In an alarming display of institutionalised discrimination last week, the South Dakota state senate passed a bill requiring transgender students to use locker rooms and toilets corresponding to the sex they were assigned at birth. In other words, if Republican governor Dennis Daugaard signs the bill into law, trans girls will be forced to use the boys’ bathroom and trans boys the girls’, regardless of the impact on their physical safety or mental health, or of the bigotry it may foster in their cisgender classmates. We teach our children how to treat each other. This bill teaches them that trans people are liars, they are predators, and discriminating against them is a moral obligation.

Similar legislation has been proposed in other states, including Texas, Arizona, Florida and, lately, my home state of Washington, but South Dakota is the first to actually pass such a retrograde, heartbreaking bill. The supposed reasoning is always the same, and would be uproariously ludicrous if it weren’t so dangerous: letting trans people choose which bathroom they feel most comfortable using is not “safe” for the rest of us, anti-trans activists claim. Trans people are trying to sneak into your bathroom to look at your genitals. Cisgender men could pose as trans women in an elaborate long con to sneak into your bathroom to look at your genitals. Everyone wants to look at your genitals! Going to the bathroom is ruined!

Or, as Republican lawmaker David Omdahl put it, we need bills like this to “preserve the innocence of our young people”.

Hey, here are a couple of ideas I have, just off the top of my head. How about intangible, moralistic, faith-centric concepts such as “innocence” not factoring into our public policy? How about people such as Omdahl, who admits he has no grasp of the issues facing trans people and is, in fact, actively hostile toward them (he recently said, in reference to the bathroom bill, “I don’t even understand where our society is these days,” and called transgender children “twisted”), forfeiting their right to enact legislation affecting trans lives? How about we listen to people when they tell us who they are? How about everyone just gets to go to the bathroom?

This conversation has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with transphobia. We already have laws against sexual predation and harassment in public toilets – they’re called laws. And, anyway, as Marcie Bianco reported Mic last year, claims that letting trans people use the toilet is somehow a “safety” issue are founded on literally nothing. “Vincent Villano, the director of communications for the National Center for Transgender Equality, told Mic in an email that there isn’t any firm data to corroborate these lawmakers’ claims, and that NCTE has ‘not heard of a single instance of a transgender person harassing a non-transgender person in a public restroom. Those who claim otherwise have no evidence that this is true and use this notion to prey on the public’s stereotypes and fears about transgender people.’”

Meanwhile, I know plenty of trans people who don’t feel safe using public toilets because they have experienced glares and harassment from cis people who buy into this rhetoric. The fact that fear of trans people begets peril for trans people is not a coincidence. On the Huffington Post last week, Brynn Tannehill argued that anti-trans bathroom bills aren’t just the indiscriminate flailing of frightened bigots – they are part of a coordinated effort by rightwing groups to, effectively, eradicate trans people altogether.

The far-right Christian lobbyist organisation the Family Research Council (which was listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2010) announced a five-point plan last year to, as Tannehill put it, “legislate transgender people out of existence by making the legal, medical and social climate too hostile for anyone to transition in”. Point three in the plan is: “Transgender people should not be legally allowed to use facilities in accordance with their gender identity.”

“Use one bathroom,” Tannehill wrote, envisioning a world in which the FRC’s plan succeeds, “and it’s a felony. Use the other, and you’re likely to be beaten, maybe to death. If you fight back against your attackers, you’ll go to a prison for people of the opposite gender, that guarantees you will continue to be raped, beaten and denied medical care.” This is deliberate, it is systematic, and it is happening.

If you are a trans person, or count trans people among your close friends and family, or follow trans activists on social media, then none of this is new to you. You already know that trans people are not predators – they are human beings with complex lives, they are fighting to live and thrive, they are frightened by bills such as this and their wider implications – and sometimes they have to pee. Unfortunately, thanks in no small part to influential bigots like the South Dakota legislature and the FRC, a lot of cisgender people don’t personally know any transgender people. (Or, at least, they aren’t aware they know any.) Bathroom bills – and even just the conversations that swirl around them – actively encourage trans people to stay in the closet, stanching the kind of humanisation that’s necessary for progress.

I unreservedly support the right of trans people to use whichever toilet their gender identity dictates. It’s just a toilet, and it’s not just a toilet.