BLAZING TRAILS

April 20, 2016
18 WINDY CITY TIMES
viewpoints
Sending a message
Nathaniel
FRANK
How to stamp
out the transgender
‘bathroom panic’
This article originally appeared in The Los
Angeles Times.
Social conservatives in North Carolina used a
familiar playbook when they helped pass a draconian
law restricting which restrooms transgender
people can use. The tactic was fear:
They whipped up anxieties about modesty and
vulnerability in public restrooms until they
created full-fledged “bathroom panic” over
victimization by sexual predators. This week,
with banks, businesses and Bruce Springsteen
announcing boycotts to protest the discriminatory
law, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory announced
half-measures to try to dampen the
backlash, but he did nothing to alter the deception
inherent in bathroom panic.
The North Carolina law, House Bill 2, took aim
at an ordinance that was about to go into effect
in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Charlotte City
Council had voted to prohibit discrimination
against gay and transgender people in public
accommodations and by government contractors,
expanding an existing law that protected
other minorities. In response, the state legislature
invalidated the ordinance and seized the
opportunity to target transgender people using
the crudest—and most baseless—of fears: “No
men in women’s bathrooms.”
When McCrory signed HB2 into law, he
claimed he was protecting the “basic expectation
of privacy in the most personal of settings”
and acting to stop a “radical breach of
trust and security.” Peter Sprigg of the conservative
Family Research Council defended
the need to force transgender people into restrooms
aligned with their birth gender by citing
letters
Art Director’s Guild, CAA, National Association
of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP), Netflix,
SAG-AFTRA, Univision and Viacom all undersigned
the below open letter from GLAAD that
sends a message to governors and state legislators
that anti-LGBT legislation is not congruent
with their values. The letter appeared in Variety.
As representatives of our nation’s entertainment
and media industry, we wish to express
our profound disappointment in the proliferation
of anti-LGBT legislation being considered
across this great country. By standing together—and
alongside so many others who are
speaking out from the corporate and business
communities at the national, state, and local
levels—we hope to demonstrate that the kind
of discrimination being proposed (and, in some
“legitimate fears that people have about their
safety.” Yet hundreds of similar nondiscrimination
measures are in place across America,
and law enforcement officials have reported no
surge in bathroom victimization as a result.
Sprigg and company borrowed their playbook
from a successful effort in Houston last year.
With a ballot measure, voters there repealed a
nondiscrimination ordinance after a campaign
that included an ominous television ad showing
a man in a dress following a little girl into
a bathroom stall.
As the New York Times reported, the ballot
measure fight was turned “from one about
equal rights to one about protecting women
and girls from sexual predators.” The anti-discrimination
ordinance lost, 61 percent to 39
percent.
Fear-mongering against gay and transgender
people is a time-tested strategy, despite plenty
of evidence that there is nothing to fear but
fear itself.
Such fear mongering against gays and transgender
people is a time-tested strategy, despite
plenty of evidence that there is nothing
to fear but fear itself. In the battle for marriage
equality, the nation was told time and
again that marriage itself, along with the
American family, would be imperiled if samesex
couples were allowed to marry. “Freedom
will be taken away,” said one infamous 2009
ad titled “Gathering Storm.” Religion would be
destroyed because the clergy would be forced
to conduct same-sex weddings, no matter their
convictions. Yet none of these doomsday scenarios
has come to pass.
The particular terrors that fueled the campaigns
in Houston and North Carolina have
an even longer history. In the debate over
“don’t ask, don’t tell,” opponents of openly
gay service spent decades fanning the flames
of anxiety about straight recruits sharing quarters—sharing
showers!—with known gays and
lesbians. At one point, senators held congressional
hearings in the bowels of a nuclear submarine
to infuse the news cycle with frightening
images of the compromised privacy of
military life. The message was clear: In such
conditions, gay people were not to be trusted,
unit cohesion could not be maintained and an
inclusive policy would be a clear and present
danger to the United States.
Again, none of this was true, as a wealth of
research before and after “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”
concluded. (Some of it was buried by those opposed
to change.}
A 2003 Palm Center study found that the experience
of military and paramilitary organizations
that lifted their gay bans showed that
“cohesion, morale, recruitment, retention and
privacy will be preserved or even enhanced” by
ending policies that required gay people to lie
about their identities or stay out of uniform.
Other scholars noted that, all across the globe,
people in various contexts that might seem
erotic (especially when social conservatives
insisted on eroticizing them) in fact developed
an “etiquette of disregard.” In doctor’s offices,
in military barracks, in locker rooms and restrooms,
most people simply finished their business
and ignored those around them. Those
who had predicted disaster were spectacularly
wrong.
But no amount of evidence seems capable of
stopping the fear strategy. The Rand Corp. has
completed a new study on transgender military
service concluding, unsurprisingly, that ending
discrimination against transgender troops
will not harm military readiness. The Pentagon
has neither released the study nor met its own
deadline for reviewing the policy. Sen. James
M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), who wrongly predicted
that openly gay military service would “complicate
things” and “make it very difficult for
us to take care of the troops,” is now opposing
service by transgender troops because—guess
what—he can’t understand which bathrooms
they would use. And Elaine Donnelly, president
of the Center for Military Readiness, who
had earlier wrongly predicted that openly gay
troops would drive away one-quarter of the
military, is now predicting that transgender
service will increase sexual assaults.
Voters should see these kinds of fear-based
charges for what they are—a cynical, angry
and wildly inaccurate response to LGBT people
gaining equal rights. In the barracks and at the
marriage altar and in the bathroom, equality
for sexual minorities does not cause harm to
others.
Nathaniel Frank is the director of the What
We Know Project at Columbia Law School. He
is completing a book on the history of the
marriage-equality fight.
cases, enacted) is simply unacceptable.
Recently, North Carolina went further than
any state has gone by passing a bill that was
immediately signed by the state’s governor, revoking
important protections for LGBT people
previously secured at the local level. This new
legislation asserts that state law overrides all
local ordinances addressing employment, wages
or public accommodations.
Meanwhile, more than 100 other bills targeting
LGBT people have been introduced in states
and cities across the country. It’s important to
note that these attacks don’t just put LGBT
Americans in the crosshairs; they also put the
basic rights of other religious and ethnic minorities
in jeopardy.
The results of such laws taking effect across
the nation makes it difficult to attract and retain
workers, grow local and state economies,
and bring top talent to schools and universities—all
of which our communities depend on
for sustainability. Finally, it undermines the
core values of the companies we represent and
those of a majority of this nation’s most successful
and profitable businesses.
Let us be clear. Entertainment is not just one
of our nation’s most powerful economic drivers;
it’s also one of our greatest cultural exports to
the rest of the world. As leaders charged with
making a difference in your cities, towns, and
states, we implore you to stand with us and
reject any and all efforts to legalize discrimination.
Send a strong and clear message to the
rest of the world that America—and your communities—remain
places where all people are
respected, welcomed and treated equally.
Matt Goodman
Associate Director of
Communications, GLAAD
Send columns or letters to Andrew@WindyCityMediaGroup.com.
Letters may be edited for brevity or clarity.
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