This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Someone made a mistake on my birth certificate.

I almost never went into the bathrooms at my high school.

Those two facts have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

Just like the sudden explosion of people convinced that transgender human beings relieving themselves in whatever public accommodation fits their self-image — which the U.S. Department of Justice is insisting on — will lead to a wave of sexual assaults — which the North Carolina Legislature, and not a few important Utahns, have made up out of thin air.

For the record, my mother's name was Donna May, not Donna Mae, despite what the Missouri Bureau of Vital Records says. That might be enough of a discrepancy that I wouldn't be allowed to register to vote in some states these days. But mostly it's a musty old government document that clerks pretend to look at whenever I get a shiny new government document.

As for those high school rest rooms, they were dirty, smelly and had a reputation for being the personal fiefdoms of my more aggressively unpleasant classmates. And my bladder was young enough that I could wait until I got home.

As some of us get older, though, we see how the title of Martin Luther King's book "Why We Can't Wait" takes on a new meaning. Folks whose search for a suitable restroom is being painfully complicated because some brittle state form says they are one gender and their own being tells them they are another.

At least a dozen states have laws that say the person in that situation gets to choose and nobody gets to second-guess them. Reported sexual assaults in such facilities going back at least 15 years: Zero.

One state, North Carolina, got all hot under the waistband and, with a sudden reverence for the infallibility of government documents, adopted a law that said the opposite. U.S. Attorneys General and National Basketball Associations who spoke out against such inane legislation: Two.

Meanwhile, effective steps taken by anti-transgender politicians to deal with sexual assault on college campuses, sexual assault in the military, health care (including abortion) for victims of sexual assault, children who will never be assaulted in a public bathroom but have bad schools, poor diets and meager prospects: Not very bloody much.

A long-term solution is already trending. Increasingly, public bathrooms are designed less for sexual dimorphism than for individual privacy. Single-occupancy rooms with no need for gender designation. Or larger restrooms — even locker rooms — with full privacy stalls for each fixture, each shower, each occupant.

Thus no line outside the ladies room while the gents is empty. And no worry about whether Dad should take young daughter with him into the men's room or allow her to go into the women's by herself.

Meanwhile, some modicum of sympathy for the resisters is in order. Gender roles have changed really quickly. Women have been just about everything except president, and that may change very soon. Gay people went from non-existent to invisible to reviled to token to normal to quarreling old married couples in the blink of an historic eye.

Last week, Salt Lake City engaged in another of those against-type — for people who know nothing about Salt Lake City — exercises and designated a portion of 900 South through one of the city's funkier neighborhoods as Harvey Milk Boulevard.

He was the gay guy who got elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and then, in 1978, went and got himself murdered by another member.

But the thing Milk did that deserved to have streets and courthouses and bridges and schools named for him was his personally brave, and politically brilliant, call for all the other gay folks to come out, as he had. To do so in sufficient numbers that there would be no choice but to admit that, with so many such humans among our families, friends, colleagues, classmates, teachers, soldiers, clergy and everything else, bigotry against them was no longer an abstraction. It was a slam on those near and dear to us.

Which is everyone.

George Pyle, a Tribune editorial writer, is only concerned with the gender identity of strangers he wants to sleep with. Which is no one. gpyle@sltrib.com