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Criminalizing trans people

EG

So, a Florida state representative, Frank Artiles, has introduced a bill to criminalize somebody using any bathroom or changing room or locker room but the one corresponding to that person’s assigned sex at birth. It doesn’t matter how they’re presenting, how they identify, whether they’ve had surgery, whether they’ve had their sex legally changed (as far as I’m concerned, only one of these should matter, and it’s the second one)–you follow your birth certificate or you are subject to a year in jail and a $1000 fine.

Such a bill would do nothing but turn trans people into criminals simply for living their lives like we all do, and, it is specified, leave them and facility owners vulnerable to civil suits that could be brought by anybody “lawfully” in a single-sex facility.

And what’s the reason? Well, to keep the poor little cis ladies safe, of course: to reduce “the potential for crimes against individuals using those facilities, including, but not limited to, assault, battery, molestation, rape, voyeurism, and exhibitionism,” or, in Artiles’s example, to prevent cis men from going into women’s bathrooms to be voyeurs. Artiles admits that this is not actually a thing that has happened, but you never know. I’m not sure what Artiles’s record is on violence against cis women in general, but he’s clearly willing to, at best, accept trans people as collateral damage in his effort to combat an imaginary scourge. Speaking as a cis woman who worries quite a bit I have to say that this particular danger has never leapt to my mind as a priority to worry about.

If one were really worried about cis men harassing cis women in bathrooms, I just want to point out, one could draft really pointed anti-harassment legislation that would cover voyeurism.

There’s also the issue of how anybody would enforce this bit of legislation. Would people be asked to drop their pants for inspection at the door of every restroom? Carry around birth certificates? Would cis mothers of small cis boys be forced to send their kids into the men’s room alone lest they taint the sanctity of the ladies’ room with a tiny penis? I can’t help but think that these issues alone will make sure the bill won’t pass and that Artiles is showboating, but that does not lessen the transphobia he is advocating and using, and he ought to be ashamed of himself.

5 thoughts on Criminalizing trans people

  1. I have nothing substantive to add to what you wrote, except to point out that relying on birth certificates still wouldn’t solve this guy’s “problem” by keeping trans women entirely out of women’s bathrooms: by statute, Florida law allows trans people to change the sex designations on their birth certificates (albeit only after genital surgery). So he’d have to get rid of that law too. In other words, it won’t be enough for the Bathroom Police to demand “show me your papers” to everyone entering the women’s room in addition to checking to make sure that they all have vaginas. Some trans women might still escape the net!

    Of course, in the unintended consequences category, his bill would force all the burly, balding, bearish trans men around to use the ladies’ room! Somehow, people like him never consider that aspect of their bigotry. The fear-mongering (when people aren’t engaged in ridicule) is always about trans women, all the time. Relentlessly.

  2. Also: perhaps needless to say, “assault, battery, molestation, rape, voyeurism, and exhibitionism” are already against the law, in Florida like everywhere else, regardless of any anti-discrimination laws. I’m sure a cis man bent on committing any such crimes in a women’s public bathroom will be deterred (not) by the prospect of a $1000 fine and a year in jail.

    There’s about the same likelihood of that (none) as there is that a cis man bent on such crimes — who used to be prevented from entering women’s bathrooms by a magic force field — will be encouraged to commit them by anti-discrimination laws, and proceed to put on a dress thinking that he’ll accordingly be exempt from the consequences of those crimes.

  3. I’m super anxious about going into the women’s room. The only times I’ve ever done that have been in already trans-friendly spaces. So instead I just use the men’s room, hoping that no one in there identifies me as trans.

    I’m really tired of using the wrong restroom because I’m afraid of a cis woman assaulting me. I hate being in the men’s room, where there’s a high risk of facing creepy guys who often seem to perceive me as trans. And I’m sick of bills like these which force us into situations that inevitably endanger our lives.

    Transmisogyny is so deeply entrenched in society that something as mundane as going to the restroom is a potentially life-threatening situation for a trans woman. Far from being evidence of the “pettiness” of our complains about the world – according to TERFs – it only serves to prove that transmisogyny invades all aspects of our lives. The fact that there are people trying to pass laws that enforce already highly detrimental social norms is scary but unsurprising.

  4. By an ironic coincidence, I was pointed to an article about a Florida city that wants to be seen as trans friendly, which says, among other things:

    the Southern Comfort Transgender Conference decid[ed] to bring its 2015, 2016 and 2017 conference to Greater Fort Lauderdale

    (h/t to Susans.org)

    If this passes, I suspect that’s going to kill Fort Lauderdale’s bid to be seen as “trans friendly”.

  5. Just stumbled across this reading through some equality issues – Would the people involved not use their head and let men use the men’s bathroom and ladies use the ladies? I think this is quite silly.

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