Before he went to Millsaps, my grandfather had never used a toilet before. Founder's Hall had one. (They would install a ladies' room before they tore it down.) The KA House had a single-seater that I'm sure they kept as pristine and clean as the ones in the KA House now.
Where he came from, people didn't have toilets. They had outhouses and chamber pots. When we went to homecoming in the seventies, his little Methodist church in Hesterville had a port-a-potty where the outhouse used to be. The only one willing to use it was my cousin Libba Wingate, who had trouble holding her water after childbirth. Delta women act like they're frail as lace and require our constant protection and supervision. It is a lie. They've been climbing trees and shooting doves since they were four, and any man who falls for that trap deserves what they get.
In those days, there weren't that many buildings in all of Mississippi that had toilets. Pretty soon, though, indoor plumbing became common, and every public building had bathrooms for three genders: Male, Female, and Colored. If you think it causes a commotion now when somebody uses the wrong bathroom, try letting a white woman use the colored toilet in 1940. They would have found a way to send three black men to jail for that.
After the sexual revolution of the seventies, people who had different ideas about how to express their gender started to feel like they had more freedom to do so. Some people feel very threatened if they start to lose control over gender expression, and almost immediately, they become uncomfortable with the sexual revolution.
A few years ago, internet trolls decided that if there was anything they hated more than transgender people, it was furries, so they started spreading the story that elementary schools in California had to install "litter box" bathrooms in all their schools for students who identify as furries. It's not true, of course, but the trolls had a grand time watching guys with MAGA hats spew their nonsense on YouTube. If you think about it, I'm sure you know somebody who has heard this story and believes it.
So, where does all this gender ideology and multiple bathroom business lead? Where does it end?
A few days ago, in Iran, a sixteen-year-old girl was beaten to death by the "morality police" because she dared to uncover her hair on the train. It's not the first time this has happened. In Iran, women covering their heads is part of their gender ideology.
It's so easy for us to hold ourselves as morally superior to Iran, but fifty years ago, they were the country in the Middle East that was the most like us. They had a very popular, democratically elected prime minister, who made the mistake of trying to Huey Long, the British Persian Oil company, so the CIA had him taken out and replaced by a puppet, and they changed the name to British Petroleum and pretended like nobody did anything. Twenty years later, the puppet government we installed was taken over by the Islamic Brotherhood, and an awful lot of law-abiding, peaceful Persians had to move to the United States.
This girl was sixteen. All she wanted was to express her gender identity in her own way, and she died for it. She died because the adults in Iran believed they had to control these things, that it was madness to let a sixteen-year-old decide for herself whether or not to show her hair.
I'm not saying that's where it will end in this country, but these things are a spectrum, and we're on the spectrum. We like to think we're so very different from Iranians and so very different from them, but are we.
There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who believe all cultural matters must be tightly regulated and controlled, and then there are people who believe that bacchanalia can sometimes be useful, that you have to let people express themselves in their own way, or it ends in tragedy.
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