Commentary

The straight poop about trans women and washrooms

The straight poop about trans women and washrooms

Trigger warning: Effectively dismantling the trans bathroom predator myth means walking straight through the conflation between trans women and sexual predators, and into territory that makes people afraid that they might say things that could be perceived as insensitive comments about sexual assault that weren’t intended. 


Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard about the growing panic in mostly southern American states (though not limited to that region – even Canada has fallen sway at times) over the prospect that trans women might use public restrooms.  The LGBT movement, if you buy into the rhetoric, has unleashed its weapons of “lass destruction.”

At the end of the potty panic train wreck, it becomes incontrovertible that what motivates the fearmongers is pure, deliberate anti-LGBT discrimination, and nothing more.

The state of North Carolina even called a whirlwind emergency session to pass a bill which (along with several anti-LGBT and anti-worker goodies slipped in) bans trans people from using the washroom corresponding to the gender that they identify with.  The reasoning, apparently, is that although trans women have already been using public facilities for decades, extending human rights protections to them will unleash a horrific wave of sexual assaults, molestation and peeping tom-ery targeting women and girls in gendered spaces. 

Several other states have followed suit (sometimes trying to outdo each other with special “religious freedom” exemptions to human rights laws, and other twists).  The panic escalated when Target announced a company-wide policy to accommodate trans people, and far right groups responded with a massive campaign of boycotts and protests. The fearmongering had also been occurring on a smaller scale with public schools, prompting the U.S. Department of Education to respond by affirming the rights of trans youth to be accommodated, and reminding states that if they refuse to comply, they’re actually in breach of contract, and could have federal funding withheld.

With Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government’s introduction of a federal bill to include trans people in human rights legislation, it’s worth remembering that bathroom panic helped kill the bill’s previous incarnation in the senate, also surfaced during several previous attempts to pass federal protections, and has been used to try to shoot down school policies that are designed to accommodate trans students.

If any other identifiable group were conflated with rapists and pedophiles, there would be immense outrage — not treatment as though there were “two sides” of the issue, of which the fearmongers deserve equal or greater amplification. This exceptionalism is especially stunning when one considers that no other group in North America since segregation has been targeted with legislation that specifically bans them from public restrooms — not even the one group which actually does have a statistically demonstrable history of predation: convicted sex offenders.

Chew on that for a minute.

Statistically, the potty panic trope is not borne out. In jurisdictions which have human rights protections for trans people, law enforcement officials report that no such pattern of predation has materialized. Of course, if people keep fearmongering long and loudly enough, there’s always the possibility that they could inspire somebody. 

Maybe that’s the intent.

The Grand Deflection

Because there’s no demonstrable pattern of predation, when challenged or embarrassed, proponents of trans panic often retreat to claiming that their worries are not about trans women, but rather actual predators who might pretend to be trans to gain access to a woman’s space. Not all washroom panic fearmongers feel a need to retreat like this, of course, but most see it as a strategic sleight-of-hand so that they can say they’re not being discriminatory; others will sometimes try this before subsequently going on a transphobic rant that demonstrates otherwise.

The washroom imposter line of reasoning doesn’t make logical sense. Gender expression is so fraught with stereotypes and assumptions that male-assigned people – both trans and cis (not transgender) – tend to make the mistake of clumsily overcompensating in their gender presentation. As a consequence, early female-identified transitioners and cis people who crossdress publicly for the first time tend to draw a lot of attention to themselves.

Why would a predator take the risk of drawing that much attention, suspicion and anger to themselves for an extended period of time, in order to access a washroom that they could slip into when no one is looking?

The majority of the examples that proponents of trans panic raise are of cis males who entered washrooms without any attempt to claim/appear to be transgender (and were certainly not shielded in any way by trans human rights legislation, because, contrary to the claims, there’s no way that it could do that).

In fact, it’s exactly those gender stereotypes that trans fearmongers play upon and delight in.  “Imagine men going into women’s bathrooms and locker rooms,” they repeat endlessly… because once the public becomes familiar with who trans women actually are, the tactic begins to fall apart. 

It’s no coincidence that the panic purveyors invite audiences to think about “their four-year-old daughter [having] to go into a bathroom with a guy with a beard in a dress,” or illustrate articles with popular stock photos of bearded figures applying makeup. Indeed, it’s not unusual to find photos of stereotypical drag queens on stock photo sites before encountering an image of someone who is genuinely trans.

To be fair, there are trans people who choose to express themselves in ways that challenge gender stereotypes, and that’s actually a positive thing; there’s a lot about those stereotypes that deserve to be challenged.  But the fixation on the mostly-fictional bearded trans woman is deliberately exploitative.  This is why the issue often devolves into one of policing people’s gender expression:

“I’m at peace with transgenders with convincing appearances using the restroom that won’t make others uncomfortable. I think this is where I may part ways a bit with a small handful of my rock-ribbed conservative friends. If you actually look like and dress like a woman, then go to the women’s restroom. (Have the decency, however, to sit down.) Look like a man? Go to the men’s restroom. Nobody is going to police the genitals or the chromosomes. At least I hope not…”

Of course, not all trans people are fortunate enough to have the physical stature, bone structure, framing and physical embellishments to meet the cartoonish Barbie-and-Ken social expectations of gender. But the people who pay that price are just as easily cisgender women due to subjective assessments based on gender stereotypes.  

Policing of gender expression aside, the trans predator panic strategy is a co-option of highly traumatizing experiences of sexual assault.  It provides a shield to criticism, so that any accusations of bigotry or mocking of the conflation between trans women and predators (“weapons of lass destruction”) can be twisted to look like insensitivity toward the issue of sexual assault instead.  It raises a quandary in which taking the predator myth head-on puts a person in a position where they can look like they’re defending sex offenders. 

In that sense, it’s a highly cynical strategy, exploiting the experiences of abuse survivors to combat a virtually non-existent problem — meanwhile doing deliberate harm to entire groups of people and creating a highly toxic social environment around them.  It does so by conclusion-jumping through the twin assumptions that all trans women are “really men” (usually to the point of simply phrasing everything as “men in women’s bathrooms,” erasing the existence of trans women entirely), and that all men are inherently predators.  It engages legislators’ favourite impulse and an effective fundraising gimmick – “protecting women.”

This is especially egregious when one remembers that the same paternal, socially-conservative legislators and media figures still seem to have a difficult time understanding what consent and spousal rape are, retain a penchant for doubting the legitimacy of sexual assault, have a habit of victim blaming, and resist addressing actual crises like the phenomenon of missing and murdered Indigenous women

Anti-LGBT legislators don’t exactly have the best record on bathroom behaviour, either.  In that sense, it should not be surprising that one of the sponsors of North Carolina’s bathroom bill is under investigation for harassment.

That’s why legislators are not worried about whether federal funds to states like North Carolina might be withheld in a standoff over bathrooms or whether that could negatively affect things like domestic violence programs.

But here’s the worst part. In the American Family Association’s petition against Target for instituting chain-wide trans-inclusive policies, the group emphasized: “Target’s policy is exactly how sexual predators get access to their victims.” 

Except that no, it isn’t. Not by a longshot. Most rapists are known to the victim to some degree, and rarely is it someone hiding in the bushes or a bathroom.  

This is one of the most infuriating things about the trans predator trope: it allows social conservatives to completely ignore the circumstances of sexual assault, while pretending to themselves that they are champions for women, by rerouting the rage against rape into toxic energy against their targets du jour.

Even convicted sex offenders aren’t banned wholesale from public washrooms. If people are seriously going to conflate trans women with rapists and pedophiles, it’s worth noting why even the latter are not denied blanket human rights protections – let alone subject to a ban from public washrooms.

The legal system has horrible gaps, but it does recognize that pre-emptive actions need to be based on an individual’s known history. A judge can place release conditions on an individual parolee for a period of time, based on their criminal record and an assessed likelihood that they might re-offend, for example. 

Generalizing even about a class like “convicted sex offender” fails to recognize how terms come to be defined quite broadly — in this case, because of abuse of legal application (usually disproportionately applied to minority persons), it can include teens who’ve sexted photos of themselves or each other, teens dating within their peer group when one of them turns the age of majority, or being a sex worker. Legislating on a blanket basis, without the context of individuals’ histories, can have wildly unintended and unjust consequences.

Put simply, you can’t legislate against entire classes of people or exclude them from human rights protections based on something that you suspect one of them might do.  No matter who that class is thought to be. Or worse, legislating against or excluding based on what an imposter pretending to be one of them could be imagined to do.

Especially when accommodation doesn’t actually provide a shield of any kind from prosecution and/or consequences for illegal and/or inappropriate behaviour — the other great conclusion-jump that trans predator proponents like to imply.

And that is why bathroom bans — and denial of human rights inclusion — are doomed to fail.

In the meantime, the rhetoric continues to escalate.  The Target boycott has inspired a number of conservatives to take actions against the store chain that haven’t exactly won them a lot of support (one was initially reported as an active shooter incident). “Are you gonna let the devil rape your children?” one unidentified woman screamed, according to video of the bizarre demonstration. Other pundits have declared that the boycott won’t be enough until Target is completely destroyed.

Restroom harassment and violence have increased.  A North Carolina school system allowed students to carry pepper spray, and one school board member suggested it would be a good form of protection against trans kids in bathrooms. 

After the U.S. Department of Education issued guidelines calling on trans students to be accommodated in schools, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins urged Congress to impeach President Obama; the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer, meanwhile, called on Texas to secede from the United States.  And Franklin Graham asks, “What are you willing to take a bullet for…?”  

In Canada, the sole clinic that performs genital reconstruction surgeries was the target of an arson attack which is being treated as a hate crime.

But something else is surfacing at times in the debate, as well — cognitively dissonant moments in which people like Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright can say this…

“You go into the bathroom with my wife, I’m gonna make the news… If you’re a guy … I’m gonna whip your tail if you go in there with my wife while she’s trying to use the bathroom…”

… And this in nearly the same breath:

“I don’t want to be in a restroom with someone dressed as a lady. I just don’t think that’s a great idea. Once you get that door open, it will never stop.”

Trans women, it seems, shouldn’t be able to use washrooms at all. It was a sentiment that was recently echoed by failed Republican Presidential candidate Ted Cruz while on the campaign trail who told reporters that transgender women should only use the restroom at home.

“You don’t have a right to intrude upon the rights of others because whether or not a man believes he’s a woman, there are a lot of women who would like to be able to use a public restroom in peace without having a man there,” Cruz said. “And when there are children involved, you don’t have a right to impose your lifestyle on others…”

If the objective was only to force trans women into men’s washrooms, social conservatives wouldn’t be quick to similarly exploit a rape of a trans woman in a men’s room as though it proves their point.

The solution to this quandary?  To people like Linda Harvey, it’s simple: trans people should just stop being trans  — and then no one should have to worry about any obligation to co-exist with them:

We should not be agreeing to any notion of “equality” for the advocacy of behaviors no one needs to engage in. There can be no polite acceptance of danger, not if we truly love our children.

“The gender offenders and homosexuals do not deserve equal time, or an equal voice, to magnify this horror. They deserve to be shown the door, followed by referral to sensible counselors, not accommodated with “non-discrimination” policies, nor, God help us, with the gift of pretend “marriage.” How has Christian America been tricked into affirming these behaviors?

“The only valid message is this: Leave these sins behind. You are better than this. We are all better than this, and this perversion will no longer be given a platform among our precious children…”

And that gets straight to the heart of the matter: washroom fear mongering is not about any actual danger presented by trans women to other women, but rather the danger that society might begin to accept trans/LGBT people and get used to existing in the same spaces with them.

In the end, washroom panic is designed to shut trans and gender diverse people out of public life, and make them stay at home.

Because that’s where the closets are.

Don't forget to share:

Support vital LGBTQ+ journalism

Reader contributions help keep LGBTQ Nation free, so that queer people get the news they need, with stories that mainstream media often leaves out. Can you contribute today?

Cancel anytime · Proudly LGBTQ+ owned and operated

Russian crime gangs find gay men easy targets

Previous article

Neoliberalism’s siren song of freedom

Next article