When late night host Seth Myers likened the issue of transgender bathroom laws to Jim Crow-style racial segregation this week, he joined a growing list of media personalities who’ve made the exact comparison.
“[F]ighting over bathrooms is the oldest move in the Prejudice Playbook,” the comedian said Wednesday.
“America has a long history of using bathrooms to scare people,” he continued. “[A]fter the Civil War, Jim Crow laws forced African-Americans to use different bathroom than white Americans and then, in the 1980s, there was a movement to keep gay men from using public restrooms, because people were afraid they’d catch AIDS from a toilet seat.”
The newer laws Myers referenced this week seek to regulate bathroom usage, and address the issue of transgender persons using restrooms that correspond best to the gender with which they identify.
“[T]elling a minority group that they’re not allowed to use the same bathroom everyone else uses is a well-worn strategy used to make minorities feel like crap, pun intended, but proponents of the so-called bathroom bill don’t want you to see their bills as prejudice,” Myers said.
“They want you to think they’re trying to protect the children,” he added.
Myers is hardly alone in making the comparison between the bathroom laws and racial segregation.
“Panic About Transgender People In Bathrooms Echoes Logic On Racial Segregation,” read the headline to a Huffington Post report published last week.
There’s much more where that came from on the Huffington Post’s website.
Slate published a similarly themed article titled, “The Anti-Trans Bathroom Nightmare Has Its Roots in Racial Segregation.”
“Gender-Segregated Public Bathrooms Have A Long, Ugly History,” read the original headline to a BuzzFeed report that tracked the same comparison.
The Guardian ran with a story titled, “From Jim Crow to transgender ban: the bathroom as battleground for civil rights.”
And so on.
However, the most notable example of the comparison between bathroom laws and racial segregation didn’t come from media, but from America’s chief law enforcement officer.
“This is not the first time that we have seen discriminatory responses to historic moments of progress for our nation,” Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in an address on May 9.
“We saw it in the Jim Crow laws that followed the Emancipation Proclamation. We saw it in fierce and widespread resistance to Brown v. Board of Education,” she added. “And we saw it in the proliferation of state bans on same-sex unions intended to stifle any hope that gay and lesbian Americans might one day be afforded the right to marry.”
For these remarks, Lynch won high praise from Washington Post reporter Janell Ross.
“The truth is that there is nothing about Lynch’s historical reference to Jim Crow that is not spot-on,” she wrote in an article titled, “Loretta Lynch isn’t wrong about Jim Crow and bathroom laws.”
“What Lynch said was, in fact, rather solicitous in her description of the discomfort some Americans feel with vast social changes that have taken shape in the years since the Supreme Court has repeatedly acknowledged that Americans’ constitutional equality extends to matters related to gender and sexuality,” Ross added. “What Lynch said was that said discomfort does not and cannot outweigh U.S. law. And state policies that attempt to contravene it cannot be abided.”
