Séamas O'Reilly: Trans people have spent a decade being attacked in a moral panic

A really well-written article about the UK anti-trans bathroom bill that digs into the reality that it is about nothing more than cruelty.

These types of bills cannot accomplish anything other than disaccommodating many people--both cis and trans--and we should read them as intentional and frightening discrimination intended to define people as less-human and punish them.

The distress this ruling will cause for trans people is abhorrent, and would be even if its stated aim of protecting women was being achieved. However, it’s very obviously not.

Many who oppose it have claimed that it legally enshrines a situation in which thousands of trans men — sporting beards and moustaches and every other “masculine” descriptor you care to name — will now be legally obliged to use those female-only facilities.

This is, in fact, a misreading of the ruling, which is worse than this suggests, and clearly implies that trans men should be barred from using male or female toilets both. Because, in a battle between cruelty and logic, the cruelty must always win.

With 8,000 holders of gender recognition certificates now unsure if they’re barred from peeing once they leave the house, some have argued that the provision of millions of unisex toilets might be the answer. Considering these would be the same unisex toilets they never got round to building for Britain’s 4m pre-school age kids — and their awkward dads — we can dismiss this stalling tactic with the contempt it deserves.

We might also consider what this means for the millions of cis women who do not fit the standard, sexist notion of “femininity” which logic dictates they must be checked against to enforce this ruling.

Too tall, perhaps, too strong-jawed, or short-haired — anything that one patron, one witness, one supermarket or leisure centre security guard might consider cause to question their femininity. And how might they prove their “real” gender?

How would you? Perhaps my conception of feminism has been mis-calibrated all this time, and true freedom for women is mandating that they carry their birth certificates around with them all day, so they can be checked by citizen genital inspectors, male and female, encouraged to presume you’re a predator first, and work backwards from there.