The gay marriage movement succeeded by convincing people that gay men and women just wanted to be normal. Having lost that battle, the opponents of LGBT rights have made a partial comeback by turning their focus to transgender discrimination, bringing old fears of the abnormal and the deviant back to the forefront.

On Tuesday, voters in Houston overwhelmingly rejected a broad anti-discrimination ordinance by a whopping 62 percent to 38 percent margin after its opponents shamelessly pitched the measure as a vehicle for sexual predators to victimize young women. “Any man at any time could enter a woman’s bathroom simply by claiming to be a woman that day. … Even registered sex offenders could follow women or young girls into the bathroom,” warned one TV ad depicting a faceless man following a young uniformed school girl in into a bathroom stall and shutting the door. “It would allowed troubled men to enter women’s public bathrooms, showers, and locker rooms,” former Houston Astros baseball star Lance Berkman said in a radio ad against the ordinance.

That message preyed on all kinds of base fears and stereotypes—that trans people are disturbed freaks; that the world is crawling with sexual predators; and that women and girls must be shielded from men’s private parts. The reality is that 17 states and more than 200 towns and cities broadly prohibit discrimination based on gender identity, including at public bathrooms. And there's no evidence that these laws are enabling sexual assault by sexual predators pretending to be transgendered. Violence against transgender people, on the other hand, is still distressingly real and on the rise.

The Houston officials supporting the law—including Annise Parker, the city’s openly lesbian mayor—never intended the fight to be reduced to bathrooms in the first place. The Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) was intended to protect an extremely broad range of groups, barring discrimination against individuals based on “sex, race, color, ethnicity, national origin, age, familial status, marital status, military status, religion, disability, sexual orientation, genetic information, gender identity, or pregnancy.” In the brief period last year when HERO was in effect—before the Texas Supreme Court intervened and forced the measure to be put on the ballot—five of the complaints filed under the ordinance were about racial discrimination, five were about LGBT discrimination, and one was about gender discrimination.

Supporters of HERO tried to unite behind the broad message of anti-discrimination, garnering the support of everyone from Hillary Clinton to actress Sally Field. “In the most diverse city in America, we believe that everyone should be treated fairly and equally under the law, no matter who they are,” proclaimed Houston Unites, a local coalition that supported ordinance. The website featured minority business owners, disability rights advocates, and faith leaders who supported the anti-discrimination measure. But that generic message of “diversity” ultimately didn’t seem to be enough to cut through the opposition’s message about sexual deviants on the prowl.