Republican lawmakers in several states have resurrected and expanded the fight over whether transgender people may use bathrooms and other facilities that do not match their sex assigned at birth.
At least one bill goes so far as making it a crime for a transgender person to enter a facility that doesn’t match the sex listed on their birth certificate.
The debate has been popping up in statehouses across the nation in recent months, predominantly in conservative, rural states, including at a hearing of the Arizona Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee in February. Proponents of that state’s SB 1628, which defines “male,” “female,” and other terms through rigid definitions of biological sex, argued that women’s rights are at stake. Opponents disagreed and said the language would erase transgender people from state statute and remove legal protections.
This has become another rural vs city issue. In cities bathrooms have all been single toilet rooms forever, so removing the gender sign and making both or more restrooms genderless was easy. In many cases the diviest bars and venues never even had more than one toilet, so it’s always been this way. Newer construction just follows that and new bars and restaurants just have 10-12 individual bathrooms in a hallway somewhere.
In rural areas bathrooms are huge rooms with a dozen stalls in the shitty American “walls don’t go to the floor and the door has two inch gaps” style. And there’s two whole different barhrooms full of toilets. Converting them to other formats is crazy expensive and a lot of people don’t see just letting people into both as an option.
What is it with the walls the don’t go all the way to floor and the 2 inch gap in the door?
“if you give people privacy they’ll do drugs”… Karens everywhere smh