BATHROOM DEBATE

To some people, this looks reasonable: Because there is a fear that heterosexual males will attack girls and women in bathrooms, transgendered persons must make sacrifices.

These arguments are predictable. Typical of any hierarchy, it's difficult to hold people on the top accountable for their effects on lower groups, so the people in the lower groups must keep busy adjusting and being inconvenienced, cleaning up after the higher people, picking up the pieces that fall, and making things work, no matter what problems and havoc higher people create.

So, because heterosexual males-born-male (the top here) attack females, then transgendered persons (the lower group here) should carry around a special card or forgo their right to legal protection against discrimination?

These hierarchical dynamics are not limited to our current bathroom debate. Relief resources after Katrina go to the wealthier white people, while the poorer people of color are left to their own devices. The military recently announced a new sexual assault prevention program which only focuses on helping women and does not mention any programs for men.

I wish the people who are so concerned for the safety of girls and women would put their efforts into solving the real problem %G—%@ the facets of our culture that create so many heterosexual males-born-male who attack females.

Charlotte Behm, Springfield 

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MIND IN A CAGE

Dear Sally Sheklow: I really do feel sorry for you. Not because you're of a confused gender; that's obviously not in your control. No sane person would create that kind of world for themselves. No, it's that you seem to have no life outside of your daily trials with your confused gender. You wear your sexual predicament on your sleeve, not as a badge of honor, but as a representation of your reason for existence.

You must have nightmares that you might wake up one day, and discover you're really not homosexual. What would your life have meant then? The irony is you probably believe it's liberating to drone on about living "out," "hets" and the like, when in reality you're mentally caged because of it.

Bill Fredericks, Eugene