Transgender Bathrooms

I meant to post this a while back, I'm not a reader of the Huffington Post, so I don't know where I heard about it, or if I even "heard" about a specific case.

Here's the thing I don't understand about it: how did this become a gay/anti-gay thing? Seems to me that aspect should be one of the last discussions that should be going on here. Certainly the far left's insistence that even having a conversation about this is "anti-transgendered" is preposterous. It's a thorny issue, to be sure, but it seems to me that there are tons of practical issues at hand that would need to get solved before politics and whatnot even come into play.

One of the biggest practical obstacles I see to this is that what it means to be "transgendered" is woefully ill-defined. Every guy in a wig gets a free pass into the ladies room? Is the wig even needed? What if he just "feels in his heart that he's really a woman?" I mean, lets face it, if you can't tell the person walking into the ladies room is a man, this is a non issue. If no one could tell things weren't what they seemed, we wouldn't be having this conversation. So, let's assume most of the people we're talking about are men with 5 O'Clock shadows and a cheezy wig.

Now on the flip side, forcing a man in a dress to pee in the men's room will make everyone involved uncomfortable, not just the transgendered person.

The only realistic option is to start moving toward unisex bathrooms, but then urinals aren't an option anymore, and we run into many of the same uncomfortable/unsafe type options. Unless the bathrooms are single toilet/sink/lockable-door style, but those would be woefully inefficient as a means to provide facilities to thousands of people.

I don't have an answer, I'm not sure there is an answer, but I do know that there can be legitimate debate over the issue that has nothing to do with being "anti" anything, and that it's not automatically some sort of prejudice if a woman feels uncomfortable being followed into the bathroom by someone who's obviously a man.

I guess if I had to make a ruling I would say that only people born a woman get to use the ladies room, everyone else should head to the men's room. (Someone has to be uncomfortable, it may as well be the just guys, and then that would eliminate the "safety issue," though I think that is being a little overblown.)
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