Here are just a few questions that people might have asked before making up their minds. How uncomfortable are people with the prospect of those with different anatomies sharing their bathrooms? Is this discomfort likely to grow or decline? Since gender identity cannot be confirmed before entering bathrooms, how great is the risk of voyeurism or other abuses? How costly will it be to provide gender-neutral bathrooms, and how would people of all genders feel about such alternatives? Will market pressures such as the boycotts against North Carolina’s bathroom regulation produce a better mix of solutions than the government’s one size fits all?

And how many transgender people actually experience indignity when using traditional bathrooms, and what is the nature of this indignity? Discomfort about using a urinal when men at nearby urinals think one is a woman? Annoyance at having to wait for a stall to conceal one’s anatomy?

Transgender people, by taking on a different, often-scorned identity, have demonstrated admirable courage. If civil rights law protects them in the other 99.9 percent of their day — as I hope it will — will they find traditional bathroom practices probably favored by most of their fellow citizens intolerable? Are there alternative bathroom arrangements that might strike a better compromise among legitimate conflicting viewpoints? In a country that allows and often encourages the states to adopt different policies on many of our most important public issues — education, for example — is uniformity essential on this particular issue?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but — and this is the key point — neither do the agencies that issued their Colleague letter. And without a public conversation to find those answers, their policy may be wrong. A predictable backlash is already brewing in some states and will probably intensify, setting up a showdown with the federal government.

This is why the government should have followed normal policy-making procedures to convene a public back-and-forth before deciding to adopt what is in effect a binding national rule. At a time when Americans’ confidence in Washington is dropping like a stone, the administration’s peremptory approach is a counterproductive way to advance the important cause of transgender equality.