Should Texas enact a "bathroom bill?"

The official name of the Bathroom Bill is “An Act relative to gender identity and nondiscrimination”.  This bill would add the vague category of “gender identity” to the state ban on discrimination in public accommodations.  However, the bill relegates a person’s sex to their state-of-mind or a mental choice, instead of basing it in biological reality. Those advocating for this bill do not believe that men are necessarily men and women are necessarily women. Rather, they believe that biology is an inconvenient fact when it comes to matters of identifying one’s sex.

Although I am not homophobic, this bill would endanger the privacy and safety of women and children in public bathrooms, locker rooms, dressing rooms, and other intimate places (such as common showers), opening them to whoever wants to be there at any given time, and also to sexual predators who claim “confusion” about their gender as a cover for their evil intentions.  Since the law doesn’t require a protected person to have a legitimate problem with gender confusion, there is no way to distinguish between those people that this bill is designed to help and those who will undoubtedly abuse its existence to fulfill any number of deviant desires.

No law should make whole segments of the population feel unsafe and exploit their privacy and security

When the Transgender Rights Bill was passed in 2011, it specifically did not include bath rooms, locker rooms and other “lawfully sex-segregated facilities.”  This bill would undo that common sense precaution and force all businesses and ‘public accommodations’ to allow men who ‘identify’ as women into the ladies’ room, and vice versa.  For example, A Boston man, who was arrested for refusing to leave the bathroom in a women’s shelter, was recently awarded $20,000 of taxpayer money after he sued the city under a local ordinance that made this bathroom policy the law in Boston. If this act is passed, it would allow for incidents like this to spread throughout the entire Commonwealth!