Don’t believe the hype about transgender people

Editor: Not wishing to be the bearer of what some may perceive as bad news, Ms. Olive Francis appears to have arrived late to the party.

California passed AB 1266 in 2013, and Jerry Brown signed the bill into law. Effective January 1, 2014, the law allows students to use the bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers that correspond to their gender identities rather than the gender on their birth certificates. Efforts to repeal the bill have failed.

In addition, AB 1732, passed in 2016, mandates “any single-occupancy restroom in any business, public place or government agency to be designated “all-gender” according to the Sacramento Bee.

The idea that anyone using a multi-stall public restroom should have an expectation of privacy is laughable. And to think that there are people who actually believe that people wake up in the morning and decide whether to be a boy, girl, man, or woman that day in order to “sneak” into a public restroom with an agenda to leer, grope, or otherwise molest someone is downright ludicrous.

As failed presidential candidate Mike Huckabee ridiculously stated in 2015, “Now I wish that someone told me that when I was in high school that I could have felt like a woman when it came time to take showers in PE.” This is the type of speech that the less than sharp take to heart and believe is actually true. It is also extremely self-demeaning and appalling that a so-called Christian minister should make such ignorant comments in public.

Despite the hype, transgender individuals do not have a desire to prey on unsuspecting girls or boys in public restrooms. They only wish to pee in safety, assured that they will not be assaulted or otherwise violated.

There are plenty of straight men who already prey on women in a variety of settings — most not in public restrooms. One of them happens to occupy the White House, but I do not see the letter writer raising a hue and cry about that.