Education

Harvard Professor Calls For National LGBT Rainbow ‘Pee-In’

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Casey Harper Contributor
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A researcher and a professor from Harvard University called for a national “pee-in” movement by LGBT activists to protest the recent LGBT bills in North Carolina and Mississippi.

The article, published in a pro-LGBT magazine Wednesday, is written by Harvard Professor of law Bruce Hay and Mischa Haider, a researcher who describes herself as a “trans activist.” The pair call on transgender people to proudly go into the restroom opposite their anatomical gender at birth, regardless if they look like their new gender, all to make a statement.

“Additionally, men who make murderous threats against trans individuals for entering bathrooms with their ‘wives and daughters’ need to be held accountable,” the article reads.

The comments come after a string of religious liberty bills in North Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi. Mississipppi’s governor signed a religious liberty bill Tuesday that allows residents to refuse service based on their beliefs about sex, gender and marriage.

Georgia’s legislature passed a similar bill in March, but the state’s governor vetoed it after a slew of large businesses in the state voiced their opposition. North Carolina’s governor signed a bill in March banning ordinances that allow transgender people to use restrooms that correspond with their “new” gender, but now the state is entangled in a lawsuit with LGBT groups.

The article compares the legislation to the Jim Crow laws that oppressed blacks in the South, and calls for a “pee-in.”

Collectively and openly, in their rainbow of appearances, they should enter gendered spaces in defiance of the segregationists. The movement needs a ground campaign, a peaceful series of “pee-ins” across the nation that will bring a face and an image to this struggle. Americans need to know that trans people exist and use facilities like any other person, and should not be intimidated or threatened for the way they look. The nation needs to see the diversity of transgender identities safely and peacefully using gendered facilities and standing up to threats to their humanity. They should understand that existence and acceptance of people born with nonconforming bodies is not what threatens the peace and safety of our society, but the violent threats and actions of those who cannot tolerate human difference.

The article also compares religious liberty advocates to Lewis Carroll’s poem character, the Walrus, who spoke theatrically to distract the oysters at the dinner table from the fact that they were actually the main course. In this case, the LGBT community is the group of oysters about to be gobbled.

“Let us resolve to be more visible,” the article reads. “All of us, transgender and cisgender, in every shade and stripe of presentation. Transgender and gender-nonconforming people should determine for themselves who they are and which facility they use, and not be governed by the bigotries of the segregationist who, like the Walrus, conceals his violence with nonsense syllables.”

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