We don’t want to go there.
Really, after our Religious Freedom Act Restoration embarrassment from this year, now Republican state Sen. Jim Tomes (R-Wadesville) wants to drag the state into the transgender restroom debate.
He plans to sponsor a bill that would criminalize usage of a women’s restroom by someone born male or a men’s restroom by someone born a female, with a punishment of up to a year in jail and as much as $5,000 in fines.
There is so much wrong with this proposal.
First of all, Tomes is buying to a fear-inspiring campaign that suggests transgender people are sex-offenders looking to prey on people’s children while using public restrooms. Politician Mike Huckabee said earlier this year that’s what he would have done, if he’d known he could just claim to feel like a woman so he could get his jollies in the ladies’ room. (Who’s the predator again?) The truth is, the largest school districts that have adopted policies allowing students to use the restroom where they feel most comfortable have reported no incidents of inappropriate behavior.
Secondly, how do we plan to authenticate this? Are stores and public parks supposed to station someone at the entrance to each restroom where people will be required to present their birth certificates to prove their gender? Or perhaps to avoid this mess, we’ll have to stop providing restroom facilities. Even better, maybe we can just make all public restrooms gender neutral.
Third, what does Tomes know about using a women’s restroom? Ahem, Mr. Tomes, it is very rare for ladies’ rooms to not have stalls with doors. Women’s facilities provide privacy – which means no one will even know what type of genitalia the person in the next stall has. We find it doubtful a woman in a men’s room would stand at the “trough” so to speak. Not to mention those crowded college bars where the line for the men’s room is always so much shorter than the line for the women’s.
Lastly, this is a civil rights issue. We’re already a state divided over adding protections for LGBT people to our civil rights laws. Why would we want to wade into this muddy water? We expect our lawmakers to listen to the people when we say we want to be a place where the best and brightest aren’t afraid to take up residence. That means protecting and welcoming everyone.