurrying into womens bathrooms en masse, no businesses have been forced to build more bathrooms, there hasn't been an outbreak of women being harrassed in bathrooms by cross-dressers, businesses haven't been forced to hire a certain quota of the LGBT population,

Aside from a few people who had to pay fines because they initially refused to obey the law, everyone's pretty happy with the outcome. It's a "live and let live" situation. Not the "lies and more lies" that the anonymous writer on notmybathroom.com uses to push his agenda.

One of the realities of life

Not all transsexuals will have a full head of hair. The "Evil T" - testosterone - as well as hereditary factors and natural aging, may necessitate that the transsexual woman wear a wig. Hormones and Rogaine™ can only do so much.

Or you may just not like your natural hair color, and not want to have to bother with dying it every month. Or you may be one of those people whom nature cursed with the "I'm having a bad hair day" or "bed hair" genes.

Transgenders and cross-dressers may also want to wear either a partial hair-piece or a wig.

Shameful? Of course not!

Many genetic women wear wigs, so why not transsexuals, transgenders, and cross-dressers? While there will always be some ignorant people who will attempt to say that needing to wear a wig is a sign that you're not "really" a woman, they can be safely ignorned. Or, as Marie Antoinette (who wore a wig) would say, "Let them eat cake."

What follows is a different approach to buying and wearing a wig, equally suitable for someone who is looking to transition into living full-time as a woman and for the casual (and not-so-casual) cross-dresser.

notmybathroom.com thumps the Bible again

Maybe they should try "Jokes for the John" or something else less transphobic when they "visit the library".

I'll be doing a deconstruction of all their arguments over the next week or so, as well as posting some ideas of what you can do to help counter-act the misinformation they're spreading.

In the meantime, here's some more blathering from the people at notmybathroom.com who, in my opinion, may have issues with their own repressed homosexuality. Nice piece of Catholic-bashing while they're at it - NOT! According to their logic, we shouldn't allow fundies to become pastors either, since they have a LONG history of sexual immorality.

Just a few examples I'm aware of first-hand: I knew a fundie baptist pastor whose son and a deacon's son were having sex regularly when the latter was barely a teenager. But "the fruit doesn't fall far from the tree" doesn't apply to hypocrites. And there was the case of "God forgave him of kidnapping that woman - it was his wife's fault - she spent so much and he needed the money." And the usual "divorce is always wrong - except in this case."

Of course, there's so much media exposure of "family values" fundamentalists getting caught with their pants down or abusing drugs that there's no reason to take my word for it ...

So, read on for the latest homophobic/transphobic garbage from notmybathroom.com ...

In part 1, I dealt with some of the issues regarding personal safety, some of which apply to all women equally, and other that are especially worrisome for transgender and transsexual women.

Today, I continue with part two.

One of the things you have to accept during transition is that "the rules" change. Not only are you vulnerable to being outed in public, but also you're now as vulnerable as any other woman in so many ways. Dark streets are now suspect. What if someone steals your purse? What do you do if a man is following you?

Statistics show that if you are transgender or transsexual, you are at higher risk of violence. This is layered on top of the higher risk that women in general are exposed to.