Thread: Target takes stand on transgender bathroom controversy

Target takes stand on transgender bathroom controversy



by Robert Mclean
@robertmclean
April 20, 2016: 2:26 AM ETs 'a

Target said Tuesday that transgender customers at its stores are welcome to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity, the latest corporate reaction to a wave of legislation seen by critics as anti-LGBT.

"We welcome transgender team members and guests to use the restroom or fitting room facility that corresponds with their gender identity," the retailer said. "Everyone deserves to feel like they belong."

State legislatures around the U.S. have in recent months debated proposals that would force individuals to use the bathroom that corresponds with the sex listed on their birth certificate.

The governor of North Carolina signed such a bill in late March. Mississippi has passed a related law that critics say allows discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

In Minnesota, where Target is headquartered, a Republican state senator has proposed a bill that would restrict access to restrooms, locker rooms and dressing rooms based on the "biological sex" of individuals.

Many major corporations are fighting against the "bathroom laws," saying they discriminate against both employees and customers.
In a statement, Target (TGT) said that it had considered how the legislation could affect its business, guests and team members.

"Given the specific questions these legislative proposals raised about how we manage our fitting rooms and restrooms, we felt it was important to state our position," the company said.

Reactions to Target's announcement were mixed.

"That means I won't be using your bathrooms or dressing rooms in the future," said one commenter from Indianapolis. "May have to rethink some other things too."

"Thank you, Target!" said another customer.

http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/20/news...bathroom-lgbt/

Donald Trump says transgender people should use bathroom of their choice

So if you are a man who wants to prowl around in a woman's bathroom, all you have to do is dress up like a woman and claim to have chosen this gender, maybe if only for the afternoon.

On the other hand, how do you police against this kind of activity? How and when do you respond to complaints? At home, everybody uses the same bathroom and nobody suffers. I've been to good businesses that do not have two restrooms. Everyone uses the same restroom and sometimes you bump into the opposite sex using another stall. So what? It's kind of hard to get excited about all this.

Creepy peepers! Target hit with wave of men snooping on teens

Girls filmed changing after retail giant let grown males into women's dressing rooms

Published: 6/17.16 Chelsea Schilling
Target retailers are experiencing concerted push-back over their transgender bathroom policy (Photo: Twitter)

It’s an alarming trend that may have America’s dads and husbands standing watch outside their daughters’ and wives’ dressing rooms: Barely months after Target announced its plan to let men enter women’s facilities, teenage girls and women across America are catching creepy men secretly filming them while they change clothes.

New reports of Target’s peeping toms have surfaced in North Dakota, Massachusetts, Texas and Ohio.

According to a 16-year-old girl who visited a Target in Bismark, North Dakota, a man positioned a phone under her door with the camera facing up.

“When she walked out, the man entered a different dressing room,” reported WDAY-6 in Fargo, North Dakota.

Are you sick of all the bathroom bullies? Sign WND’s petition and say no to transgender bathroom and dressing room madness!

The manager of the Target declined to comment on the incident, according to the station.

Bismarck police said the suspect is a white male, age 30 to 50, possible around six feet tall, with a muscular build and glasses.

Cops are asking for help finding another peeping tom in Revere, Massachusetts, who reportedly spied on a 17-year-old girl changing in a Target dressing room.

Police have still photos of the suspect they say is a white male in his 30s with brown hair and a white button-down shirt. He drives a Toyota Prius.

Police in Revere, Massachusetts, released these images of a suspected Target peeping tom

Also in May at a Frisco, Texas, Target, a 29-year-old man, Charles Sidney McKissack III, was caught by police after he reportedly used his cell phone to film an underage girl in the women’s dressing room.

“Investigators say the suspect put his cell phone over the wall of a female changing room and shot video of the girl,” according to a report by Fox 4 in Dallas.

He ran off after the girl saw the camera, but police released footage of him captured by a store camera.

And in April, Joshua Sheldon, 33, pleaded guilty to voyeurism in Miami Township, Ohio, after he reportedly looked under a women’s dressing room door in Target.

Sheldon was sentenced to 90 days in jail and ordered to pay a $380 fine. He is required to register as a sex offender and stay away from Target stores for two years.

In April, Target announced a corporate policy change that would open all bathroom and dressing room doors to both sexes, depending on their gender identities.

A day after Target declared it “welcomes transgender team members and guests to use the restroom or fitting room facility that corresponds with their gender identity,” the American Family Association called for a boycott of Target and created an online pledge in which signees could promise to shop elsewhere. One week after the pledge was created, it had more than 985,000 signatures.

At the time of this report, the pledge had 1,353,396 signatures.

WND reported just last week that shareholders at a recent Target corporate meeting pressing CEO Brian Cornell to explain the new bathroom policy came up woefully short. The only answer they received was rooted in the perceived need for more diversity, according to one at the gathering who opened the line of questioning.

“Target’s shareholder meeting was appalling from beginning to end,” said National Center Free Enterprise Project director Justin Danhof, in a statement. “Liberal corporate leaders such as Cornell throw around the words ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion” so much they are starting to lose their meaning. In addition to my question, two other shareholders also expressed concern over the company’s offensive bathroom policy. Cornell just kept repeating the same vacuous lines about diversity and inclusion. He doesn’t seem to get that he has offended the sensibilities of millions of Americans.”

The shareholder meeting, held in Costa Mesa, California, allowed for the questioning of corporate board members, including the CEO, about matters of importance to the company’s bottom line – including the recent bathroom-policy switch that angered thousands of Americans enough to sign on to the petition from the American Family Association to boycott the business.

Shortly after the new policy and petition, Target’s stock fell from $83.98 per share to $81.33, in just a few hours, as WND previously reported. Target shares are now around $66.98.

Danhof raised that point at the shareholders’ meeting, as well.

“Company executives also made the bold claim that its absurd stance on bathrooms hasn’t impacted the company’s financial performance in any way,” Danhof said, referring to the 18 percent drop in shares the company experienced in seven weeks. “That’s a whopper! Target’s stock price was $83.98 the day of the announcement. On Monday, it was $68.81 … For Target to deny any correlation between its announcement and its tanking stock is ignorance of the highest form. Offending millions of investors and consumers, then denying the financial implications, borders on fiduciary negligence.”

Danhof said he didn’t get the impression from the meeting that Target’s executive staff would be reversing its pro-transgender bathroom policy any time soon.

“When Cornell ducked my question [about bathroom policy], I followed up and urged the company’s leadership team to think hard about the fact that they are branding millions of Americans, potential customers and investors as bigots,” he said. “Not a one of them had a response. If you are offended by Target’s decision to allow grown men to be in states of undress in front of young girls, and at the potential for predators to abuse Target’s bathroom policy, the company is basically saying that they don’t want your business. That’s the message I took away from today’s meeting.”

http://www.wnd.com/2016/06/creepy-pe...W02lgxYHVRw.99

Originally Posted by pkskyali

So if you are a man who wants to prowl around in a woman's bathroom, all you have to do is dress up like a woman and claim to have chosen this gender, maybe if only for the afternoon.

On the other hand, how do you police against this kind of activity? How and when do you respond to complaints? At home, everybody uses the same bathroom and nobody suffers. I've been to good businesses that do not have two restrooms. Everyone uses the same restroom and sometimes you bump into the opposite sex using another stall. So what? It's kind of hard to get excited about all this.

I disagree with any policy that makes it okay for a grown man to use a bathroom, locker room, or shower while occupied by one of my daughters or granddaughters! I've yet to personally talk to any parent or grandparent that thinks this is appropriate. The situations you identified are not really at issue because those bathrooms can be locked when occupied and most only have one urinal and toilet. For example, I never entered the bathroom at our residence while my daughter or granddaughter was setting on the toilet, nor did I allow them to enter while I was using the toilet (locked door). Same thing with businesses that have a single bathroom with one toilet and urinal. In those situations everyone everyone locks the door when they go in.

For the record, I've never knowingly seen anyone of the opposite sex using the same bathroom as me, except for my wife. Most people would probably say the same.

Originally Posted by MW

I disagree with any policy that makes it okay for a grown man to use a bathroom, locker room, or shower while occupied by one of my daughters or granddaughters! I've yet to personally talk to any parent or grandparent that thinks this is appropriate. The situations you identified are not really at issue because those bathrooms can be locked when occupied and most only have one urinal and toilet. For example, I never entered the bathroom at our residence while my daughter or granddaughter was setting on the toilet, nor did I allow them to enter while I was using the toilet (locked door). Same thing with businesses that have a single bathroom with one toilet and urinal. In those situations everyone everyone locks the door when they go in.

For the record, I've never knowingly seen anyone of the opposite sex using the same bathroom as me, except for my wife. Most people would probably say the same.

Well, of course. But the application of children to public restrooms really highlights the problem. I have regularly seen adults bring their children of the opposite sex into restrooms of the opposite sex. I've seem mothers bring their little boys into the woman's restroom and I've seen fathers bring their little girls into the men's restroom. When the little kid has to use the restroom and knows how, there really is no other choice. When they don't know how, then if you aren't with them when they are going to the bathroom, you aren't helping them learn to do it.

I seem to recall my mother doing the same thing for me. When I got older, sometimes she would recruit an adult male to do the same job. But that's risky too unless the parent knows the adult. Otherwise, turning children over to public restrooms can be risky because in either sex, children are at risk from adults of the same sex too.

Consider the Penn State scandal. What happened there? Sandusky was bringing young boys into the athletic department shower room where he was having sex with them. There was no problem of crossing sexual orientation barriers, the problem was allowing young boys into a locker room for adults unsupervised by their parents.

Do you think it would be a good idea to let any young boy under the age of eighteen into the locker room of your average professional sports team? I would not. And it's not because I would be worried about him being molested by team members.

I think of a local community center where there was a men's and woman's restroom and there was only one toilet in each and the doors were lockable. Why two restrooms? Recently, somebody wised up and pulled the signs off that designate male of female for the restrooms.

The whole LGBTQ thing is a political cult that doesn't deserve anyone's attention, but there are some practical concerns that aren't really being addressed. And maybe, failure to address these practical concerns is where we get these LGBTQ people in the first place.

Target Adds Private Bathrooms to Quell Transgender Debate

Published August 18, 2016 Retail Dow Jones Newswires

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Target Corp. said it will spend $20 million to add a private bathroom to each of its stores by next year, following customer protests over its policy allowing transgender individuals to use whichever restroom corresponds with their gender identity.
Most of Target's 1,797 locations already have single-occupancy or unisex restrooms, but it will add the option to 277 stores by November and to about 20 remaining stores by March 2017, the company said on Wednesday.
Target's finance chief Cathy Smith said the move is a response to feedback from customers voicing displeasure over the company's bathroom policy. She added the customer discontent hadn't had a material impact on sales. CEO Brian Cornell had promised to roll out family restrooms earlier this year and defended the company's stance on diversity.
Protests started at Target stores after the retailer said in April that it welcomed transgender employees and guests to use the restroom or fitting room that corresponded with their gender identity. "Everyone deserves to feel they belong," the company wrote on its website.
The company made the announcement after North Carolina became one of the first states to enact legislation requiring transgender people to use the public bathroom corresponding to the gender on their birth certificate. In its wake, several businesses promised to withdraw investment in the state. The National Basketball Association relocated its All-Star game from Charlotte in protest.
One group, the American Family Association, says more than 1.3 million people have signed an online petition to boycott Target stores to protest the issue. The petition said Target's policy was "a danger to wives and daughters" and called on Target to offer single-occupancy bathrooms.
Walker Wildmon, a spokesman for AFA, said Wednesday the organization is unsatisfied with Target's response, calling the policy "basically a bathroom free-for-all."
"If the majority feel uncomfortable, they will have to go into the single-stall bathroom," he said. "Transgender individuals should have to use the single-stall if they feel uncomfortable using the facilities assigned on their birth certificate."
Mara Keisling, executive director at the National Center for Transgender Equality, applauded Target's reported its first decline in same-store salesdecision. "There are lots of gender nonconforming people who will be happy about this and will use those bathrooms," she said, "and most transgender people will continue to use the bathrooms that match their gender identity as they have been doing for decades."
Target on Wednesday reported its first decline in same-store sales in two years and warned that sales could fall in each of the next two quarters, as it struggles with lower shopper traffic to its stores.


http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2...er-debate.html