A House panel will consider legislation today to make it a crime to enter a public restroom designated for one gender or the other if you are "not legally classified" on your birth certificate as a member of that sex. The measure, SB 1432, also would apply to showers, baths, dressing rooms or locker rooms marked "men" or "women."
For the record: these laws are wrong.
These laws are wrong because they enforce a binary gender, and harm genderfluid and intersex people rather than letting them decide what bathroom they want to use in a given situation based on the circumstances and their level of personal safety.
These laws are wrong because they enforce an assigned-at-birth or legally-classified gender, and harm trans* persons whose gender may not match those documents for whatever reason.
These laws are wrong because they are steeped in fear that people in the bathroom, dressing room, or locker room might feel private sexual attraction to the other people there, and are therefore phobic towards gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and pansexuals.
These laws are wrong because they cause immeasurable harm to disabled people and their caretakers, mandating that people who require help in the bathroom or dressing room or locker room must only be accompanied by same-gender caretakers, which is an undue burden placed on people who already have to navigate a lifetime of undue burdens.
And these laws are wrong because they provide not an iota of benefit: bathroom rapes are not magically prevented by the addition of a "No Boys Allowed" sign on the womens' restroom. Placing the responsibility for man-on-woman bathroom rape on the shoulders of trans women is mendacious, hateful, transphobic bullshit.
It needs also to be said: it's not just right-wing Republicans who are endorsing these laws. This is an intersectionality issue, and it's one on which a lot of cis straight people are failing on. And that's a problem.
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