I wrote the below “letter to the editor”at the News & Observer, the paper based in Raleigh, North Carolina, home of the legislature that passed the onerous anti-LGBT law, called HB2. I just 30 minutes ago read how PayPal has announced plans to not build a 400-person expansion facility in Charlotte, NC. Let’s see what the happens next. I’ll let more politically in-the-know people hash this out. Meanwhile, I’m going to get personal. This letter wasn’t difficult to write. I’ve been in the media many times before. What was difficult was posting a link to it from my personal Facebook page. Every time I do that, it scares me. There are people where we live now who don’t know or rather I don’t know what they know, and so each “coming out” is difficult, no matter what.
The people who love Lina and me, and thank goodness there are enough to make us feel very safe and secure and cared for, think we are just people they love. They forget, for the most part, about any weirdness. But it’s the people who don’t “know” us that it’s more difficult with. It’s not a huge deal, or I wouldn’t have posted, but it’s still a “deal.” People who say “I don’t care what anyone thinks of me” are people who I don’t believe are being honest wtih themselves. I say: It’s OK (and normal!!) to care what people think of you, but not healthy if that controls your life. That’s my take, anyway!
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
MARCH 25, 2016
Diane Daniel: Strange bathroom fellows
My wife and I left Durham to live in her homeland, the Netherlands, in 2014. Because she is transgender, having once been my husband, some people assumed we moved because the Dutch are more liberal and that we had been discriminated against in North Carolina. Quite the contrary.
We were accepted, embraced and treated like we had been before the big change. Even after I wrote about her transition in The News & Observer back in 2012, nobody showed us any malice, though my car mechanic did stop flirting with me, which I didn’t mind.
Things sure look different today, with the law Gov. Pat McCrory signed. If I have this straight, no pun intended, my wife, who is a woman and who looks very much like a woman, is supposed to now use a bathroom designated for men because she was born a man? And, for that matter, the transgender men I know, the ones with the deep voices and beards, should now share space with me in the women’s restroom?
Of course, we all know that bathrooms aren’t the real issue, or the only one. But until this is sorted out, can you hand me some toilet paper, Ralph?
DIANE DANIEL, VELDHOVEN, THE NETHERLANDS
She Was the Man of My Dreams 