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Notes -
For the purpose of this post I will use the following terms in the following ways:
Woman = Biological woman. Man = Biological man
Well it seems like we are on episode >9000 "transgender bathrooms".
There is currently a man named Sarah McBride who has been elected to congress. This person (a man), who wishes to be seen as female, has caused another member of congress named Nancy Mace (a woman) to start whining and complaining on various social media videos and news interviews about her (Nancy's) concern that Sarah will try to use the female bathrooms, lockerrooms, etc. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has said that the policy of the House is that women's restrooms/lockerrooms are for women, and men's restrooms lockerrooms are for men. There are a number of non-gender specific bathrooms around the house grounds that are open to anybody who doesn't want to abide by this.
Here is what I actually think a reasonable framing of this question is: "can men with a cross dressing fetish involve non-consenting women in their crossdress-play?" In a reasonable society I think the answer to this question should be: no, obviously.
Everybody seems intent on being dishonest towards each other when talking about this, so here is what I think is a reasonable answer to "why does anybody care? Just let everybody pee in peace!".
Bathrooms are extremely vulnerable places; they usually have one exit, you are often in there alone, and you are often doing something which makes you physically vulnerable (using the toilet). It seems completely reasonable for women to want to keep men out of these spaces.
To put some additonal context here: I think that the tide is turning pretty sharply on gender ideology within the democratic party (at least for anybody mildly near the center). I've seen several prominent-ish democrat spokespeople openly blame transgender people for the 2024 presidential loss. You also have the UK making it illegal to trans your kids, as well as a recent, prominent NYT article that was critical of transing your children (unfortunately the google index seems very intent on not showing me links to the article, but has plenty of links to people talking about it.
the McBride situation aside, these bills are nothing more than performative measures meant to publicly express disgust with the idea of trans people in general. They do nothing to actually keep trans people out of whatever bathroom you're trying to keep them out of, excepting whatever mild deterrent effect comes out of making something technically illegal. What would it take to successfully prosecute such a case? Suppose a woman sees someone she suspects is a trans-woman in a public restroom. What can she do? The first option would be to alert the staff, who may or may not care to do anything about it. Eventually, the police will have to be called by someone. Assuming the police arrive and the suspected man is still on the premises, to what extent does a person have to look masculine enough for it to constitute probable cause for arrest?
You might argue that the officer could ask them to produce ID, and if the sex was listed as male this would give them probable cause (states with bathroom bills generally require the sex on ID to match that of the birth certificate). While the cop may have a valid argument that he had the requisite reasonable suspicion necessary to require identification, identification in this context is limited to providing a correct name, address, and date of birth; producing a government-issued ID is not required. At this point, there's no probable cause to arrest. There's no probable cause to get a warrant for a medical examination.
The only option at this point would be to run the name and dob through various government databases to determine if the sex listed in the records matches that of the bathroom they were in. But nobody is doing this. And even if they did, it isn't necessarily dispositive, since the person could have been born in a state that allows amended birth certificates. Given that police can't just look at people's genitals based on a complaint alone, actually enforcing such a law would be burdensome to the point that it's unenforceable absent some extraordinary circumstance. Even the state officials supporting these bills, when asked about enforcement, admit that they have no clue.
If the trans community were smart, they'd stop complaining about these bills and shrug them off. Red state legislators know that the bills are unenforceable, but they pass them anyway. I think their motivations are partially sincere, but partially cynical—trans issues are an electoral loser, and passing these laws induces their opponents to take unpopular positions. If the trans community simply announced that they had no intention of complying because the state couldn't do anything about it anyway, it would put increasing pressure on the government to actually attempt enforcement. there would likely be few prosecutions, if only due to a dearth of complaints, but one can imagine a situation where the only arrests of note are of normal women who are mistakenly believed to be trans. This would result in a PR disaster that doesn't require any Democrats to take unpopular positions.
Agreed, but that's kind of the problem here - the trans community has not been smart, and instead doubles down defending bad actors (or denying they exist).
Had trans women limited themselves to peeing in peace, you might have had an occasional Karen freaking out seeing someone who looks like a man in the women's restroom, but most people wouldn't have cared. My recollection is that this wasn't an issue for many years. Trans women have been around since long before the current iteration of the culture wars. Why do you suppose suddenly they are a major front in the culture war? I don't think it's because conservatives suddenly discovered they exist.
Really? Before the trans debate, do you think men could just occasionally walk into the women's bathroom and pee in peace while only being freaked out at by rare Karens?
I think people with androgynous physiognomy wearing female-coded clothing (such as Sarah McBride, or indeed Nancy Mace as Twitter trolls took considerable delight in pointing out) used to be able to walk into a woman's bathroom and pee in peace. Most of these people were and are cis women, and they shouldn't have to get their ladyparts out to prove eligibility before they go into a stall.
Bad actors using the wrong bathroom for nefarious reasons is a problem we have, empirically, managed to solve without bathroom laws for about a century. Assaults by strangers in public bathrooms are not exactly a common form of sex crime. It isn't worth creating a new problem of Karens harassing manjawed cis women in order to fix it.
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