Despite extensive studies showing that transgender people aren't trying to check out your junk in public bathrooms, Republican State Rep. Frank Artiles filed a bill that belongs in a handbook on how to discriminate.
The proposal, HB 583, would apply to same-sex facilities like restrooms, fitting rooms and locker rooms, and says people who try to pee or change clothes in the same facility as those of a different sex can be fined.
The kicker? The bill designates "sex" as that which you were assigned at birth. That means even if you're post-op, and have been so for years, you would have to use the facility for members of a gender you don't belong to, which we imagine could get awkward.
It's ostensibly a way to prevent things like sexual assault and voyeurism in these spaces, though there has not been one proven case of such an incident in transgender-inclusive facilities. Despite this, the myth persists on the far right.
According to a recent National Center for Transgender Equality report, people who are transgender have an attempted suicide rate that is more than 25 times that of everyone else. Many have lost a job due to discrimination, 55 percent have been harassed or bullied at school, 51 percent have been low-income, 61 percent have been physically assaulted and 64 percent have been sexually assaulted.
And now we want to make transgender people even more uncomfortable — well, people like Artiles do, anyway.
The bathroom question came up in 2013 when Pinellas County Commissioners were discussing extending the county's Human Rights Ordinance to include transgender individuals, which they passed. Then-County Commissioner Norm Roche, a staunch conservative who still thinks fluoride should be removed from the county water supply, said in public that the bathroom issue was a concern to him. His argument was so embarrassing that many media outlets covering the hearing didn't even include it in their reports.
Artiles's bill states that "Users of single-sex public facilities reasonably expect not to be exposed to individuals of the other sex while using those facilities" while completely missing the point that it's not about body parts, and that to even suggest that is deeply offensive to some. Anyhow, this guy needs to get with the times. A recent poll showed that half of millennials view gender as something that occurs along a spectrum, and many don't think anatomy enters into the equation.
Meanwhile, states like Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont have spent the past decade passing laws that prohibit discrimination in public accommodations. Again, not one incident of assault or anything else that's pervy.
Florida, once again, is headed in the other direction: backwards.
This article appears in Feb 5-11, 2015.