WASHINGTON—When Lucas Rixon has to go to the bathroom, the guys know what to do.

They come with him, no questions asked.

Sometimes they enter the facilities too. Sometimes they stand sentry at the door. At Walmart or the mall or any other public place in Greenville, N.C., two or three straight cisgender teenagers turn into bodyguards for their transgender buddy.

“Because they’re terrified for me,” Rixon, 17, said over the phone. “They’re terrified for me, and I’m terrified for myself.”

He has felt particularly endangered since March. That’s when his trips to the toilet became the subject of a state uproar and then a national uproar.

Communities across America are suddenly in the grips of emotional battles over whether transgender people, especially students, should be allowed to use bathrooms that match their gender identity. Once a little-noticed sideshow to seismic fights over gay and lesbian rights, the bathroom wars have sprung to the fore as other disputes have faded and transgender advocates have become more visible and more vocal.

Social conservatives have lost clash after clash during the Obama era. In school bathrooms, they have found an issue on which they can win. At least temporarily.

Acceptance of transgender people lags far behind acceptance of gays and lesbians. Polls suggest a slight plurality of Americans, about 45 per cent, thinks people should be forced to use the bathroom corresponding to their sex on their birth certificate.

The Christian right found a model for victory last year in Houston. Seeking to repeal a city anti-discrimination law that prohibited discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity, conservatives ran a fear-mongering referendum campaign focused on the slogan “no men in women’s bathrooms.” They prevailed handily.

Seeing opportunity, Republicans have this year pushed “bathroom bills” in more than 15 states. Rixon’s North Carolina is the only state to pass one so far.

After the city of Charlotte approved an anti-discrimination law, the state government approved a law to overturn that law — and to restrict public school students to the bathrooms and locker rooms matching their birth sex.

The law, known as House Bill 2, came as a shock to Rixon. Though he feared bathroom violence because of attacks on transgender people elsewhere, North Carolina had always seemed accepting to him. He has more friends now, he said, than he did before he came out as a boy early last year.

Uncomfortable with his body but uncertain what his problem was, he attempted suicide three times while presenting as a girl. Now he sees a happy future, ideally as an actor.

“I tried to be one of the girls. I tried really hard. And nothing would work,” he said. “I’m comfortable with who I am, and I’m definitely not confused. This is not a phase.”

Social conservatives continue to insist that nobody is truly transgender, that tens of thousands of teenagers like Rixon are just “searching.” Tanya Ditty, Georgia state director of the evangelical group Concerned Women for America, said discarding your birth sex is akin to “erasing what a loving God has designed.”

But Ditty, like others on her side, also claim that their stance on bathrooms is not about antipathy to transgender people. Nor, she said, do they think transgender people are going to hurt anyone.

The real issue is pedophiles, Ditty said — non-transgender men who will use the new rules to saunter unquestioned into bathrooms while masquerading as women.

“It’s the predators who will take advantage of this, and really it’s a huge risk factor,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to be the casualty of a mandate (from Obama). Because you will have casualties: you are going to have people that will be attacked.”

There have been a tiny number of cases, including one in Toronto, in which men have pretended to be transgender and then attacked women. But there does not appear to be any evidence at all that laws letting transgender people use the bathroom of their choice have contributed to even a single incident.

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Far more dangerous, the evidence suggests, are laws forcing transgender people to walk into bathrooms that do not match how they look.

Transgender people are disproportionately likely to be harassed, assaulted and sexually assaulted, and their need to use public bathrooms has always been the source of stress and peril. The “predators” panic makes them feel even more vulnerable.

“Now they’re hunting for us,” said Paxtyn Thompson, 17, who founded the gay-straight alliance at his high school in small-town Indiana. “They’re like, ‘Oh no, what if a trans person is in here?’ They’re so worried about that that they probably can’t even pee themselves.”

The Obama administration issued a mid-May letter implicitly threatening to deny funding to school districts that don’t let transgender students use bathrooms matching their gender identity. Eleven Republican-led states are now suing, arguing that the directive “has no basis in law.”

Thompson uses a single-person unisex bathroom at school. He thinks the controversy about his use of the toilet is the “really weird” product of “fear and rumours and urban legends.”

But he was chipper in discussing it. He believes the high-profile effort to make the lives of transgender people harder will actually help them in the end.

“The transgender community hasn’t been really big and in people’s faces since the Stonewall riots. So now it’s back in people’s faces again,” he said. “And they’re going to have to realize that this is reality, and there are people like this everywhere.”

The key players

Alliance Defending Freedom: The Arizona-based Alliance is a deep-pocketed conservative Christian legal non-profit devoted to protecting “religious freedom.” Staunchly opposed to gay rights — president Alan Sears wrote a book called The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today — it has promoted “model” laws and school policies that would restrict transgender students to the bathroom of their sex at birth. Its suggested language has been adopted by legislators around the country.

Ted Cruz: Hoping he could scare Indiana evangelicals away from Donald Trump, the Texas senator repeatedly invoked the spectre of transgender bathroom predators during his last-gasp May campaigning. One of his attack ads began, “Should a grown man pretending to be a woman be allowed to use the women’s restroom? The same restroom used by your daughter?” Cruz lost, but he brought the issue to wider national attention.

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory: McCrory, a Republican, has his own history of antipathy to LGBT rights; in 2005, he said Charlotte’s Pride event “belongs in a hotel.” In March, he signed the law that prohibited schools from accommodating transgender people in bathrooms — and prohibited cities from passing anti-discrimination laws to protect LGBT people at all. He has defended the law in the face of boycotts, saying he was forced into action by the pro-trans efforts of “the left.”

The Obama administration: President Barack Obama publicly opposed same-sex marriage until more than three years into his first term, but no president has done more for LGBT rights. Controversially deploying a civil rights law forbidding sex discrimination, his administration two weeks ago directed schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms matching their gender identity. The directive carried an implied threat: the loss of federal funding. Attorney General Loretta Lynch also launched a civil rights lawsuit challenging North Carolina’s law, calling it “state-sponsored discrimination.”

LGBT advocates: Following a string of major victories on gay and lesbian rights, LGBT groups are having more trouble fighting transgender rights battles — in part because they have struggled to develop a winning strategy to combat their opponents’ successful use of bathroom-related fears. But groups like the Human Rights Campaign, led by gay activist Chad Griffin, carried the once-obscure bathrooms issue to Obama’s attention with a “highly orchestrated” lobbying effort, the New York Times reported.

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