How Right-Wing Transgender Fearmongering Hurts People

Powerful essay by Gabrielle Bellot about being transgender and using the bathroom in the mall. Read the whole thing. But let me point out the first paragraph.

For me, it is already a new year of old fears. 2016 has scarcely begun, and there is already yet another bill, from the end of December, being proposed to criminalize transgender persons—like myself—for using the restroom that corresponds with our gender identity. Republicans have largely lost the cultural debate on same-sex marriage, and so the question of who can use what restroom has become the new site of fear-mongering rhetoric—a shift made chillingly clear after the failure of Houston’s Equal Rights Ordinance. And this new law, which has been proposed by Sen. Jim Tomes in the Indiana state legislature, is as draconian as they get. Tomes’ bill would put us in jail for up to a year and charge us as much as $5,000 for using any restroom that does not correspond with the sex we were assigned at birth—regardless of whether our gender is recognized by the law, regardless of whatever gender confirmation procedures we may have had. It is a bill that binds us to our bodies from birth, a bill unwilling to imagine that transgender people truly exist, a bill born out of a fundamental lack of understanding of how demeaning—and dangerous—it is for a transgender woman—like me—not to use the women’s restroom. It is a bill that fails to recognize the fears that follow so many of us into the restroom already.

A year in prison and a $5000 fine for using the restroom. I am nearly speechless. I imagine such a bill will have real support in the Indiana legislature as well.