On the internet, there’s this funny thing that happens: people are rewarded millions of views, likes, and subscribers for being as outlandish and divisive as possible. You can watch “Social Justice Warrior Cringe Compilations,” Milo Yiannopoulos “destroy” feminists with logic, videos about cancel culture, and any other ideological microcosm be critiqued and subsequently shamed. 

In my meager academic teachings on government and political science, it seems that the idea of fixation is a common trope used to dramatize and distract from potentially larger issues. Many of the types of media I mentioned before have revolutionized and monetized off of fixing in on the things that make people tick, that make people want to yell at the Thanksgiving table, and what rocks people to protest and unfriend their family members. One such person who has made a name for herself in this new media trend is Kaitlin Bennett, and I’m going to explain why she cares about your genitals so much. 

A quick debrief first. Kaitlin Bennett first rose to fame in 2018 when she took her graduation photos at Kent State with an AR-10 rifle as a part of a protest against her not being allowed to open-carry on her college campus for the purpose of self-defense. She earned the nickname “Kent State Gun Girl;” easy enough to remember, right? She was subsequently launched onto the internet as a Milo-Alex Jones protege and started working for Infowars and recorded videos for a Youtube channel called Liberty Hangout. 

Clips of her interactions with college students and rally attendees have gone viral for a funny reason; they are used by conservatives and liberals alike to prove the other side “wrong.” Tik Tok has been a popular platform for these clips to gain steam (being cut down to less than a minute or thirty seconds to become more attention-grabbing and palatable,) and I am only mildly ashamed that it was Tik Tok that prompted me to write this article. 

In a video from November 2019, Bennett can be seen interviewing people on the University of Kentucky campus, asking questions revolving around putting menstrual products in men’s bathrooms for men with periods, and putting urinals in women’s bathrooms for women with penises. When she shares her ideas or probes people further, she shows that she aligns with transphobic ideologies that situate gender within a binary man or woman, male or female, and she makes her beliefs evident. Some interviewees are confused, some laugh it off and decline to answer, and some try to explain their ideas to her.

Focusing on the questions, Bennett was most likely informed to ask the urinal question because of a Facebook post that went viral in April 2016, supposedly of urinals that had been installed in a women’s restroom in a Los Angeles Target store. The post was made near the time that Target put out a statement sharing that customers were welcome to use whatever bathroom they felt aligned with their gender/was best for them. They also provide single-stall bathrooms in their stores for reference. Target clarified that the picture in question wasn’t their bathroom and that they had not installed urinals in any of their women’s restrooms. It was a sham, and people had become enraged by something that was never true but allowed them to espouse transphobic ideologies. 

This is similar to when the GraphicSprings, an online design company, made a Google Survey asking about updating Santa. One of the questions asked what gender, if any, Santa should be to fit modern society, to which 18% said gender-neutral, and 10% said female. People took to their keyboards, their communities, and Christmas trees to make sure people knew that the “left” were trying to take traditional Santa away from them. Let me clarify further. As I write this article, the global population is 7,759,284,500. Of the population polled in one RANDOM survey, in only TWO countries, performed ONE time EVER, 0.0000000193% of the global population thought that Santa shouldn’t be male. 

The fixation, the dramatization of an issue that should and IS truly the last of anyone’s concern gets amplified and assigned to an agenda or political ideology which distracts from more important issues, like the effects of consumerism during holiday months on labor forces that are underpaid, overworked, and exploited. 

In any case, Bennett’s videos are a perfect case example for the idea of fixation, which I am loosely defining as focusing on a topic that is then taken out of proportion or context and meant to distract or deter other conversation. Bennett’s fixation on the concept of genitalia aligning with certain bathrooms (for example, only men biologically born male with genitalia that have been socially constructed to be “male” i.e penis, testes) isn’t actually about bathrooms, it’s the existence of trans people and lives outside of the binary. 

Gender is an issue constantly portrayed in the media as something unfathomable, as immovable, and as “extreme.” Sexual assault claims are labeled as divisive, work relationships are now over tiptoed around and criticized when really people just didn’t want their bosses massaging their shoulders, and trans people just want to shit in peace. The issue isn’t bathrooms, it’s inherent transphobia in the way we have constructed our lives under a veil of “normal” that makes people uncomfortable now because they have to confront their internalized phobias. It’s in the way we talk, the way we address people, it’s in healthcare, it’s in family dynamics. 

Counterclaims might say that the issue isn’t that transgender people shouldn’t use certain bathrooms, it’s that people will abuse that and use it as a means for assault. That, my friend, is an issue of sexual assault and not the existence of transgender folks. Sexual predators have been using means of manipulating situations, relationships, and spaces like bathrooms and literally any public place for their own sick benefit. And let us be reminded that transgender people, especially people of color, have one of the highest number of reports of sexual assault, coming in at 48% according to the 2015 U.S Transgender Survey. If anything, it is more likely that cisgender folks are a threat to transgender folks using bathrooms than vice versa. 

I will leave you with this; transgender, non-binary, gender non-conforming, and every other non-cis-gender identity have existed since humans were first conscious. In every culture across the globe, transgender people have existed, lived, and shit next to the rest of us cis folks. So go on with your day, pee in the bathrooms you want, and mind your own business, Bennett.