The City of New York faces a $3.8 billion budget shortfall by 2019, but city hall has launched a $265,000 tax-funded ad campaign to push transgender bathrooms on the city’s residents.

The new “Look Past Pink and Blue” ads informs residents to “Use the restroom consistent with who you are,” echoing the political claim that each person’s feeling of their “gender” is more important than their anatomy or genetics. That aspect of transgender ideology will force women and men in New York to share bathrooms with people of the opposite sex.

City officials are even touting the loss of sexual privacy for men and women as a new “right.”

“While other cities and states are legislating intolerance and taking away individuals’ right to use bathrooms consistent with their gender identity, we are proudly standing with our transgender and gender non-confirming New Yorkers,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement celebrating the new campaign.

The ads feature transgender models and will appear on subway cards, bus placards, newspaper ads, social media promotions and elsewhere.

The $265,000 campaign was launched after the city received input from “transgender and cisgender New Yorkers,” the de Blasio administration claimed “Cisgender” is the latest trendy term for normal people.

But Joseph Borelli, a Republican member of the New York City Council, said the money was not a proper use of tax dollars. “I’m not sure if this is the best use of taxpayer money,” Borelli told Fox News. “However, I guess it is fair to warn people that there may be men in the women’s restroom in the future.”

The announcement of the massive expenditure comes as the city began negotiations over its next budget. But some say the city faces an even larger budget gap than the Mayor’s office has been willing to claim.

Late in May, City Controller Scott Stringer reported that the Big Apple faces a $3.8 billion budget gap by 2019, not the $3 billion projected by the mayor’s office.

According to the New York Daily News, the Comptroller said the budget gap is $800 million larger than the $3 billion the mayor projected for 2019 because “the city will have to shell out more on a rescue plan for public hospitals, homeless shelters, and overtime.”

Despite the massive shortfall, during the first week of June the city council and the mayor’s office reached an $82.1 billion budget deal which increases spending by $30 million of the last budget.

In general, progressives who favor transgenderism says the government should require every American to validate every person’s choice of created “gender identity,” even though a man who claims to be a woman is still a man by every known scientific measure of evolutionary life. In practice, this demand requires government to penalize people unless they use language and terms preferred by a political group.

For example, an Oregon law recently allowed a jury to award $60,000 t0 a transgender teacher because other teachers declined to use the teacher’s preferred pronoun, which is “they” rather than “him” or “her.” President Barack Obama backs similar rules for all 50 million kids in public K-12 schools, and New York City has also establish similar forced-speech rules. Canada is preparing a law that will punish people who argue against the transgender ideology.

The ideology’s demand that the state enforce a new right to “gender identity” also requires the state to ignore or dismantle many civic rules that evolved to help the two distinct sexes — men and boys, women and girls — meet their legally equal, but different and complementary, needs. For example, the transgender ideological demand means that single-sex bathrooms and locker rooms must opened up to people of the opposite sex, regardless of age, and without any verification of created “gender identity.”

As a result, it is now an offense in Washington State to ask a man in a woman’s bathroom if he thinks he is male or female. Similarly, Obama and gay advocacy groups have slammed a popular compromise North Carolina law, dubbed HB2, because it requires people to undergo medical procedures before they can use a bathroom reserved for the opposite sex.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com