Tuesday, May 7, 2024

Yet another disastrous rollout of a scheme to report who's using a bathroom (this one in Utah)

Utah actually passed this law

Source: Utah Launches "Snitch Line" To Report Trans People In Bathrooms; Memes Flood In: The move is the latest in a series of states that have tried to launch ways to report transgender issues to authorities; such attempts in other states have not been successful. Erin Reed, Erin in the Morning, May 2, 2024

On May 1, "the Utah Public Auditor released a form to report transgender individuals encountered in changing rooms and restrooms to state authorities. The form, titled "Alleged Government Violations of Utah Code 63G Chapter 31: Distinctions Based on Sex," is in response to a law enacted earlier this year. This law bans transgender people from using restrooms that match their gender identity in schools, as well as locker rooms and similar facilities in public buildings across the state."

The law "explicitly prohibits transgender individuals from using restrooms that match their gender identity in schools and also bans them from public changing rooms unless they have amended their birth certificates and undergone gender reassignment surgery." This is a problem in part because whether a person can update their birth certificate is up to the state in which they were born.

Reed says:

"In February, Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita released a snitch line to report schools. Instead, it received copies of Godzilla holding a trans flag. In March of 2023, the Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey launched a website for reporting gender affirming care clinics. Within a month, the website was taken down after being flooded with the 'Bee Movie' script. In Virginia, Governor Glenn Youngkin launched a tip line to report 'divisive teaching practices.' That tip line received very few legitimate reports, and instead was flooded by “GenZ for Change” activists. The website was taken down quietly a the end of the year."

illustration of guy on telephone, objecting to something

Context

Source: Mississippi Passes Bill Allowing Cis People To Sue Over Trans Bathroom Usage: The bathroom ban targets transgender people in colleges. It also contains a private right of action that some have said would allow cisgender people to sue over trans bathroom usage. Erin Reed, Erin in the Morning, May 6, 2024

Reed says: "Utah’s ban targets all government buildings, including the airport, with enforcement depending on allegations of behavior that 'causes affront or alarm.'"

Result

Utah Auditor Slams Legislature For Making Him "Bathroom Monitor" After "Snitch Form" Flooded With Meme Complaints: After receiving thousands of meme submissions to a form used to report transgender people in bathrooms, Utah's auditor shared scathing words for the legislature tasking him with the role. Erin Reed, Erin in the Morning, May 7, 2024

"...the Utah Public Auditor released a form allowing cisgender people to report transgender people in bathrooms. This was done in response to a law passed earlier this year banning transgender people from bathrooms and changing rooms in various circumstances. Within a couple of days, the form was flooded with over 4,000 meme submissions..."

Utah State Auditor John Dougall said the law gave his office "a role we did not request. Indeed, no auditor sets out to become a bathroom monitor."

The situation was pretty bad: "The form included a section where people could upload images, among other things, to support their allegations. This led to fears that the form would encourage members of the public to act as vigilante bathroom police, taking pictures of people they thought were transgender in private bathroom spaces."

Public defender Dustin Parmley had told the Senate Business and Labor Committee that it's "impossible to enforce" who belongs in which bathroom if you rely on the public to know "if someone is feminine or masculine enough" to be in a bathroom and if the qualifying facts for "exceptions" have to do with "someone's surgery or birth certificate" as those facts are, of course, "hidden" from the public.

"Already, the option to submit a picture has been removed" from the Utah form, Reed reports.

"Other attempts to create such forms have similarly failed, such as in Virginia, where Governor Glenn Youngkin's tip line was flooded with complaints about Beowulf, or in Missouri, where scripts for the Bee Movie were sent in."

By the way

In Utah, you can request that the court use certain pronouns and titles for you, and you can request a legal change of sex/gender. (forms accessed July 2024)

No more Judy Blume:

This law doesn't just ban books-- it makes it illegal to redistribute them. It demands the destruction of them. And once a low like this passes somewhere more pop up elsewhere. Use the @5calls.org app to call your state reps and demand that they protect our children from book bans.

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— Maggie Tokuda-Hall (@maggietokudahall.bsky.social) Aug 9, 2024 at 10:45 AM

Oh, now look. They are making the gender-neutral bathroom unusable.

They could have deactivated the bathroom in multiple ways. They chose to send a specific message that your gender isn't private; your gender is everyone's business.

A school district in Pennsylvania approved nearly $9,000 ‘to cut windows into the ‘gender-identity’ student bathrooms so passerby can look inside’

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— Phil Lewis (@phillewis.bsky.social) October 3, 2024 at 10:29 AM

It started in North Carolina

Eight years ago North Carolina pushed an anti-trans bathroom bill and it was a national outrage and disgrace, this refrain that Democrats have "moved too far left on trans issues" is witless nonsense, it was a coalition of far-right ideologues and bigoted liberals that did the moving!

— Tom Scocca (@tomscocca.bsky.social) November 7, 2024 at 4:33 PM

Read more

In addition to subscribing to Erin Reed...

Check out

Surviving Transphobia. ed. Laura A. Jacobs. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2023.

And my article: How the bathroom verification cards would work

In the UK too (2025)

"I’m trying to draw a line between Simone de Bouvoir writing that womanhood is a sociological construct foisted upon women by the normative force of the patriarchy and a 53-year-old terf getting into a row with a butch lesbian washing her hands because her skull doesn’t look right to them and if I can be absolutely real with you right now I’m coming up short. Some mysterious gravity has pulled these people into an endlessly dark rabbit hole.

What element of these new rulings will make women safer? Will it not, instead, ensure every woman is (even more so) at the body policing whims of officials and strangers? Will they not sink further into the thrall of conforming to some external standard of womanhood to ensure they can piss unquestioned? And the fallout extends far beyond cubicles – trans women may now be searched by male officers. Do we want to grant male police officers this level of discretion and plausible deniability? Male cops? Cops who are men? Them?

Female public toilets are less than 200 years old. Before that time women were subject to the “urinary leash”, a functional tethering of women to private households by not giving them somewhere to vent their bladders. This tool of the patriarchy has now been twisted into a four-dimensional finger trap primed to disadvantage almost everyone in society except cisgender men, who once again come out completely unaffected. As a representative of cis men I would like to say wahoo and thank you. I have a nervous bladder and if something like this happened to my ability to conveniently wee while I’m wandering merrily I think it would devastate me, so thank you for thinking of us."

The Anti-Trans Moral Panic: Britain’s Grotesque Obsession: The attempt by the Supreme Court to legislate trans people out of public life represents a capture of democracy by a fractional entourage of brainbroken zealots. by Sean Morley, Now Then, 21 May 2025

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