YouTube star Joey Salads recently watched a video entitled "What Pisses Me Off About Transgender Bathrooms" and came up with an idea for one of his signature "social experiments."

Salads, who declined to provide his legal name for privacy reasons, wanted to test how women react to seeing a visibly transgender woman in a public bathroom.

He quickly researched gender identity online and chatted with two friends who he says represent opposite sides of the argument.

Then Salads, 22, donned a dress, purse and blonde wig, and let the cameras roll as he followed women into a public bathroom in a north Hollywood apartment complex. The video, released on Monday, has since been watched more than one million times.

Though the camera remains outside of the bathroom during filming, women can be heard shouting their disbelief and disapproval. Their comments may seem scripted or rehearsed, but Salads says they are spontaneous.

He believes the video appeals to people with different political views. Conservatives, he says, can cite the women's outrage as proof of why so-called bathroom bills like the one recently passed in North Carolina are necessary. To transgender people, the video could be evidence of intolerance.

"It’s not OK to discriminate against anybody," says Salads. "I made the video as unbiased — you could interpret it to support any side of the argument."

The power of a meme

As the battle over transgender rights ripples across the U.S., opponents and supporters are fighting to define the debate online with memes, videos, Facebook posts and tweets that call for acceptance and equality — or that invoke fears about safety.

Yet, some of these messages, transgender advocates say, play into dangerous stereotypes of trans people as confused, inauthentic and untrustworthy.

On Tuesday, former pitcher and ESPN baseball analyst Curt Schilling received considerable backlash when he shared an anti-trans meme on his Facebook page. He later deleted the post, which seemed to feature a large man wearing an unkempt wig and a risqué outfit, but he'd already essentially endorsed its inflammatory content.

ESPN fired baseball analyst Curt Schilling after he shared this meme on Facebook. Image: autumn williams ii / facebook

The image itself appears to have originated from the meme collection known as People of Walmart and it's not clear whether the person in it identifies as transgender, but the post has been shared more than 1,200 times.

While no one expects a meme to convey nuance or spare ridicule, they can blithely inflict pain on unwitting subjects. That's what happened earlier this year to Leon Mitchell II, a cancer survivor who resembles NBA player Steph Curry.

The meme, "Meth Curry," contrasted Mitchell's frail face with Curry's image. In an Instagram response, Mitchell said he'd struggled for years with how cancer treatment had affected his appearance.

Leon Mitchell II, a cancer survivor, responded on Instagram after he became the subject of a cruel meme. Image: Leon Mitchell II / instagram



"The fact that the meme was posted was a reminder of how distasteful and cruel people can be without background knowledge of the person in the bullseye of the target," he wrote.

#WeJustNeedtoPee

Kasey Suffredini, chief program officer for the non-discrimination campaign Freedom for All Americans, says anti-trans memes have the potential to expose transgender people to harm.

That might be especially true for trans women who are not interested in physical or surgical alterations to make them imperceptible to strangers, or do not possess the financial and medical resources to change their appearance so fundamentally.

"Underneath the caricature and mockery is casting judgement on somebody’s worth and dignity," Suffredini says. "Let’s say that is a picture of a transgender person. So what? They are just as worthy of dignity and fairness and equality as anyone else."

Transgender people have created their own viral content in response to the North Carolina legislation. Some trans men have tweeted selfies trying to highlight the absurdity of being forced to use the women's restroom.

The hashtag #wejustneedtopee continues to collect emotional first-person accounts from transgender people about the travails of bathroom access. One trans man even created business cards to distribute in the women's restroom, acknowledging a mutual discomfort and urging the recipient to contact their legislator about the bill.

A transgender man is handing out cards explaining why he's required to use the women's restroom in North Carolina. Image: Charlie Comero / facebook

The digital LGBT community Moovz recently released a video that portrayed what it's like for transgender people to use the wrong bathroom; it's been watched more than one million times.

Suffredini knows some of the improvisational tactics on social media might not be effective or well-received with people who aren't already allies, but he thinks it's important to see a range of responses from the transgender community — from emotional to logical to humorous.

"There are a lot of myths and stereotypes about transgender people," he says. "It’s really important that we do everything we can to ensure that more Americans meet [them]."

'Part of human diversity'

While transgender people seek full recognition of their identity in politics and the digital public square, opponents of transgender acceptance have focused on their perception of gender identity as a fallacy.

"There are a lot of myths and stereotypes about transgender people."

In January, the Republican National Committee issued a formal resolution that argued against protecting transgender students from discrimination or exclusion, and instead urged legislators to pass bills that explicitly prevent them from using restrooms, locker rooms and other similar facilities that correspond to their gender identity.

It described a person's sex as a "physical condition of being male or female, which is determined at conception, identified at birth by a person’s anatomy, recorded on their official birth certificate, and can be confirmed by DNA testing."

This kind of rigidity, says Dan Karasic, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, isn't the view of mainstream medical and scientific opinion.

"The accepted science isn’t that everyone’s gender is determined by the presence or absence of an X or Y chromosome," says Karasic, who has worked with transgender patients for the past 25 years. Expressing a gender identity that does not match one's sex at birth, he adds, is "part of human diversity" and not itself considered a mental health condition.

Yet the belief that gender identity is a joke, whim or mental illness is a defining characteristic of digital content produced by opponents of transgender acceptance.

A 'social experiment'

The video that inspired Joey Salads to perform his "social experiment" was made by Paul Joseph Watson, a self-described "contrarian polemicist" who likens transgender identity to a "fringe lifestyle choice."

With the same cadence of a classic John Oliver takedown, Watson says the North Carolina bill won't matter to "transgender men who actually make the effort to look like women."

"The only people that this bill will negatively affect," Watson adds, "is creepy perverts who throw on a dress so they can go and masturbate in the girls' locker room." His video has been watched 184,000 times.

"Transgender people are not performing...it’s who they legitimately are."

Earlier this month, a viral post on conservative website The Blaze referred to transgender people in quotes and argued that the solution is for transgender women to "take off the girl costume."

It's this emphasis on transgender identity as a performance that worries advocates like Nick Adams, director of GLAAD's Transgender Media program.

"To get people to acknowledge and be aware that transgender people are not performing and it’s who they legitimately are, I think it is a fundamental thing that people haven’t grasped yet," says Adams.

Salads acknowledges in his video that simply putting on a dress and a wig isn't the full representation of what it means to be trans, but defends the "transformation" by saying others will perceive him to be transgender.

The women, though, might have viewed him as cross-dressing, a term typically used to describe heterosexual men who wear women's clothes but don't identify as transgender. Salads, who felt uncomfortable in the outfit and stopped filming after capturing five reactions, says some people don't know the difference.

'A conversation about real people'

The resulting stunt, says Karasic, isn't an even-handed approach to a stereotype but instead "reenacting the nightmare scenario" of a man following women into a private, vulnerable space, which conservatives have used to justify anti-trans bathroom bills.

Salads talks earnestly about caring for transgender people even as he speculates that they're experiencing mental illness and describes reassignment surgery as "mutilation."

He says he consulted a transgender friend he met online about a month ago for guidance on how to sensitively approach the issue. The medical expert he cites is a friend who recently graduated from medical school.

"This isn't just a policy debate or political debate. This is a conversation about real people."

"I’m the type of guy that I’m not going to beat around the bush. I’m going to tell you the way I see it, but I also see the other side..." he says. "In my mind, I’m all about figuring out a way to make everybody happy and solve a problem."

Suffredini says the best hope for acceptance is to share the lived experiences of transgender people with the public so fraught portrayals like Salads' don't become a lasting, definitive impression.

That's why Freedom for All Americans recently launched a national campaign to increase support of transgender people, which includes a database of personal stories and a Tumblr page.

Suffredini, who directs that education initiative, says he worries about the short- and long-term effect of anti-trans online content.

"This isn't just a policy debate or political debate," Suffredini says. "This is a conversation about real people. I worry about the impact those kinds of messages will have on transgender people themselves and the community around them."

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