With transgender rights making national headlines for the past several weeks, members of Rochester's transgender community and their supporters are weighing in on the conversation.

Psychologist Emma Forbes-Jones says her private practice focuses on young people who perceive themselves to be outside traditional gender norms.

She says laws that restrict the use of municipal public bathrooms by transgender individuals, like those recently passed in North Carolina, are the result of fear based on the false belief that transgender people are somehow sexually deviant.

"I think the other thing that people aren't aware of, is that there has been bathroom access, certainly in many schools nationally, and certain states nationally, where transgender people have had access to the bathrooms that they identify with, and none of this scary stuff is happening. I think we're probably all been in the bathroom and peed next to a transgender person and not even known it."

24-year old Neka Zimmerman of Rochester is a transgender man. He thinks the increased awareness of the transgender community in the past few years is resulting in a kind of backlash.

"There is no recorded evidence to support these laws and people just ignore that. Most of the perpetrators of assault are white, cisgender men, so somebody who wants to be a predator isn't going to be stopped by a law like that," he said. "Basically, these bills are targeting trans women, and especially trans women of color, and trans women who don't, and may never, look like a cisgender women. Those are the people they're targeting. And that's sad, because those are the people who are the most attacked, and murdered, and the most suppressed in our culture already."

Zimmerman and Forbes-Jones say it is transgender individuals who are more likely to be frightened and intimidated when they use public restrooms.