State lawmakers are resurrecting and expanding efforts to prohibit transgender people from using public restrooms and other spaces that match their gender. Some have sought to ban trans people from “sex-designated spaces,” including domestic violence shelters and crisis centers, which experts say co...
Republican lawmakers in several states have resurrected and expanded the fight over whether transgender people may use bathrooms and other facilities that do not match their sex assigned at birth.
At least one bill goes so far as making it a crime for a transgender person to enter a facility that doesn’t match the sex listed on their birth certificate.
The debate has been popping up in statehouses across the nation in recent months, predominantly in conservative, rural states, including at a hearing of the Arizona Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee in February. Proponents of that state’s SB 1628, which defines “male,” “female,” and other terms through rigid definitions of biological sex, argued that women’s rights are at stake. Opponents disagreed and said the language would erase transgender people from state statute and remove legal protections.
It’s abhorrent. Republicans are trying to criminalize trans people’s existence. It’s legislative genocide. They don’t want trans people to have employment protections, housing protections, let them go to the bathroom, let them have a proper ID and birth certificate, don’t want to give them healthcare, and won’t even let them play fucking sports in K-12 schools.
How often do they even encounter a trans person? They're so obsessed with oppressing a minority that's so small they probably almost never encounter them, let alone have any impact on their life.
The state’s legislative fiscal analysts determined that $7.5 billion in federal funds were on the line in the first year, depending on how state agencies implemented the law and whether those actions were deemed violations of anti-discrimination laws. The bill passed regardless and was signed by Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte.
It's wild that they are willing to turn down $7.5 billion dollars in Federal funding just to pursue their discriminatory agenda.
I'm trans and I actually do carry a copy of my birth cert sometimes. If I don't know how a certain area is going to react to me I bring it because I've had my gender marker changed. Fortunately never been in a situation where I've needed to show it to anyone but yeah the concern is real
Restrooms should all just be sexless/genderless anyways, why are they restricted in the first place? We're all just doing gross stuff in there, regardless if you're a man, woman, transgender or anything else on the spectrum. I've seen men that are the avatars of hygiene and meticulous about cleanliness and I've seen women that are absolute slobs and disgusting pigs, and I've seen the reverse. Anyone saying that any sex/gender is cleaner or more proper/trustworthy than the other one is being sexist. Just make one set of restrooms for everyone and fuck all this segregated restroom shit.
This has become another rural vs city issue. In cities bathrooms have all been single toilet rooms forever, so removing the gender sign and making both or more restrooms genderless was easy. In many cases the diviest bars and venues never even had more than one toilet, so it’s always been this way. Newer construction just follows that and new bars and restaurants just have 10-12 individual bathrooms in a hallway somewhere.
In rural areas bathrooms are huge rooms with a dozen stalls in the shitty American “walls don’t go to the floor and the door has two inch gaps” style. And there’s two whole different barhrooms full of toilets. Converting them to other formats is crazy expensive and a lot of people don’t see just letting people into both as an option.