Really? Really?
Ladra’s jaw is still hurting from how hard it hit the floor when it dropped during Wednesday’s county committee consideration of an 
amendment to our human rights ordinance so that it includes transgendered people. You know, guys who like to look like girls and girls who like to look like guys.
Not because I’m against the amendment. I’m an open-minded, inclusive and mostly sane person. So I am for anything that helps diminish any kind of discrimination. No, my jaw hurts because I have never seen so much ignorance and fear and hate all at once in the commission chambers.
And that is saying a lot.
The house was so packed that people poured out of the commission chambers into the hallway and there were some gathered downstairs to watch the discourse live on a TV. Somewhere around 250 people signed up to speak at the committee meeting. There were lots of folks from the LGBT community. Members of SAVE Dade and Equality Florida and other human rights LGBT groups spoke about how transgenders can often be subjected to hostile working environments or housing discrimination, which this amendment would aim to make illegal.
State Rep. David Richardson, Florida’s first openly-gay 
state legislator, spoke about feeling discrimination earlier in his life.
“It has not been an issue at all in Tallahassee, not at all. When I campaigned, it was not an issue with any voters,” said Richardson, who was re-elected sans opposition this year and who said he wants transgendered citizens to feel the same embrace from the community.
And then there was the ultra conservative (read: backward) religious right who made references to Sodom and Gomorrah, quoted the devil and used the word deviant too many times to count.
“A man is a man. A woman is a woman. Everything in between is the devil,” one man said.
Another said it was “an attack against God’s principles.”
“This is a law against women,” another man said. “A woman has the right to go to the public bathroom and not have a man sit next to her because he thinks he’s a woman.”
Outraged pastors who say they speak the word of God bussed dozens of worried Spanish-speaking moms with furrowed brows to County Hall to wring their hands and beg the four commissioners on the public safety committee to keep their little girls safe from certain harm.
It’s not their fault, though. They’ve been brainwashed by the religious right who makes them think that men dressed as women will start using the public restrooms marked for ladies. They don’t realize that, drum roll please, men dressed as women already use the ladies’ room. You wouldn’t know it if one had, but any man dressed as a woman or with a very feminine persona would likely use the ladies room anyway, already. They certainly don’t use the men’s room, which is, by the way, the public restroom where someone is more likely to be assaulted.
And, wait a minute, wouldn’t these same bible-quoting pastors and God-fearing women have an issue with men dressed as women using the little boys’ room as well? Of course they would.
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