Transgender Americans have seen tremendous progress over the past few years. With increasing visibility in mainstream media and politics, more people understand the bigotry that trans people endure and have seen many examples of people overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds.
But with progress usually comes backlash.
The Republican National Committee passed a resolution encouraging Republican legislators to coordinate a legislative assault on transgender rights, essentially making it criminal and unsafe for trans people to pee in public. These legislative attacks known as “bathroom bills” prohibit trans people from using the restroom that matches their gender identity, and instead force them to use facilities that correspond with their sex assigned at birth.
In 2016 alone, at least 17 states have introduced anti-transgender bathroom bills, over half of which target children in public schools. North Carolina positioned itself as a leader in hate, using parliamentary trickery to propose and pass, in one day, a law making it illegal to protect LGBT people from discrimination and includes an anti-trans bathroom law. Thankfully, this heinous move is being challenged in federal court.
Why bathrooms?
This bigoted effort is about more than where people relieve their bladders; it is a blatant attempt to forcefully and legally define everyone’s gender. In many cases they get as invasive as defining gender by genetic markers like chromosomes--something that can only be determined by medical testing. At minimum, these bills define gender as sex, by what’s marked on birth certificates which most people don’t carry to the bathroom.
If Republicans are successful, we will live in a nation where it is lawful to demand “Papers, please!” and that actively asks people to prove their gender. Though this effort is clearly aimed at trans people, anyone who doesn’t look enough like other people’s common expectations of gender will be subject to restroom harassment.
Butch, or masculine presenting, women have stories of other women shouting at them or cowering away from them, mistaking them for men in the ladies’ room. These bills invite people to question and police people’s gender, whether or not they are transgender, and make them prove they belong.
By claiming to champion safety and privacy Republicans created these bills to capitalize on the constant fear of rape that our culture forces people to live in. Republicans seized upon the extremely dangerous idea that trans people cannot be trusted to understand their own gender -- that they are either confused, or lying men in dresses hoping to abuse innocent women and children.
Anti-transgender bathroom bills suggest that restroom assaults will soar, but they ignore one horrifying fact: Transgender people have committed bathroom assault exactly zero times, but nearly 3-out-of-4 trans people report being harassed and assaulted in public facilities.
The push for bathroom bills not only proposes a solution to a completely non-existent threat, it fosters even more hostility toward trans people -- the kind of hostility that leads to unmatched rates of bullying, high murder rates of transgender Americans, as well as disturbingly high rates of suicide. The average lifespan of a trans person is 30 to 35 years old.
Transgender people using public restrooms pose no threat to cisgender people. If Republicans were honestly concerned about the safety and privacy of Americans in bathrooms and locker rooms, they would support efforts to institute gender-neutral public restrooms.
These bathroom bills put Americans in grave danger, and we should all work to stop them. They legalize discrimination and will put trans people at higher risk of assault. Politicians should stop these bills and trust trans people and all gender nonconforming people to know, better than we do, what their gender is.