She was Japanese, a temp sent over by some naive agency to fill a spot in the files department. Back then, before computers, an enormous room was devoted to files. This was at an insurance company where I worked. It was located in the Empire State Building, ninth floor. The company had only a corner of the floor; the rest was taken up by another firm. These two companies had one thing in common: absolutely no employees of color.

At the time (1960 or so), bigotry was so ordinary that it was not even recognized as bigotry — except by the victims. In certain fields, and insurance appeared to be one of them, people of color were not merely rare, they didn’t exist. Sometimes I would discuss these matters with the branch manager, an affable bigot with a huge corner office who told me — then a mere mail boy — that blacks would not be tolerated by the other workers. He also assured me I would prosper in the insurance game since “Jews do well in business.” As it turned out, I did not — I wound up being fired — but before it became clear to everyone that I was not cut out for the insurance biz, I got promoted to claims.

I handled property damage, mostly auto, and when I needed a file I could pick up the phone and call back there or I could amble over to jolly the clerks to get immediate service. This is how one day I noticed the Japanese file clerk. It’s hard now to describe the shock of seeing her and, I imagine, how uncomfortable she must have felt. She was alone, isolated, and when the other women cleared a huge table of files and used it to have their lunch, the Japanese temp was not among them. She had her lunch somewhere else.

The very next day, the woman was gone. I asked the boss what had happened to her. As always, he spoke evenly and, as usual, with feigned regret. The Japanese woman had used the ninth floor’s shared ladies room. The women from the other firm had complained. She had to go, the boss said.

Now, this is not the same as the controversy over transgender people. The only thing that the two seem to have in common is bathrooms, and we have learned recently much about the sociology of public restrooms. They are places of great anxiety, especially where schools and kids are involved, and about discomfort about undress and bodily functions — and now something more. They are the locus of yet another struggle between modernity and convention — the steady and, to some, inexplicable assault on the status quo.

And yet that Japanese woman might say that little has changed. At the time, World War II had ended just 15 years prior. My company was full of veterans. The Japanese were still loathed and assigned all sorts of invidious characteristics — sneaky (as in Pearl Harbor), cruel (as in the Bataan Death March) and diabolically mysterious (as in the refusal to surrender). It wasn’t all that many years earlier that Japanese-Americans were forcibly removed to internment camps. For many Americans, the Japanese were slurred and there were as many idiotic notions about Japanese then as there are about transgender people now.

For transgender people, the list of purported offenses is long and, conveniently, unproven. They are being accused of being sexual predators or not being genuine. Never mind that the vehemently outraged can cite no surge in bathroom crime and have almost certainly been in a bathroom with a transgender person and not known it — unless they peeked. Never mind, too, that it’s hard to imagine anyone going through the physical and emotional stress of coming out as transgender just to have a good time in a public restroom.

The women who complained about that Japanese file clerk no doubt would have argued the many virtues of their bigotry with the same passion others now bring to the transgender issue. They, too, would have trotted out alleged grotesqueries and insisted on the status quo, and they were no less irrational than the legislators of North Carolina, who have made both voting and the use of public restrooms contingent on having the proper documents.

History has since turned the righteous indignation of the women who wanted that Japanese file clerk fired into a ludicrous example of blatant prejudice. It will do the same to those who would limit the rights of transgender people.

Richard Cohen is a columnist for The Washington Post. His email address is: cohenr@washpost.com.

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