One of the dumbest and most persistent myths pushed by anti-trans types is the “bathroom predator” thing: that protecting people’s right to use the bathroom reserved for their gender identity means that creepy men will say they identify as women so they can walk into women’s bathrooms and… listen to us pee, I guess?
There’s so much wrong with this it’s hard to know where to start. Is society’s still-fairly-rigid concept of gender the only thing standing between creepy cis dudes and their fervent desire to walk into the ladies’ loos? What do these people do in bathrooms that they think these guys are so desperate to see? Why would the vanishingly small possibility that this specific perversion is even a thing at all be worth denying trans people their right to pee?
Now we finally have an admission of what most sensible folk knew all along.
MassResistance – an organisation listed as an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group by US civil rights watchdog the Southern Poverty Law Center – admitted in a post on their extremely ugly website that the “bathroom predator” line was “concocted” for the above reason.
In an analysis of why a ballot initiative in Massachusetts in this year’s US elections– one that asked whether the state should keep its legal protections for people to use the bathroom of their identified gender – went overwhelmingly in favour of keeping those laws in place for the safety of trans folk, there’s this incredibly candid sentence:
“Our side concocted the “bathroom safety” male predator argument as a way to avoid an uncomfortable battle over LGBT ideology, and still fire up people’s emotions.”
So it was literally invented by anti-queer rights campaigners as a “less offensive” argument than “the LGBT movement’s ‘civil rights’ argument has no basis whatsoever” (yes, that’s a direct quote).
The campaign against the protections included an instantly infamous ad featuring a hulking (and clearly intended to be cisgender) dude in a wig, who hid in a women’s changeroom and waited for a pretty young woman to come in and start undressing.
CNN fact-checked the whole “bathroom predator” thing in 2017, and they found that in 20 jurisdictions with anti-discrimination protections in place, there were no attacks in bathrooms committed by people claiming to identify as women. There have been, however, plenty of attacks on trans people using the bathroom consistent with their gender identity.
This is the most invasive, inappropriate, discriminatory & disgusting thing i've seen in a while.
Grown adults PRYING bathroom doors open while a trans student is using the restroom? They should all be fired.
& To the people under this tweet defending it: you're all assholes. https://t.co/0kVG5urmao
— alexis isabel (@lexi4prez) November 29, 2018
The right to use their own gender’s bathroom is, in fact, crucial to trans people’s ability to exist in public. If you’re not sure you’ll be able to find somewhere safe to pee, just going anywhere becomes awfully difficult.
“Half the time I won’t leave the house because it’s too hard to find a toilet that I feel safe in using,” Aurora, a trans woman from Mildura in NSW, told the ABC in May. “Some females were complaining that I was using the [female] bathroom, so when I used the male bathroom, someone threatened to do some disgusting things to me.”
For some reason, certain people are obsessed with the idea that trans women, in particular, could just be lying pervs looking for a way to get into women-only spaces. Famously morally-upright dude Barnaby Joyce brought this up just last week on Sky News as part of the government’s bizarre insistence that schools should be allowed to kick out queer kids, saying it would be “an affront” on the “rights” of “everybody else” if he sent his hypothetical daughter to an all-girls school only to discover that she had a trans classmate who would “want to” use the girls’ facilities.
I and others said it before SSM was passed- once it was, trans kids would bare the brunt of all the hate from society’s lowest commons denominators. Well done @Barnaby_Joyce, if you hadn’t done it already, youve well and truly proved you’re it
— Hannah Mouncey ?♀️ (@HannahMouncey) December 6, 2018
The unusually honest post on Mass Resistance says as much, and so does anti-marriage equality group Australian Marriage Alliance rebranding as anti-trans group “Binary Australia”: now that marriage equality is law, people who just plain don’t like queer folks are focusing their attention on trans rights using the same strategies as anti-same sex marriage campaigns did.
But hey, we all know how well that worked out for them.