A round of backhanded applause, please — if there is such a thing — for the scare-mongering bathroom meddlers in our state's august legislature.

By hooting and flailing their arms over the dread-ridden peril of allowing people to figure out all by themselves which public toilet to use, they have created a fresh class of social activists. The historically marginalized transgender community has been given a level of public attention that years of public relations couldn't buy.

A state Senate subcommittee's graceless effort to limit testimony on Senate Bill 6, the so-called "bathroom bill," fell flat last week. Hundreds of opponents wearily remained at the Capitol all night, with transgender Texans and their families speaking out against the bill until 5 a.m. Wednesday. They waited, even though the panel started out in fine democratic fashion by packing the speakers list with supporters and stationing staff members to keep the opposition out of the hearing room.

The committee went on to ignore its own eyes and ears by voting 7-1 to push this embarrassing piece of bigotry on to the full Senate. If enacted into law, SB 6 will require people using restrooms in public places to consult their birth certificates instead of their brains before deciding whether to patronize the gents or the ladies water closet.

Yes, this is cruel, stupid and a gross misuse of taxpayers' time and money. It's not the first time, though, that a vulgar obsession with plumbing equipment — of both the industrial and organic varieties — has been used to drive discriminatory practices.

Students of history will recall the "unisex bathroom" panic of the 1970s, when eleventh-hour hysteria over gender-neutral public conveniences derailed the all-but-ratified Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Thus was a groundbreaking move toward social and economic equality 50 years in the making torpedoed by a squalid sideshow over who pees where.

Idiotic, but at least not as vicious as earlier efforts to keep public bathrooms segregated by race by catering to paranoia and bigotry. For instance: In 1961, Shelby County, Tenn., grudgingly accepted a court mandate to desegregate its public libraries. County authorities, however, tried to keep library restrooms segregated with the shameful claim that white patrons might contract venereal diseases from African-Americans via toilet seat transmission.

You'd think elected officials pushing modern-day bathroom legislation might have enough sense to realize that this is not exactly the thinking on which long-term legacies are built.

What these self-destroying missile launchers have managed to do, however, is focus public attention on a segment of society that has long been ignored. People who might otherwise have been just as happy to keep their own experience with gender identity private feel compelled to speak out. In the process, they're provoking thought, eliciting sympathy and enlisting allies.

It's easier, no doubt, for some folks than others. Two years ago, when opponents of an otherwise innocuous equal-rights ordinance in Houston hit on the strategy of making it All About the Bathroom, a transgender woman in Chicago fought back. She posted a startling Facebook photograph with the provocative caption: "Houston, do you REALLY want me in the same restroom as your husband or boyfriend?"

Far more in evidence, though, are ordinary people who want to lead their ordinary lives without having to worry about the kind of routine convenience most folks take for granted.

And no amount of political subterfuge or internet hysteria among the bat guano-crazy classes can breathe life into the absurd myth of perverts masquerading as female to lurk in the ladies room. There are already laws with stiff penalties against the kind of sex crimes to which these legislators — with their fatuous intonation of "protecting women and children" — keep alluding.

If anybody gets harassed or preyed upon in public bathrooms — as law enforcement officials keep patiently repeating — it's transgender people themselves. The intent here, as has been the intent at other points in history, is to find a practical lever (in this case, a plain physical need all humans share) to keep a maligned minority out of public spaces, out of society's eye, out of the range of visibility.

I love Texas a lot, but the state's current political leadership makes it awfully hard.

Nonetheless, you've got to hand it to them. Even if the Legislature is dumb and bigoted enough to make the bathroom bill into law, they're doing an excellent job of drafting new activists.

They're giving a voice to the very people they want to silence.