Tonight on campus, LGBT Affairs is hosting a vigil for the thousands of trans women who lose their lives to violent hatred annually.
In Tallahassee, lawmakers are putting forward a bill that would legalize discrimination against trans people in our state.
The law is similar to many others moving through state legislatures across the country, laws which would restrict access to bathrooms based on biological sex.
Anyone who uses a bathroom designated for people “of the other biological sex” would face jail time and fines if this law passes.
The bathroom bill was created by Rep. Frank Artiles, R-Miami, reacting to a Miami-Dade County rule passed in 2014 that bans discrimination based on gender identity.
What makes this bill problematic is that it uses sex assigned at birth.
As anyone who’s taken an entry-level sociology class knows, biological sex and gender identity don’t always match up.
In order to avoid jail or fines, trans people would have to have gone through sex reassignment surgery and have their government IDs updated.
Because sex reassignment surgery is often prohibitively expensive, they’d have to use the bathroom consistent with their sex assigned at birth — becoming the proverbial “man in the women’s restroom” Artiles claims he’s trying to stop.
So, the law essentially leaves trans people who need a spot to pee when they’re out in public with three choices: get surgery, serve jail time or keep your government papers on you in case you drank too much water before you left home.
The bathroom bill, then, would have the effect of making criminals out of trans people simply for existing. So much for small government.
Artiles and his supporters in this endeavor believe the bill opens up loopholes and threatens public safety.
They claim its intent is to fix these loopholes, offering lurid tales of men entering women’s bathrooms and “trans-boys” changing in a varsity swim team’s locker room.
In their minds, Miami-Dade County has put women and children in danger with an illegitimate anti-discrimination law.
Perhaps Artiles and others who back the bill, including the executive director of the Christian Family Coalition, were so caught up in protecting women and children from prying, perverted eyes that they forgot voyeurism is already illegal.
If they’re actually trying to prevent sexual misconduct in public restrooms, then the bill is incredibly redundant. But, upon closer inspection at the rhetoric they use, it’s clear Artiles isn’t trying to solve a voyeurism problem.
The language is riddled with contempt for trans people. The law won’t have any effect beyond making trans lives a living hell.
It’s a direct legal attack on identities that don’t fit into their distinct one-or-the-other worldview, and they know it.
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 3/23/2015 under the headline “Trans bathroom bill comes from hatred, contempt”]
