Bathroom wars rage with mixed results

By Rob Howard
Associate Editor

The right-wing campaign to discriminate against transgender people, particularly transgender students, continues across the country with mixed results.

This week, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported that House Bill 781, which would prevent transgender students from using bathrooms and locker rooms according to their gender identity, was defeated in a House of Delegates subcommittee on an 8-13 vote.

According to the Times-Dispatch, “The bill, House Bill 781, gained wide attention this year after critics suggested it would require school employees to check students’ genitals. The bill’s patron, Del. Mark L. Cole, R-Spotsylvania, dismissed those suggestions as false, saying the proposal was meant to protect students’ privacy and ward off lawsuits against local school boards.

“’I think this will help protect schools from being sued over the issue of allowing someone of the opposite sex to use the facilities that are designated one way or the other,’ Cole said during a hearing before the House General Laws Committee. ‘This is not about discrimination, this is about privacy.’

“The bill would have required local school boards to adopt policies requiring that all restrooms and locker rooms accessible by multiple students be ‘designated for and only used by students based on their biological sex.’ The legislation would have applied to all public buildings owned by the state. Violations would carry a $50 civil penalty.”

There are two bills proposed in the Oklahoma legislature dealing with transgender use of bathrooms. SB 1323, by Sen. Josh Brecheen, threatens school districts who dare to have policies allowing transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms according to their gender identity with the loss of all state school aid to the district.

SB 1014, by Sen. Joseph Silk, would make it illegal for anyone to use a “gender-specific restroom when that person’s biological gender is contrary to that of the gender-specific restroom.” Senators Silk and Brecheen are part of a small group of legislators who have authored over two dozen anti-LGBTQ bill in the current session of the state’s lawmaking body.

Even the language used by lawmakers proposing anti-transgender rights and anti-LGBTQ in general, is the same. Del. Cole said, “This is not about discrimination…” in Virginia. Sen. Silk said exactly the same thing in response to questions about one of his anti-LGBTQ bills in a committee meeting this week. (The bill was killed in a 5-4 committee vote.)

Further North, the South Dakota Senate is set to debate a bill “that would require students to use bathrooms and locker rooms that match their biological sex at birth,” according to the Associated Press. “Some legislators this session are also attempting again to void a high school activities association policy allowing transgender student athletes to request playing on the team of their choice,” the AP report on action in the state’s legislature said.

Almost uniformly across the country, supporters of these discriminatory anti-transgender bills say they just want to protect the privacy of students. Some say it’s a matter of safety, that men will say they are a transgender woman to gain access to women’s restrooms, and commit sexual assault. That argument was used in the defeat of the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance in Texas.

Better news came from Washington State. According to the AP, “Urged by lawmakers who said the Legislature must protect civil rights, Washington's full Senate on Wednesday narrowly rejected a bill that would have repealed a new state rule allowing transgender people to use bathrooms and locker rooms in public buildings consistent with their gender identity.

“Three Republicans, the chamber's majority party, joined many Democrats in rejecting the measure on a 25-24 vote.

“Sen. Doug Ericksen, a Republican from Ferndale who sponsored the measure, argued during debate on the floor that the rule, created by the state's Human Rights Commission, leaves business owners unable to stop men posing as transgender people to sexually assault women in locker rooms.”

The language in these “Bathroom War” bills is so similar that many observers think “bill mills” like The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) may be the source of much of the anti-LGBTQ legislative proposals across the country.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, “when asked whether ALEC was involved in supporting the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, ALEC spokesperson Bill Meierling responds: ‘We do not work on firearms, marriage equality, immigration, any of those things people frequently say are ours.’” 

"’While ALEC may not be directly distributing the template legislation we’re seeing pop up all over the country, they are the primary conservative legislative exchange and are courting legislators at their educational seminars and conferences,’ [North Carolina state Rep. Graig R. Meyer said] in a phone interview,” according to the Monitor.

It is not always easy to find out which bills are created by ALEC or other bill mills.

The action in Virginia and Washington is encouraging, but these anti-transgender and anti-LGBTQ bills continue to pop up in legislatures across the land. Activists are watching this action carefully, and attempting to defeat it. But the closeness of the Senate vote in Washington shows that we all must be vigilant.

The Gayly – February 11, 2016 @ 12:30 p.m.