Transphobia and public restrooms

To the average anti-trans conservative, there is no such thing as 'rape culture'… which to them is nothing but a fake outrage of man-hating feminists unjustly portraying people as (potential) rapists… except (for some odd reason) when a trans person walks into a restroom.

A common argument against extending rights to transgender people is that if trans women are allowed to enter cis women's spaces (typically public restrooms), this will inevitably result in rapists taking up the label of "transgender" to enter these spaces and rape cis women and girls. The argument assumes that a potential rapist who is prepared to commit an abhorrent violent crime gives a single shit about a sign saying they shouldn't pass through a door. Whether the danger is actually from trans people, or merely from your run-of-the-mill rapist who takes up the label "transgender" when it suits them, is typically not explained; many transphobes do not think anyone is really trans, so the distinction is meaningless. Interestingly, despite this argument always focusing on the supposed danger of a trans woman raping cis women, it's somehow used to justify preventing transmen from entering men's restrooms as well.

A lesser variant of this argument is occasionally made, in which trans women are not accused of being potential rapists, but instead 'merely' plotting some form of voyeurism or getting sexual thrills from being in a women's restroom. This argument seems to fallaciously presume that all trans women are attracted to women. More importantly if mere sexual attraction to people of a given sex/gender renders one incapable of being trusted to share a restroom with them, then how come all the many homosexual, and bisexual, cis individuals seem capable of sharing restrooms with a gender they are attracted to without becoming voyeurs or sexually assaulting anyone?

This argument is based on an unfounded fear that isn't just unproven, but disproven; nonetheless, this remains a very popular argument against extending rights to transgender people, and in the US, there have been many failed attempts to introduce laws that would penalize transgender people for using the bathroom that does not correspond to their anatomical gender, with penalties ranging from light fines to years in jail; these are known as bathroom bills.

A big mountain of nothing
There is no evidence at a statistical level that suggests that this is a problem whatsoever. The most people can do is point to incidents or a compilation of those incidents. Here's a few resources to consider:


 * A study in Massachusetts compared the rates of voyeurism, sex crimes, etc. between areas with gender non-discrimination rules and areas that didn't have these rules. Not only did the study find that the sex crime rate has no relation to these rules, it also found that these crimes rarely happened in the first place (though numbers could be suppressed because these sorts of crimes go under-reported already ).
 * A large number of people with experience in a variety of areas, including law enforcement, sex abuse, etc. have said that non-discrimination doesn't lead to an increase in sex crimes in the bathroom.
 * In an hours-long analysis going through dozens of claims of people committing sex crimes in the bathroom, the Charlotte Observer was only able to verify 3 incidents as having actually happened over a timespan of 17 years.

It's worth noting that even if an individual story is accurate, this doesn't necessarily mean that the problem is something that exists at a statistical level (nor that we should make any policy in response to it). Also, literally nobody is proposing the legalization of rape, etc.

Hoaxes and misleading stories
There have been a number of misleading or straight-up hoax incidents involving trans people committing sex crimes in bathrooms, and they're able to spread around quickly because of the partisan, hot-button nature of the topic. Here's a few examples which have gotten a lot of circulation:
 * A story circulated in 2013 about a transgender teen harassing students at Florence High School in Colorado, reaching CBN and The Daily Mail. It was originally publicized by the Pacific Justice Institute. An interview with the school superintendent showed that the original incident never happened, sending the Pacific Justice Institute into damage control for the situation.
 * A 2016 story from Dallas, Texas circulated about a transgender woman taking pictures of underage girls in a Target restroom. The story is a complete hoax — the website's 'about' page quite literally says "This should go without saying, but everything on this website is purely for entertainment purposes. We are in no way affiliated, or trying to look like we are affiliated with any local news station." Yes, this is something that people have unironically cited to substantiate their worldview.
 * A 2017 story from Casper, Wyoming circulated about a trans woman raping an underage girl in a private restroom. It was originally published by a local newspaper and was then picked up by partisan news outlets like Fox News and the The Daily Wire. Unlike the others, this incident actually did happen, but transgender bathroom bills wouldn't have had an impact on this incident regardless because it was done in a private restroom, not a public one.
 * A compilation of 25 transgender bathroom incidents was put together by the Family Research Council. However, the vast majority of incidents listed are of cis men committing sex crimes against cis women, rather than trans women committing the crimes. The FRC argues that the real issue is about cis men exploiting loopholes in non-discrimination law rather than trans women being sexual predators, but this doesn't make a lot of sense either, because even if said loopholes exist in those laws (they don't), activities such as non-consensual voyeurism are still illegal. On top of this, even if all 25 stories involved a trans person, this does barely anything to prove there's a broader problem at play — these incidents took place over the course of 18 years (1999-2017), meaning that on average, it would take around three-quarters of a year for just one of these incidents to occur.
 * A compilation of a few hundred incidents has circulated around the web, originating from a TERF wordpress blog. Ignoring the preamble, the post is very obviously a gish gallop which has lot of dead links and an awful lot of links unrelated to the transgender bathroom stuff. The compilation also includes way more than just transgender people, extending its focus to cross-dressers (that is, anyone who is wearing literally any clothing which we associate with the opposite gender, such as a naked man who is wearing nothing but women's heels ). Many of these incidents don't even give us evidence that cross-dressing is something the people involved do on a regular basis, e.g. an incident where a man impersonated a female police officer. We don't know if that person regularly cross-dresses or if the person was impersonating a police officer who just happens to be a woman or any of that, but it gets included in the blog's list anyway. The blog even includes incidents where no crime was committed, e.g. a man who drowned because the skirt he was wearing was too tight to let him swim. Using this list to dunk on trans people at large is extremely stupid.
 * In 2021, a firestorm was started around a story about a boy in Loudoun County, Virginia who had raped a girl in a girls' bathroom. This story, while tragic, had literally nothing to do with transgender people, but the story was later picked up on and heavily spread by various transphobic commentators and websites such as, you guessed it, The Daily Wire, who laced the story with various hoaxes in order to create a moral panic around transgender people. They claimed that the boy identified as "gender fluid", either heavily implied or downright stated that he had been allowed into the girls' bathroom by school policy, and accused the government and the media of trying to cover up the incident. In reality, there was no evidence of the boy identifying as "gender fluid" except for the fact that he allegedly wore a skirt when the rape occurred, and his status as gender fluid was both publicly denied by his own mother and never mentioned in court. Furthermore, the school's policy was actually not enacted until several months after the assault occurred, and the pair had consensual sex multiple times in the same bathroom, demonstrating that bathroom bills and things of the sort, do absolutely nothing. The "cover-up by the government" was essentially, the victim's father being arrested after behaving aggressively towards a person who was in favor of enacting the policy, a few weeks after the assault, and a few months before it was enacted. You might believe the arrest wasn't justified, but calling it a "cover-up" is absolutely ridiculous.

Criticism
This argument is typically seen as an odorous pile of bovine fecal material by LGBT rights groups because, as the Trans advocate website Tranifesto writes, "the use of public restrooms is far more of a safety issue for trans people than it is for non-trans people in the next stall." Transgender people are far more likely than cisgender people to be victims of violent crime.

In the specific case of people arguing "protect the children," the association of trans people with pedophilia is likewise unfounded. Furthermore, the idea that someone might claim to be trans just to get into the restroom of the opposite sex is beyond ludicrous. The stigma against trans people is extreme; nobody would willingly take that stigma on just to exploit a legal loophole. In short, one's children are no more in danger when trans people are allowed to use the restroom than when they aren't.

Connection to fascism
In a male-centered gender hierarchy, where it is assumed that men are better than women and that masculinity is superior to femininity, there is no greater perceived threat than the existence of trans women, who despite being born male and inheriting male privilege “choose” to be female instead. By embracing our own femaleness and femininity, we, in a sense, cast a shadow of doubt over the supposed supremacy of maleness and masculinity. In order to lessen the threat we pose to the male-centered gender hierarchy, our culture (primarily via the media) uses every tactic in its arsenal of traditional sexism to dismiss us. As a threat to masculinity, and hence patriarchy, allowing trans women into women's rooms is an expression of the threat to gender hierarchy, and hierarchies in general, an important aspect of fascism. The idealization of the patriarchal family is necessary to support the idea of a patriarchal national leadership in fascism.

Enforcement
Ignoring the ethics and morality, the laws aren't even practical. How would society even begin to enforce such laws; if someone tries to enter the bathroom, could anyone demand to see their genitals before letting them in? Could random women be stopped and frisked by gropey suspicious police officers with only the flimsiest of excuses? Would using the bathroom now require a government ID?

Furthermore, what never seems to be considered are trans men, i.e., female to male. An ultra-macho burly buff manly man isn't necessarily cisgender, and under these laws would be forced into the ladies' room (though trans men may need to rely on ladies' rooms to get and dispose hygienic products, including tampons and pads, until people call attention for the need of these in men's restrooms). In terms of "protecting our precious womens", this actually creates the possibility for the very problem the laws are allegedly there to prevent; hypothetically, after everyone gets used to seeing the occasional trans man in the woman's room, actual cisgender rapists could enter the opposite gender's bathroom without raising suspicion.

Ignoring compromises
Many trans people would prefer another solution altogether: additional, unisex toilets, which would allow trans people to freely relieve themselves and panicked people the safety of knowing that there's no penis Y chromosome anywhere within a fifty-foot radius. This proposal usually goes nowhere, ostensibly for financial reasons (though the more conspiratorially-minded activist may wonder whether the need to perpetuate a culture of fear might also be a factor). However, some Canadian universities have de-gendered their existing single-toilet washrooms with little controversy, which requires no infrastructure changes beyond a door lock and has the side benefit that two cisgender users of the same sex can relieve themselves in a pair of such washrooms at the same time.

And yet, set against the backdrop of widespread transphobia, it might not be mere cynicism to note that loud calls for the elimination of gendered washrooms followed immediately on the defeat of "bathroom bills", and trans people's securing of a reliable legal right to use gendered washrooms — or that transphobic feminists eagerly and loudly promoted such calls. Rendering a major and long-fought victory for trans people meaningless — even if only as an unintended consequence — certainly could be seen as having a vindictively transphobic impact, whatever the intent might be (or be claimed to be): ''Oh, so you won legal access to gendered washrooms? Well, we'll get rid of gendered washrooms — take THAT!'' What some people might see as a reasonable compromise, others might see as a scorched-earth reaction.

Who's saying this?
More people than you'd think. Aside from the usual anti-LGBT suspects and Bible thumpers such as Greg Locke, there are some otherwise liberal voices who let their ignorance single-topic bigotry color their views on trans people, such as Graham Linehan and JK Rowling.

Roseanne Barr also argued over Twitter that "women do not want your penises forced in their faces or in our private bathrooms." Presumably, Barr would have genital inspection teams posted outside of public restrooms to ensure cisgender women aren't threatened by trans women's toxic penises.

Discrimination against trans people
Unsurprisingly, this kind of paranoia has done nothing, and will never do anything, to protect cis people from sexual harassment or rape. This makes sense, as the intention is not to protect cis people, but to harm trans people. Author Kate Bornstein recounts her experience in her book Gender Outlaw:

In 2016, a survey among over 27,000 transgender adults in the United States uncovered that 60% had avoided using public restrooms out of fear of confrontation, and that 12% had been verbally harassed in a public restroom within previous year (at the time of the survey), with 9% being denied access, 1% being physically attacked, and 1% being sexually assaulted, 32% had limited at some point, the amount they ate or drank to avoid having to use the bathroom, and 8% reported experiencing medical problems.

In May 2018, losing House of Representatives candidate from California, Jazmina Saavedra (Republican Party) proudly livestreamed herself on Facebook (she later deleted the video) harassing a trans woman in a Denny's bathroom despite facing no provocation. Despite the fact Saavedra did not endure any form of threats or violence, she implied that she was willing to use pepper spray and a taser.

In August 2018, a 12-year-old trans girl in Achille, Oklahoma (a town of about 500 people) was violently threatened on Facebook after using the girls bathroom at her middle school. She had previously been forced to use the staff bathroom in elementary school. The threats were so severe that the school system was shut down and the family was forced to move. On February 23, 2020, a transgender woman, Alexa Negrón Luciano, also known as Neulisa Luciano Ruiz, had a police report filed against her after entering a woman's bathroom in a restaurant in Toa Baja, Puerto Rico, and was falsely accused of spying on other women in the bathroom. A video of her encounter with the police was uploaded to social media. Later that day, she was shot to death.