As I write this, the LGBT community is struggling with a situation in Maryland where the provision for "public accommodations" has been removed from a bill that proposes to extend human rights to trans people, due to the ongoing "bathroom bill" panic-generation tactic. In Canada, Bill C-389 passed despite this same fearmongering, but faces an increasingly precarious situation in the Senate. In Montana, the state is proposing legislation that aims to erase the protections for all LGBT people that had passed the previous year in the City of Missoula, where the "not my bathroom" rhetoric failed... and where most pretexts of it have now been dropped in the battle against equality. Elsewhere in North America, potty panic has been used to stir up an emotional "ick" response to any legislation that protects trans people, and even some non-inclusive LGB protections. And once the emotions have been engaged, logic has to work five times harder to dispel the myths.
But in Maryland -- which in 2007 was the birthplace of this wave of "bathroom bill" spinmongering -- the tactic needs to be addressed head-on before it forever changes the face of how we accord and apply human rights. Because the recent removal of "public accommodations" affects far more than washrooms, all because of an irrational fear of the possibility of behaviour that isn't actually facilitated by trans protections and doesn't actually happen in real life.
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