In both a post by the editors and an op-ed piece by Frank Bruni, the New York Times dismisses the concerns about transgendered men putting demands on policies that require keeping the sexes separate in public.

To start, the editorial quotes a sheriff from South Carolina who says it’s a non-issue.

“In the 41 years I have been in law enforcement in South Carolina, I have never heard of a transgender person attacking or otherwise bothering someone in a restroom,” Sheriff Lott wrote in a letter to the committee studying the state’s bathroom bill. “This is a non-issue.”

Wrong.  Perhaps the editors and the sheriff would like to view a twenty-minute video offering case after case  of the sort of sexual predators for whom the transgender laws will serve as a green light.  One big bruiser, dressed in a curly old lady wig, a pink sweater, and a flowered skirt, walked into a facility, and when a woman challenged him, he sucker-punched her and knocked five teeth out.  The video spells out other cases.

In another video, Target reassures a man dressed as a man that he can go into the women’s restroom and deal with any woman’s objections.

It is simply too risky to allow the breakdown of the modesty barrier between men and women.

Then the editorial goes on to state the high price of losing business.

Despite what supporters of these laws might claim, the measures do nothing to make restrooms safer. They will only further stigmatize and endanger people who already face systemic discrimination. If lawmakers who might want to follow North Carolina’s abhorrent example aren’t moved by appeals to equality and human rights, they should ponder this reality: The price of bigotry is becoming quite steep.

Price of bigotry?  Target is finding out the high price of insanity with its policy of allowing men to use the women’s restroom.  The American Family Association launched a boycott of the retailer, with huge numbers of people signing on.

Op-ed columnist Frank Bruni got in on the act and deployed all sorts of clever bathroom puns, like “pee-peeved.”  I count five; I’m surprised he didn’t use “pooh-pooh.”  In any case, his extra-clever wit merely reveals that we live in the Sneering Age.

His main point, as I read it, is here:

Cruz, Schilling, and many others are obsessed with – or cynically exploiting – the hallucinated scenario of male sexual predators suddenly feeling emboldened to stalk little girls in public bathrooms, presumably because they could, if caught, claim that they identify as women and belong there.

Here’s a news flash: they’d still be breaking laws.  You know, the ones against lewdness and harassing and molesting kids.  The ones that govern a male sexual predator whose targets are boys and who already has access to the same urinals that they do.

Bruni misses a loophole in law against voyeurism.  Opening women’s rooms to men who are transgendered opens the door to men who claim to be transgendered but really aren’t.  And in that case, how are women supposed to confront these men, if the men claim immunity with the new laws?  Target already has twenty cases of sexual assault in women’s restrooms.

However, no assault needs to be done or pictures taken; no harassing words need to be spoken.  The sexual predators need only to take off their clothes and stand next to a woman in the showers and get an eyeful without seeming to leer.  Maybe these men would like to choose the time when the female athletes are showering after practice.  The women’s volleyball team, perhaps?

Women can feel violated in more ways than just physical or verbal.

The issue goes much deeper than the law; it’s a sign of culture rot.  But as soon as sane people resist the rot, liberals easily and breezily dismiss their concerns as a “solution in search of a problem” or as “bigotry.”

No, it is people like NYT editors and Bruni who are cynically exploiting and obsessed with breaking down the modesty barriers and then making our concerns seem like irrational fears and our sanity seem like bigotry.  They’re the ones who call good evil and evil good.  We were happy with the laws as they were, without the liberals altering them.  We’re merely responding to their lunacy.

So without apologies or fear of being called “transgenderphobes” or other nonsense epithets, we tell them a loud “No!”

James Arlandson’s website is Live as Free People, where he has posted Postmodern roots of leftist policy, The battle between gender ideology and fact, and Mississippi’s non-discrimination law.