Supporters argue that bathroom laws protect the privacy of cisgender women, pitching the laws as safety measures without evidence of threats or assaults by transgender people.
While the laws focus mostly on transgender students, critics believe they also encourage harassment of trans adults at work and while they're shopping and eating out — and even harassment of cisgender people, or those whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth.
Supporters argue that bathroom laws protect the privacy of cisgender women and girls. They've also pitched the laws as safety measures, without evidence of threats or assaults by transgender people against cisgender women or girls. States' laws vary in their sweep. Florida and North Dakota are applying their restrictions to state universities and prisons. Arkansas is making it a misdemeanor for transgender adults to be in any public changing room associated with their gender identities if a minor is present and the purpose is “arousing or gratifying a sexual desire.
All of the laws permit schools and other institutions to make special accommodations for trans students, such as providing gender-neutral bathrooms, so long as they aren't allowed into facilities associated with their gender identities. In Des Moines, Iowa, the school district already had been preparing for a bathroom law for several years and “the facilities were in place” when the state's law was enacted, spokesman Phil Roeder said. The Shawnee Mission district in the affluent Kansas suburbs of Kansas City is adding gender-neutral restrooms, too, with most of the work completed.
And in Fargo, one of North Dakota's rare politically blue places, the school board backed Superintendent Rupak Gandhi's public statement that,"We will not participate in anything that we think is going to subject students to further discrimination or increase their self-harm.”
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