It seems that whenever a civil rights movement has fought in the United States, the battles have included public restrooms. From the segregated restrooms of the Jim Crow south, to the “unisex bathroom” arguments used in the fight against the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), to even the repeal legislation for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT), the public restroom has been used as an essential feature for fighting back against civil rights.
When it comes to transgender people and the issues of antidiscrimination protections for employment and housing, as well as the issue of antidiscrimination protections with regards to public accommodation, the LGBT community has ceded the ground on social conservatives’ and the religious right’s arguments of “men in dresses” using women’s public restrooms – their argument that has been shortened to the “bathroom bill.”
We, as a broad community, have given up trying to battle the “bathroom bill” argument.
We in the LGBT community ceded the battle space on bathrooms. We didn’t lose the “bathroom bill” argument; we never fought the argument like it needs to be fought.
The key points in battling the “bathroom bill” argument by social conservatives and those on the religious right, are these:
• The “bathroom bill” argument is an argument that assumes transgender women are really men, and that men are predators in women’s restrooms and locker rooms.
• “Fill-in the blank social conservative/religious right organization” has not presented even one case of a transgender woman – someone they identify as a “man in a dress” – engaging in predatory behavior in a public restroom.
• For the “fill-in the blank” “bathroom bill” argument to be anything but fear mongering, “fill-in the blank” needs to show firstly, that bathroom predation by transgender women is occurring frequently in public bathrooms, and secondly, for the “fill-in the blank’s” argument to be a valid argument, they need to prove that alleged bathroom predation occurs more frequently in states and localities that have antidiscrimination laws for transgender people more frequently than in states and localities without antidiscrimination laws for transgender people.
And then it needs to be followed up with some pithy summarizing statement, in the vein of: When it comes to this “bathroom bill” argument, it’s not “show us the money,” but instead this organization needs to “show us the bathroom predation.” And, you can’t send that message by a press release. To work, it would need direct action.
An example of a direct action would be the one used by transgender people who attended Seattle’s transgender conference Gender Odyssey in a 2007 protest against the Pacific Place Mall. Essentially, two female-to-male, transgender men were humiliated in a mall restroom one day and then on the next day the Gender Odyssey attendees held sit-ins in the mall’s restrooms to change the mall policy. It worked.
So I’d call that bathroom antidiscrimination model the “Gender Odyssey Model.” Adding to that basic model, there’d be a sit-in spokesperson who would rattle off the talking points and pithy summary I highlighted above.
And, of course, which restrooms that group targets would be really important. My choice of targets for these sit-ins would be:
• The headquarters’ restrooms of the social conservative/religious right organizations’ that are making “bathroom bill” arguments.
• Legislator and congressmembers’ office bathrooms.
These sit-ins, preferably including both transgender people and their LGBT community allies, would be, by necessity, direct actions that could end in the arrest of the participants.
There is a big problem with this model though. Very few in the LGBT community today take their own freedom, equality and justice as seriously as suffragists, black civil rights movements and feminist activists. We, as a group, in the LGBT community seem not willing to sacrifice for civil rights. As a community, we’ve apparently lost the burning desire for civil rights. We’ve lost the ideals that Cesar Chavez expressed about civil rights and direct action:
“…there has to be someone who is willing to do it, who is willing to take whatever risks are required. I don’t think it can be done with money alone. The person has to be dedicated to the task. There has to be some other motivation.”
LGBT community members have a moderate equal rights agenda that apparently needs radical strategies and tactics. If we don’t again embrace, as civil rights activists before us have, radical strategies and tactics, I believe we tacitly accept the inequalities of our LGBT lives, as compared to those in broader society.
In my opinion, we in the LGBT community need to stop thinking in boxes and stop ceding battle space to our community enemies, such as the battle space over transgender public restroom use. We need to start thinking in terms of the Gender Odyssey Model.
