Houston, We Have a Problem

An amazing non discrimination ordinance in Houston was just struck down due to a paid-for campaign that focused, once again, on fear mongering: that somehow laws that allow trans people to use public bathrooms are going to result in sexual assault (of cis women) in those bathrooms.

So let me quote Red Durkin here for some clarification:

If a man wants to get away with sexual assault in America, he doesn’t have to put on a dress and sneak into the women’s restroom. He just has to join a frat or a band or professional/semi-professional sports team or the police department or get promoted to manager at Wendy’s or own his own business or go to a bar, stand on the street corner, go into a grocery store, star in a movie or sitcom, go to school with a woman, work with a woman, go on a date with a woman, live next door to a woman, deny the charges after the fact or, generally speaking, do anything EXCEPT disguise the fact that he’s a man in America.

And, I’ll add, there is no evidence whatsoever that any man who wanted to commit sexual assault did so by wearing women’s clothes and using the ladies’ room, and none, either, that any trans woman or crossdresser or GNC person has.

Sorry, Houston. I’m sure you’ll come back bigger and better and stronger as a result. In the meantime, because trans men who have not changed gender markers on their ID are now legally required to use women’s rooms, there’s a call for them to do so.

In the meantime, public hearings on a similar law in Wisconsin have been postponed.