I get mail

I'm still receiving email about my op-ed in the Dallas Morning News yesterday.  There have been about 30 friendly, supportive messages.  Wouldn't it be nice if the other 5 were friendly but in disagreement?  But no, what I've received from critics is all tirade, no reasoning.  It's as if they were deliberately trying to give me data to support my final hypothesis--that the bathroom bill simply comes from outrage over something conservatives can't understand.

A number of these e-critics seem to have exploded before reading the whole op-ed. They fulminate about the sentence "Why are bathrooms ground zero?" (when it comes to separating people based on biological sex) as if I had stopped there. But no, I didn't. That question is a lead-in to the next paragraph:

If there's a smart case for SB 3, there needs to be some sort of harm done by letting trans folk use the same bathrooms as cis folk. I suspect supporters of the bill think, deep down, that it's harmful for a cis woman or girl to suspect there may be a trans woman in the next stall because, well, because that person may be making use of a penis. 

And what of that argument?  To find out how I assess it, you have to go on to the next paragraph.  Generally, comprehension of an op-ed requires that you keep going, paragraph after paragraph.  Yes, that is how it works.

I'm awfully surprised that some of these low-comprehension email critics  are actually pretty accomplished people. In fact, some of them are very accomplished people. It's been fascinating reading their fulminations, but honestly it would have been even more fascinating if they'd actually read my op-ed and responded coherently.  I'm actually genuinely curious how conservatives think about these issues.

But credit where credit is due. I found this comment (by Brian Baldwin) at the DMN website interesting. It's not from a conservative, but from someone who does a rather nice job (I think) of entering the anti-trans mindset.  He describes what's going on in more detail than I did and offers some good food for thought.