About three weeks ago, I shared about a new law passed in Odessa, Texas targeting trans people in bathrooms. Today I learned that the city council there decided to up their transphobia game.
Odessa voted to expand the impact of that law. They modified it to allow any citizen, no matter their residency, to sue trans people. In addition, they expanded it to include private facilities rather than only public ones. The bounty authorized starts at $10,000, and has no limit.
Why do so many people hate me and my siblings so much? We are not in that bathroom to do anything other than what you are there to do. We just want to perform our bodily functions in a safe private space. Many of us aren’t even capable of the harm you imagine us there to enact. I know, that’s too much information.
I am simply incapable of understanding the mindset of the hateful bigots who make these laws. I get that lack of good information about my community plays into this. Things like Trump’s anti-transgender advertisements targeting the Harris campaign fuel the flames. But they wouldn’t be so successful unless the bias already existed.
The next few years are going to be painful. Many of my siblings will simply give up. Suicide rates will climb, particularly among trans youth. And this is only the beginning. Trump’s win will no doubt encourage more of these types of bigoted actions.
It won’t just be trans people harmed. Cis women who aren’t “traditionally” attractive will be targeted. The article mentions a lack of provision for a person of the “opposite” gender. This affects accompanying a disabled person to the restroom.
Before I transitioned, I was the only caretaker for my late wife. I often had to assist her in the women’s restroom. People saw me as a man in a women’s only space. In today’s climate, with laws like these, people in similar situations will be targeted.
These laws are ill-informed, ill-thought, and bigoted. They benefit no one. They reduce no harm, and introduce new harm, and not just to my community. This is what it seems no one wants to see.
The journey continues, but for now at least, it won’t be taking me to Texas.
An Aging Trans Woman 
I want to rage against all of the hatred, but it does absolutely no good in changing the minds of these phobic assholes!
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So very true. 😢
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So, private restrooms, does that mean that, say, you and I could attend a party at a mutual friend’s house, and you and maybe they could be sued if you went potty?
I wish people who knew law and the English language would write the laws again. The ignoramuses know not what they do. It’d be fun to sue them for pottying in a private restroom.
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🤷♀️ I don’t know if that ambiguity is in the law, or the reporting about it. I wondered honestly, and chose not to see if the actual ordinance is published somewhere. I just … 😢
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Exactly. I didn’t look for it, either. My own state’s leg is always amending laws for language after some stupidity causes a consequence anyone could have seen if they’d simply proofread the draft of the bill. Well, maybe not anyone, but many people. So that’s automatically where I go when I see something like that.
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I noticed the other day, a grocery store labeled their 2 bathrooms as both male and female as they are individual rooms with a locking door. I wish we would go to airplane like bathrooms and family/ handicapped rather than this focus on men and women.
You know it’s going to be busy bodies looking for women that aren’t trying to be attractive to the male gaze doing the reporting. A pixie cut will become an act of defiance.
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