If they don’t simply call it an “anti-LGBT law,” those in the news media typically call North Carolina’s law requiring single-sex public restrooms and changing facilities the “bathroom bill” or the “bathroom law.”
Opponents of the law ask what, exactly, is the big deal if people with male anatomy use a restroom reserved for women? Restrooms reserved for women will still have private separate stalls, after all.
This argument makes a certain amount of sense for city-dwellers who have been to restaurants that have had gender neutral multi-occupancy restrooms for years. It makes less sense if you can imagine what you’d think as a father watching a 200-pound man enter the public restroom that your 6-year-old daughter is using.
Donald Trump came down on the “what’s the big deal” side of the argument on Thursday in an interview on the Today show. “Leave it the way it is. There have been very few complaints the way it is. People go, they use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate, there has been so little trouble,” Trump said of North Carolina’s law.
But North Carolina’s law doesn’t simply cover bathrooms–the text of the law makes it clear that it also covers school locker rooms, changing rooms, and shower rooms. The “what’s the big deal” argument is a lot weaker when you’re talking about forcing teenage girls to share changing facilities and open bay showers with teenage boys who say they’re girls.
I haven’t seen any polling on the specific issue of locker rooms and shower facilities, and that’s probably because the result would no doubt reveal that the left-wing position is wildly unpopular. I’ll go ahead and guess that somewhere between 70 and 85 percent of Americans think teenage girls should not have to change their clothes or shower in the presence of a human being who has a penis.
And this isn’t some wild hypothetical situation. Look at this real-world example from Illinois. A Chicago-area school was willing to allow a transgender student into the girls locker room so long as the student used a privacy curtain. The student claimed this requirement was discriminatory and demanded full unrestricted access to the girls locker room and shower facilities. The Obama administration’s Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights came down on the side of the student.
“The Department of Education has settled two similar allegations of discrimination of transgender students in California, with both districts eventually agreeing to allow the students to use female-designated facilities,” the Chicago Tribune reported at the time.
So does Donald Trump agree with the Obama administration’s transgender policy for public high schools? I asked his campaign that question yesterday, but his usually responsive spokeswoman Hope Hicks did not reply to an email.
Trump’s comments on the Today show certainly indicate that he agrees with the Obama administration’s logic. Trump not only opposed the North Carolina law, he said it would be “discriminatory” to create a separate facilities for people who identify as transgender. “You know there’s a big move to create new bathrooms. Problem with that is, for transgender, that would be a, first of all, I think that would be discriminatory in a certain way. It would be unbelievably expensive for businesses and for the country. Leave it the way it is,” Trump said.
Trump likes to portray himself as the candidate who “tells it like it is.” So why won’t he tell us if he supports the Obama administration’s transgender policy for public high schools?
