SB 6 unnecessary in Texas

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There’s been a lot of talk about Texas’ “bathroom bill” or Senate Bill 6. Although there are financial implications to the bill, the biggest issue for me is the discrimination against transgender people.

SB 6 would require transgender people to use bathrooms in public schools, government buildings and public universities based on “biological sex” and would pre-empt local nondiscrimination ordinances that allow transgender Texans to use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity. 

“We know it’s going to be a tough fight,” Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said when he announced the bill. “But we know we’re on the right side of the issue. We’re on the right side of history. You can mark today as the day Texas is drawing a line in the sand and saying no.”

Patrick also said that his support for the legislation is based on privacy concerns, arguing that such policies allowed men to enter women’s restrooms. But if SB 6 were to pass, Chaz Bono would be required to use the women’s restroom. If you don’t know who Chaz Bono is, go ahead and run a quick internet search. I’ll wait. As you can see, Bono has more facial hair than me and yet he’d be required by SB 6 to use the women’s restroom. Not exactly the result those in favor of this bill are looking for.

Patrick has branded this initiative as the “women’s privacy act” to make it seem as though this law is to protect the women and girls in the bathroom. In actuality, this is another attack on the LGBT community, specifically trans people.

The folks who are for this bill believe that transgender people are dudes with dresses on looking to terrorize little girls in a restroom. That’s not how that works.

Here’s the simplest explanation I can give. Transgender people are people who have a gender identity that differs from their assigned sex. They don’t identify with the sex they are born with. You may have heard someone use the phrase a man trapped in a woman’s body and vice versa.

None of that implies sexual deviancy. A common mistake folks make about transgender people is they believe trans is a sexuality. Being trans has nothing to do with sexuality. In fact, transgender people may identify as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, etc.

Going back to this bill, Patrick claimed that if a local law allows men to go into a woman’s bathroom “because of the way they feel,” criminals will have a new opening. Except public restrooms are open access anyways, so how exactly will this law stop sexual predators from coming in?

If SB 6 passes, a sexual predator isn’t going to snap his fingers like Swiper from Dora the Explorer and go “oh man” and now feel as though they can’t enter said restrooms. The contrapositive works the same way. The sexual predator is not going to feel like he has easier access to the restroom if SB 6 does not pass. He is going to do whatever he wants because he’s a sexual predator.

Gun rights’ advocates use this logic in regards to guns in schools. How is a sign outside the school saying “no guns allowed” going to stop a criminal from shooting up the school? You cannot argue for that logic and then go against it by saying SB 6 is going to protect women in restrooms.

So what’s the point of the bill then? There are already laws that prohibit people from entering restrooms to harass someone. Houston Chronicle’s Phyllis Randolph Frye wrote a piece on May 11, 2016 titled “The real bathroom laws” that go through various Texas penal codes that already punishes sexual predators as Patrick believes SB 6 would do.

For instance, if a criminal enters the “wrong” restroom “in order to take pictures through the crack in the stall door” as Frye wrote, that person would be in violation of Texas Penal Code Section 21.15.

So I ask again, what’s the point of SB 6? All it does is adds even more legislation that discriminates against transgender people.

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