Trans People Aren’t Surprised, Trump Told You He Would Take Our Rights

No one, I repeat, no one is using bathroom-protection laws to prey on children

by LAURA KATE

Let’s get this out the way — protecting transgender people’s access to public bathrooms will in no way enable sexual predators to commit acts of sexual harassment, sexual abuse or any other crime.

Transgender bathroom protections have existed in numerous American states for years, and there has never been a single reported incident of a non-transgender person using them as a shield to commit a sexual crime. No court has ever convicted a single transgender person of committing sexual assault in a bathroom. Not a single time. It’s an imagined problem that does not and has never existed.

The number of times Pres. Donald Trump has admitted to barging into gendered space under false pretenses is greater than the entire transgender population of the United States. Trump has bragged about more sex crimes than trans people have ever committed in bathrooms.

The argument against laws that let people go to the bathroom in their preferred space is outlandish. In short, people against such protections argue that sexual predators will use them as cover to commit heinous crimes. The idea of a non-transgender person using transgender bathroom protections to commit crimes of a sexual nature is so ridiculous that it falls apart if you think it through for more than a few seconds.

Let’s hypothetically say a non-transgender man walks into a women’s bathroom, puts his camera under a stall door and photographs a woman peeing. When questioned, he says he’s a trans woman. In that case, a woman walked into the lady’s bathroom and took a picture of a another woman peeing. That’s still a crime.

If this imagined predator walking into a gendered space under the guise of being transgender takes photographs of naked people without consent, touches them without consent — pretty much does anything but walk in, pee, wash their hands and leave — whatever crime they commit is still a crime regardless of transgender bathroom rights.

There is literally no crime that suddenly becomes legal for a non-transgender person to commit just by virtue of them saying they are transgender.

Now, this is all important context, because on Feb. 23, Trump repealed one of the only national level protections that existed for transgender Americans and their access to gendered spaces. In doing so, he put trans people at risk in an attempt to stamp out a threat which does not exist.

Back in May 2013, Pres. Barack Obama issued federal level guidance to schools across the United States. According to the guidance, schools receiving federal cash would need to protect the gendered space access rights of transgender students to keep receiving federal funds.

This guidance came as a result of the Justice Department interpreting unclear wording in Title IX, which bans federally funded institutions from discrimination on the grounds of sex.

The Obama administration’s guidance interpreted that provision in Title IX as protecting the rights of transgender individuals to be free from discrimination in federally funded settings, and set a clear expectation — on a federal level — that the government should protect trans people’s gendered space access rights.

This came alongside the administration suing North Carolina over its anti trans bathroom bill and then Attorney General Loretta Lynch delivering a powerful speech in which she spoke out to the transgender community. She promised that the federal government saw them and would protect them.