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The Transgender Issue & Societal Gender Constructs Essay

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The Transgender Issue & Societal Gender Constructs Recently, courtrooms have been filling up with the issue of transgender rights and the need for protection of these people’s basic rights that everyone else has (Scherer 32). The most pressing, or popular issue, within this battle, seems to be which public bathrooms should be used by transgender individuals. On the one hand, conservatives believe that everyone should go to the bathroom specified for the gender they were born with, claiming that invasion of privacy and safety issues would be bound to arise in allowing transgender individuals to go to the bathroom of their choice. While proponents claim that the transgender community is excluded from society, bullied, and forced to live as the gender they were born as, not what they identify with--leaving them restricted, oppressed, and denied of their basic freedoms and rights under the Constitution (Scherer).
Are there bigger issues at hand than where someone should go to the bathroom? Why is there so much controversy over such a daily simple task as going to the bathroom? Maybe the real problem is that we, as a U.S. society, have created a separation of genders in numerous social constructs where there need not be even distinction of these genders. Our beliefs have always been that there are only two genders and that with these two genders comes specific traits, behaviors, and characteristics-- that crossing the barrier of the genders by behaving what we consider to

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