Earlier this week, I set out to start a long overdue conversation about an issue that anti-LGBT activists used to defeat the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO): bathroom use. It’s not a conversation I relish, but we are going to have to have it if we want LGBT nondiscrimination measures adopted in the South and Midwest and eventually at the federal level. In fact, Houston’s anti-equality crowd had so much success scaring people into believing that the ordinance would put women and girls at risk by allowing men to use women’s bathrooms that they are now taking their road show to Dallas.
In Houston, conservative activist Jared Woodfill said the same core group that helped defeat the ordinance here 61 percent to 39 percent will deploy similar tactics in Dallas and seek to force a repeal referendum. Woodfill's group will help collect signatures, send letters to Dallas City Council and organize with local conservatives.
On Wednesday, I was contacted by an editor at the Houston Chronicle who wanted permission to re-run my Daily Kos article as a counterpoint to an op ed the paper would be running by anti-equality activists Jared Woodfill and Dr. Steven Hotze. My column was a very personal piece in which I recounted my own challenges with using women’s restrooms (even though I’m a woman) to demystify the notion that the other side’s emphasis on bathroom access was about ensuring women’s safety.
I don't buy the idea that rejecting an equal rights ordinance was somehow about protecting women from men, when it was clearly about using societal bias to play on people's unfounded fears … The bathroom issue isn't about transgender people. It's about people not liking the way someone looks or who they are and punishing them for that.
The Woodfill-Hotze column that ran as a counterpoint to mine is a hate-filled screed in which they malign “those who participate in homosexual and transgender behavior” and celebrate their assertion that “black voters considered it insulting that the choice of a person's sexual behavior could be used as an excuse to gain minority status.” It is supremely unpleasant to read but they were quite right in one regard.
After spending over $3 million, the proponents of Proposition 1 went down in a humiliating defeat.
What struck me most about being contacted by the Chronicle is the fact that our side spent that much money and still failed to produce a cohesive message that resonated. That’s partly because even as activists on the ground like native Houstonian Monica Roberts and other advocates tried to elevate the conversation about transgender discrimination, the organization running the effort—the Human Rights Campaign—continually tried to quash it. The fact that the editor there was left searching for someone who could produce a reasonable counterpoint reinforces just how listless the campaign’s message was on our side.
This entire episode took me back to when I reported in 2009 on the first-ever Senate hearing on the trans-inclusive Employment Nondiscrimination Act. The people who had organized it had been so afraid of allowing transgender people to testify that they cut them out of the hearing. Instead, members of the transgender community were asked to speak at a press conference before the hearing.
Thinking like this has got to stop. The idea that we can somehow politely redirect the conversation away from things that make the Beltway crowd uncomfortable—when right-wing activists are going for the jugular—is ludicrous.
I, for one, have gotten past the point of believing that groups like the Human Rights Campaign are going to find a way to talk about this. If they wouldn’t talk about it in Washington in 2009 and wouldn’t talk about it six years later in Houston, they’re going to have to be cornered into addressing it.
I do not have a silver bullet for how to fight people who don’t want us to be able to use the restroom. In fact, it’s such a very basic human need that it seems like silly season to even discuss it. But right-wing haters are using that one singular argument to scare people who might otherwise be reasonably inclined to vote for fairness, equality, and the dignity of other human beings.
Some people, even on our side, want to pretend that the bathroom issue is exclusively about transgender individuals. As a self-identified woman who was born biologically female and still experiences discrimination in bathrooms, I can tell you that’s just not true. It’s about anyone who doesn’t perfectly conform to the box that society would like to put us in. That applies to all of us in the LGBT community—none of us fits perfectly into that box. The sooner we realize our success lies in our interconnectedness and our willingness to confront these lies head on, the closer we will be to putting an end to this loathsome and deceptive campaign.