Transgender Bathroom Rights

Danielle has attempted to portray me as the type of unethical debater who would argue semantics rather than the point at hand. I'm not sure if this acusation is a strategy or an honest concern, but either way I will dispell this notion. What Public Bathrooms?The public bathrooms I reference in my case are those that are hosted by businesses. This is a relevant distinction and point of argumentation because:1. These are the most common public bathrooms. This includes companies like Target, Walmart, Kmart, that bait shop on the corner, etc. The only bathrooms that are excluded from the ones I am considering are those specifically hosted by the government, be they in parks or government buildings. Obviously, the restrooms I'm referring to make up a large majority of public bathrooms, as the number of businesses in any given town will almost always outstrip the number of government buildings and parks.2. These bathrooms are termed "public bathrooms". While, in a legal sense, it may be possible to call these bathrooms "private bathrooms", it is the understood connotation that "public bathrooms" includes those that you might find in a gas station. Furthermore, public bathrooms of the type I am referencing are the ones being so heavily debated in the news and media currently. When people complain about having to share a bathroom with a transgender person, they almost always refer to "Target bathrooms" or "McCoys Toys bathrooms". If the opponent were to seriously claim that these can only be considered "private bathrooms", then she is playing the semantics game by moving the definition of "public restroom" away from commonly understood definition. ConclusionI've demonstrated that I am not playing some kind of semantics game. I'm not making the claim that "transgender people shouldn't be able to use the bathrooms in my house, therefore they shouldn't be able to use all restrooms". Rather, I am referencing the right a business has to refuse service to customers in regards to bathrooms, which affects the vast majority of public bathrooms that exist in the US. If we are to truly only consider bathrooms that absolutely public, we would be limited to discussing parks and government facilites. It is clear that the issue is much greater than that, largely due to the fact that people call the restrooms you'd find at a supermarket "public". To claim that this is an unfair semantics-based ploy isn't just a stretch -- it's plain untrue. Danielle's debate record is solid and quite large. I would expect better from her than this strategy. Any voter can plainly see that I am talking about the vast majority of what we call "public restrooms", the same restrooms that we see plastered all over the news in reference to this issue. Perhaps she has just misunderstood that my argument applies to some 95% of all public restrooms. Maybe she thought I was referring to some <1% of restrooms like those at a private golf club.Business Owner RightsThe opponent makes an important distinction here between what is and what should be. I will take this as an implied acceptance that transgender people do not currently have the absolute legal right to use any public restroom. Let's look at the way things should be. In a perfect world, no one would think of transgender people as being any different than anyone else. This would be a non-issue. However, we do not live in a perfect world and many people feel uncomfortable around them. This leads to my first point.1. Business owners are justified in doing what is legally allowed to make their customers more comfortable. Imagine a po-dunk, population 1000, Bible Belt town in the middle of nowhere. There is a bait shop, Bob's Bait, that gets great business. It is revealed that one of these citizens is transgender. The customers tell Bob that they will not be using his store anymore if he allows the transgender person to use the bathroom not matching their sex. Bob has two choices. He can either allow the usage, which will hurt his sales and brand, or he can deny the usage, effectively driving away only one customer. Should Bob be forced to implement an anti-business tactic so that someone can use the bathroom they prefer?I argue that the answer is no. It is unethical to force a business to do something that would hurt the business, given that the lack of action in question is not in some way significantly damaging to anyone. It cannot be said that disallowing a transgender person from using the one bathroom ten feet away from the bathroom they can use is in any way physically harmful to said person. It can be said that allowing this person to use the bathroom of their choice will negatively impact the business. ConclusionThe question "should transgender people be able to use the bathroom matching their gender identity," is best answered by looking at another question: "Should businesses be compelled implement negative business policy to provide comfort to certain minorities of its clientelle?" The answer to the latter question is "no", which answers the former question with a definitive "no". SafetyThe opponent has proven that transgender people face great adversity. What she hasn't proven is that changing the law will in some way reduce this adversity. In fact, it is now the law in many places that transgender people can use the bathroom of their choice and we have not seen any statistically related evidence that there has been any reduction in their suffering. I do not deny that transgender people "got it bad". I do deny that implementing this policy in more places will in some way reduce how "bad they got it."Attacks in the BathroomThe opponent is trying to simulataneously argue to conflicting points. "Transgender people will not attack others in the bathroom because bathroom attacks rarely occur" and "transgender people will get attacked if they use the restroom matching their sex." These are mutually exclusive. The "evidence" provided by the opponent points to a very limited number of cases in which transgender individuals were attacked and a survey with a small sample size that indicated some sort of confrontation occured in bathroom related incidents". Let us assume this is true.What this survey doesn't mention is which bathroom these transgender people were trying to use. It is even mentioned by Danielle that "some were even denied access". This implies that the violence/confrontation is not a result of transgender people using the "wrong bathroom", but rather than the violence is a result of them being transgender. This makes sense, too. People who hate transgender people do so because they are transgender. Whether they use the men's or women's restroom is irrelevant to these kind of people, because their hate runs deeper than what the transgender person chooses to do, it's based upon what they are. If this resolution was "should people stop hating transgender people for no good reason", I wouldn't have accepted, because this is absolutely true. But we're talking about bathroom rights. And whether or not these rights exist, transgender people are still going to face just as much abuse and violence. No "bathroom law" is going to change that reality. It is not uncommon for people to rally behind something small and pretend that it's really something big. We cannot confuse "perceived equality of transgender people" with "the ability to use the correct bathroom". They are two fundementally different and tangentially related things. I ask the opponent to provide one shred of substantive evidence that "bathroom rights" reduce the violence against transgender people. (This should be easy, since there are places where the law does exist and places where it doesn't. Comparing the two should yield a reduction in violence against transgender people in areas were the law exists. It doesn't.)ConclusionIt is true that transgender people face violence. I will assume it is true, for the sake of the argument, that transgenders to face violence in the bathroom. This is not enough to show that "bathroom laws should be in place" because we have no logical reason to believe (or evidence to support) the idea that these laws will magically make transgender people less of an appealing target for violence. You cannot fix a system of hate, bigotry and violence with something so simply as a bathroom law. Just as we have seen with other discriminated classes, from African Americans to homosexuals, society eventually comes to accept other classes. At that point, it can be said that transgenders should be able to use whichever restroom they like. Before that point, however, we cannot pretend that bathroom laws will fix this issue. The LawThe opponent effectively moved the resolution beyond the current law in her last speech, making this point largely irrelevant. Mitigating FactorsThe only note to be mentioned is that the opponent very clearly shows that even businesses that are pro-bathroom rights "cannot be [proven to be] popular" in areas like the South. Here the opponent effectively admits that even having the right to bathroom of choice will not stop the "health problems" and others experienced by trans people. Bathrooms will not suddenly become "safe" or "trans friendly" simply because they have the right to use them. The opponent correctly states that bathroom measures will not be popular in many areas, showing that we have no reason to believe these bathrooms will suddenly become safe. ConclusionI provided ample clash in this round and the previous round in demonstrating that business rights should be valued above a trans person's right to use the bathroom of their choice. I have demonstrated that we have no reason to believe that the introduction of bathroom laws will in some way reduce the amount of hate, bigotry and violence facing transgender people. As such, there is no pragmatic reason to value bathroom rights over business rights (it doesn't actually help transgender people) whereas there is reason to value the business right.