Arguments about bathrooms were used to justify segregation and helped doom the Equal Rights Amendment. There’s a long, really horrifying history of demagogues and fundraisers saying, ‘Hey, those people over there, we have to hate them because we have to keep our women and children safe.’” Advocates have circulated old propaganda like videos saying “the homosexual” lurks in the bathroom waiting to prey on young boys. “Look most recently at Donald Trump saying Mexican immigrants were rapists.
“We are not the first people who have been called predators for political gain,” says Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality and a transgender woman.
Similar “predator” arguments have been used and debunked in the past. I’m here to stand up for women, children and their safety.” “I don’t want to be part of their make-believe delusion. “I don’t want men who think they are women in my bathrooms and locker rooms,” a Marylander testified in a debate over this issue. “The other half were people that said ‘I’m sure you’re a good person, but you need to know this isn’t about you, this is about people who would pretend to be transgender,’” she says.įor many people in the former camp, advocates say, emphasizing concern for women’s safety is simply a cloak for a less politically palatable position-one some people have openly expressed. She says among her many critics, about half believed she was really a man and opposed her presence in the women’s room, telling her to kill herself, as well as threatening to gang rape or murder her. McBride, who is a transgender woman, recently went down to North Carolina and took a selfie in the women’s restroom that went viral. Some of the arguments about bathrooms are just a cloak for prejudice. “We know that’s not going to happen,” she says, but the notion that the lack of a law protecting transgender people is all that’s stopping male predators from acting “is preposterous.” So a male predator could skip the trouble of dressing up and go into the women’s room in North Carolina today, pretending to be a transgender man. Transgender men, who are likely to have a birth certificate with an “F” on it, are often indistinguishable from cisgender men, notes the Center for American Progress’ Sarah McBride. The North Carolina law mandates that people must use bathrooms based on their “biological sex,” defined as the sex on their birth certificate. If male predators were waiting for alleged loopholes like this to pop up, they could be using the women’s bathrooms already. “If you are a man who dresses as a woman and goes into a bathroom and commits a crime,” says the Human Rights Campaign attorney Cathryn Oakley, “whether you have a non-discrimination protection on the basis of gender identity or not, that behavior is illegal and criminal and you could be arrested and go to jail.” But, advocates emphasize, if a female alleges she was sexually assaulted, the gender identity of the perpetrator has no bearing on the criminality of the act. The predator argument is based on an assumption that men who prey on women will be inspired to dress as women and enter women’s spaces because they could falsely claim to be transgender and therefore allowed to stay. Sexual assault remains a crime no matter why someone claims they entered a women’s space. “All those arguments, to me, crash and burn,” says the Equality Federation’s Isaacs, “because this is everybody working on male predators.” LGBT rights advocates emphasize that the signatories are not only the experts on what endangers women but that groups like the National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence would be first out of the gate to oppose any law that did seem to endanger women. “As rape crisis centers, shelters, and other service providers who work each and every day to meet the needs of all survivors and reduce sexual assault and domestic violence throughout society, we speak from experience and expertise when we state that these claims are false.” “These initiatives utilize and perpetuate the myth that protecting transgender people’s access to restrooms and locker rooms endangers the safety or privacy of others,” the letter states. The nation’s leading organizations dedicated to stopping violence against women signed a letter saying that this argument is a myth. If the behavior’s there, gonna behave as they’re gonna behave no matter what the laws are.”
“I doubt that’s gonna encourage the behavior. “We have not seen that,” a Des Moines police department spokesman told the outlet in 2014.
Media Matters, a liberal media watchdog, has asked state leaders, law enforcement and school officials in places with these protections whether they’ve seen any increase in sexual assault or rape after passing these laws, and they have repeatedly said that they have not. Police and school officials say they haven’t seen it either.
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