When Equality overtakes Human safety
Works cited:
https://www.cnsnews.com/article/national/michael-w-chapman/liberal-media-censor-alleged-bathroom-rape-teen-girl-boy-skirt
https://www.uspresidentialelectionnews.com/2021/10/virginia-school-board-hid-bathroom-assault-to-protect-transgender-policies/
https://www.newsmax.com/TheWire/target-transgender-restroom/2016/04/22/id/725278/
https://www.livenewsmag.com/cnn/
The development to the story: Over the last several weeks we have engaged in multiple conversations over how large chain news sources can be biased towards the information they have provided. Recently an incident has occurred involving a highly controversial topic in our Country. This topic involves the approval or disapproval of providing Transgender bathrooms in public spaces. This movement for transgender rights began under the Obama administration in 2008 when he campaigned for more equal rights to gay and transgender people. Over his 8 years in office, Obama took measures to implement this equality such as instructing all public schools to allow transgender bathroom use in May of 2016. Seeing the movement was gaining large companies such as Target began implementing transgender bathroom use in many of their stores.
The story: Over the last 5 years rights for transgender people have only increased. Unfortunately, the growth of transgender rights has been at the cost of protecting basic human rights. This can be seen no better than a recent event that has occurred. This event involved a 14-year-old High school Freshman, Female from Virginia being raped by a male wearing a women's dress. Immediately after being raped the girl told her parents who were rightfully upset about this. The parents contacted the school immediately to tell them about what had happened to their daughter. Unfortunately, rather than helping the female, the school was more concerned with covering the incident up as a whole. This can be seen by a school official commenting on the issue by saying " The predator transgender student or person does not exist and to his knowledge, we do not have any record of assaults occurring in court restrooms." The school board is believed to have covered up this issue in order to protect the rights of transgender people by not painting a bad representation of one.
My Problems/ concerns with this incident: As someone who is all for equal treatment of everyone I see an issue when equality comes at the expense of people's personal safety. First off rape has always been and will always be a huge issue in our world, especially to young Females. Unfortunately, the introduction of transgender bathrooms has provided an easier outlet for women to be raped at the cost of promoting equality for transgenders. When you have a private space such as a bathroom in a public place where people of all ages and sexes have the ability to enter the chances of rape occurring are much higher. Despite this, I never thought I would see a day when an innocent woman would be raped for no apparent reason and the predator would receive no consequence because of the gender they identify as. Aside from equality, this incident signals an even bigger problem in our country which is our society losing human decency norms. If rape is now acceptable by a certain group of people after being completely unacceptable throughout its existence by anyone then I question what will be next. Another long-term effect of this incident is another rapist around the world taking notes over what has happened. Seeing someone receive no consequence for committing rape will cause many rapists around the world to remodel the action which increases the likelihood of an event like this happening again.
The impact the News has played on this event: While transgender rights have been a hot topic in our Country over the course of the last several years our accessibility to this story is a big contributing factor as to why this event has been swept under the rug. This is due to our large-scale media sources such as Fox News, CNN, and ABC not broadcasting this story. If so-called reliable news sources do not broadcast important information in our country then they are limiting the amount of knowledge we can gain and our ability as citizens to form an opinion on a situation. If we are unable to form views then many of our FA rights such as freedom of speech are unable to be exercised because of this.
Overall takeaway: Overall this event frightens me for the present but most notably for the future. This event has shown me how basic human rights can be sugar-coated for anything.
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