Hello and welcome to episode 16 of The Spectrum. This was recorded on April 6th, 2025. Today we are going to be talking about the regressive obsession with bathroom bills and their consequences.

Bathroom bills are one of the fads in regressive circles these days. They seek to keep transgender people from bathrooms appropriate for their gender. They attempt to force transgender women to use the men’s room and transgender men to use the women’s room.

The stated reason for these bills is to protect women from so-called predatory transgender women. Transgender men seem to be caught in the fallout. They aren’t the target but they are caught up in this.

Now, this is another one of those situations where the very reason for the supposed need for the bill is false. Transgender women aren’t predators. They just want to go to the bathroom. But, the regressive party wants to ban them because they want to make the lives of transgender people as difficult as possible. If it’s simply too hard to exist as a transgender person then maybe they will all stop coming out and making the poor regressive men squeamish. It won’t work, of course. Transgender people have probably existed as long as there have been people. Over time some cultures have been more accepting and some cultures have been less accepting. But, nothing any culture does will make them disappear because transgender people are born, not made.

Now, let’s look at the fallout from these bills. Who gets caught up in the net they cast?

My argument is that what these bills do is to set a minimum standard of femininity to be able to use a women’s room without threat of being accosted. Who will this catch? It will definitely catch some trans women who do not blend in as well as they might wish. But, an uncountable number of trans women will “pee under the radar” because they will not be noticed. We don’t know how many because they are so unnoticed. The next group of people will be trans men who comply with the law and use the women’s room. This group will definitely not pass that “minimum standard of femininity” and will then be arrested for being in the women’s room even though they were complying with the law. The final group and one that we’ve already seen happen more than once is the cisgender woman who does not meet that minimum standard of femininity for whatever reason. Perhaps she is very tall. Perhaps she is large boned. Maybe she has short hair. Maybe she just likes to wear jeans and flannel shirts. 

In the entire time the Regressives have been passing these bills, I haven’t heard of one transgender woman being arrested for using the women’s room until just recently and that one was a special case because she announced she was going to do it to force the issue. I have heard of multiple cases of cisgender women being harassed. Why? Because they weren’t feminine enough to avoid harassment.

This is the unstated back story to bills like this. They don’t just attack transgender people. They define standards of appearance that everyone must adhere to in order to avoid getting unwanted negative attention.

This is because there is no “cisgender woman detector” at the bathroom door. Instead it makes everyone the gatekeeper of he ladies room door. Anyone can decide someone doesn’t meet the standard and call harassment down upon the undeserving victim.

Just how feminine must a woman appear before she can avoid harassment? How long must her hair be? What clothes must she wear? What physical standards of womanliness must she be lucky enough to be born with?

Why should these people be harassed when all they want to do is to go to the bathroom?

These bills are an invasion of privacy into the lives of every single person who uses a public restroom, not just transgender people. The great irony here is that they are being perpetrated by a political party that says it wants small government but at every opportunity it puts government intrusion front and center into the lives of every citizen who wants nothing more than to go the bathroom in peace.

If you have a story about LGBT life that you would like to share, please contact me at spectrumpodcasthost@gmail.com. Until next time, take care and stay safe.