AUSTIN - Carina Magyar can only remember two times when someone had a problem with what bathroom she used.

Once was in first grade after walking into the girls' restroom while playing with a pair of girl friends at school. The other was nearly 30 years later as a newly transgender woman changing her daughter's diaper in an HEB women's bathroom.

An Austin stand-up comic and a well-known figure in the transgender community, Magyar, 38, plans to document each of her interactions in Texas public restrooms until a bill proposing to restrict bathroom use to sex on a birth certificate is killed. The point? To show lawmakers that hardly anyone has a problem with transgender women in the ladies' room.

"Date: 1/12. Location: H-E-B. Activity: #1," reads one of her first entries. "Were other people in there? Yes. If yes, did we talk? Yes. Did anyone have a problem with me being there? No."

The idea started as a possible bit for one of her stand-up routines. Tapping in on bathroom humor and the bill as local comedic fodder, she thought, "I'll just make a damn spreadsheet."

Since the day after the Texas Legislative session opened, Magyar has updated the public Google spreadsheet every day with visits to places, such as the grocery store bathroom, a stall at a Chick-fil-A, or to touch up her makeup in a coffee shop restroom.

Magyar said she wanted to find a way to protest the so-called "bathroom bill" proposed by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Houston Republican who coined it the "Texas Privacy Act." The bill, SB6, is one of his top priorities this legislative session in order to ban men and transgender women from using the women's bathroom.

Boycotts elsewhere

North Carolina passed a similar law requiring people to use the bathroom that matches the genders listed on their birth certificates. The measure there has led to boycotts by sports associations, filmmakers, musicians and business refusing to do business there. It also sparked a national conversation about transgender rights.

The issue landed in Texas last summer when Patrick derided the Fort Worth ISD school superintendent for ushering in a bathroom policy allowing students to use the bathroom that best suits their declared gender. Attorney General Ken Paxton later followed, suing the Obama administration for setting out guidelines requiring schools to offer the same bathroom access.

Speaking out

Texas business leaders do not want to see Texas pass the bathroom bill, arguing that passing the measure would threaten an estimated $8.5 billion in economic activity, including approximately $243 million if the NCAA were to yank the 2018 men's basketball Final Four from San Antonio, just as it pulled its 2017 Final Four out of Charlotte in response to that state's law.

House Speaker Joe Straus has spoken out against the bill for the same reason, leaving its fate uncertain when it arrives in his chamber.

For Magyar, protesting in front of the capitol with a poster saying "I have to pee" was not going to cut it.

"I want to appeal to rationality on this one. Texans are smarter than this," she said while watching her girls, Charlotte, 5, and Josephine, 3, spin around at an Austin playground. "The more data that we put out there, the more powerful the argument becomes and the more likely it is that people don't just hear it as a political statement but see it as a factual statement, even though those are not en vogue."

In the two-and-a-half years since Magyar shed her birth gender and embraced womanhood, only one woman has voiced objection to her using the ladies' room. Magyar was six months into her transition and was underdressed – in a sweater and jeans – but needed to change her daughter's diaper. An older woman left the restroom and returned to point her out to a manager, who responded her presence there was OK because the men's room lacked a changing table, a false statement, Magyar said.

Documenting what happens day to day brings the issues of the bathroom bill to life, she said.

Her concern stems in part for taking care of her daughters, who still call her "Dad." Fathers with young daughters and mothers with sons face the same predicament over finding the most comfortable place to take their children to the bathroom.

Texas could set tone

Lauryn Farris, a San Antonio regional director for the Transgender Education Network of Texas, said the "Texas Privacy Act" bill is unnecessary, unenforceable, mean-spirited and intentionally discriminatory. Advocates say it protects the privacy of women and girls from having men in the women's restroom.

"I proudly just used the ladies room at the Texas Capitol and lo and behold, the pink dome is still standing," Farris said, adding the group's strategy is to lobby lawmakers and host lobby days.

What Texas decides to do with the bill will work like a national referendum on bathroom politics, Magyar said.

"If Texas refutes this bill, it will shut up a lot of other states that are more on the fence," she said. "As Texas feels about it, America will listen."