A community of Christian activists in Houston probably never expected their campaign to get as far as it has when they first declared "no men in women's restrooms" almost two years ago.

The phrase was first uttered in objection to local legal protections for transgender people.

Now the slogan is a national talking point, and it has landed transgender issues in the nightly headlines like never before.

The conversation has gotten a big bloc of America fired up against transgenderism; the debate is essentially whether or not trans people lay rightful claim to their gender identity. Many voices on the right argue that all people are innately beholden to their gender as physically apparent at birth, so no policy should accommodate those who feel differently.

It's basically a debate over whether transgender people legitimately exist.

Those sentiments have long simmered in the Christian right, which advocates traditional families are comprised of heterosexual men and women. Yet the profile of those objections have only achieved national prominence after elected officials in North Carolina, Texas and beyond advocated so-called "bathroom bills," which set a hard line on who can use which loo.

So what helped propel this issue to the political forefront? Blame activists in Houston who set this debate in the bathroom, which has resonated with the rest of the country.

The bathroom is where we all are caught with our pants down. As Australian psychology professor Nick Haslam wrote last week in the Washington Post, bathrooms are "hotbeds of anxiety already. They're places where private behavior becomes shared, where taboo subjects cannot be escaped, where intimate body parts are exposed."

It's an emotion seen on the face of a dog taking a poop in the grass, with its ears pulled back, its head sunk low and its wide nervous eyes scanning the horizon for signs of a threat in that most inconvenient moment. It's the ultimate vulnerability.

If people are already on edge, then what better venue to suggest that the transgender person might just be a predator in disguise?

After all, bathrooms, where we go to do our business, are where the dirty things are hidden in plain sight.

When the transgender issue was pitched in the bathroom, it went from an oddity to a threat for many Americans.

It started in May 2014, according to Houston Chronicle reports, before Laverne Cox made the cover of TIME or Bruce Jenner came out as Caitlyn on "20/20". Houston Mayor Annise Parker had quietly promoted a 35-page proposed nondiscrimination ordinance, and conservative Christian activists honed in on a paragraph specifying that no business open to the public could deny a transgender person entry to the restroom consistent with his or her gender identity.

Protesters dubbed the ordinance "Parker's Sexual Predator Protection Act," objecting that male perverts could use a disguise to obtain legal entry to women's restrooms. The paragraph was struck from the text, though Parker maintained that the ordinance was functionally unchanged: it outlawed discrimination based on gender identity.

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City council passed the ordinance and activists started a recall petition. Eventually a judge ruled it be put to public vote. The bathroom issue never faded. In fact, it grew louder.

In August 2015, a group opposed to the ordinance took their message to TV with an ad that depicted an adult man slipping into a little girl's bathroom stall. Statewide voices weighed in, including lieutenant governor and former radio talk show host Dan Patrick.

At least a dozen other states had passed nondiscrimination legislation similar to Houston's proposal, and none reported instances of sexual assault by men disguised as women in bathrooms.

Still, the opposition argued it could happen. So the public debate focused almost entirely on the merits of the claim that predators could infiltrate the ladies' room, and not on the issues related to transgender people who exist across the world, even in the most right-wing countries like Uganda.

Instead, the opposition conversation characterized transgender people as "troubled men" and women, in the words of activist Jared Woodfill, dismissing the gravity of their condition. Most transgender people wouldn't contest that they suffer a disorder; it's called gender dysphoria, or self-identification with a gender other than what is physically apparent. Suffering manifests as confusion, perceptions of insanity, subjugation to bullying and a constant need to act in a manner that feels unnatural.

As a remedy, modern medicine prescribes hormone treatment or even surgery to change a patient's body to match their behavior.

The conservative movement characterizes the emergence of transgender issues as a symptom of America's degrading cultural values. But trans people who have lived through the changing times point to another key factor: the internet.

In ages past, transgender people would take their secret to the grave, unaware that others suffered as they did. With the advent of the internet, people could anonymously send pings and get responses from others like them. Communities formed where people could express themselves without fear of judgment.

Thus we got openly transgender people. They weathered harassment in the U.S., but they never claimed the national spotlight until people started wondering which bathrooms they use.

The Houston ordinance failed in November—a shocking upset that made national news, and brought the attention to the issue in other states, where lawmakers at once realized they had to stop male infiltration of women's restrooms as well. According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, 21 states proposed 32 bills to address transgender restroom access in 2016.

The conversation hit a fever pitch earlier this year when North Carolina passed a bill that prohibited communities from setting their own non-discrimination rules, singling out public restrooms. That has prompted a backlash from companies, entertainers and others who have made North Carolina a pariah state.

Then the Obama Administration weighed in with an order for public school districts nationwide to allow transgender students to use the bathroom that they see fit.

The next day, Sen. Ted Cruz made his first post-presidential bid appearance in Texas and told a crowd at the state's GOP convention that the president had demanded "that every public school now allow grown men and boys into little girls' bathrooms."

As Haslam in the Washington Post pointed out, this is far from the first bathroom drama the nation has faced.

"Bathroom shame ran so high in the 1950s that CBS refused to air the pilot for 'Leave It to Beaver' until the show was scrubbed of a shot of a closed toilet bowl," he wrote.

In the next decade, white women voiced serious concerns over the threats of racial desegregation in bathrooms.

Looking back on what started here, it's clear Houston's anti-HERO activists were savvy to set the conversation in such a place so full of primal anxiety. Over time, it may sink into the long history of uncomfortable developments in American bathroom policy.

But before that happens, this fear of public restrooms may spark a debate that further inflame an already bizarrely torrid election season.