Note: I wrote the following in 2021. I hadn’t polished it to the point where I was ready to post, but now that I’ve found it, I want it here as background. So I’m posting it now (June, 2023), with minor edits, and backdating to when it was originally written. I don’t actually know which bills were under discussion at the time, nor whether I had specific ones in mind.
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To anyone who approves of regulating which bathrooms trans kids can use, I want you to ask yourself this: are you, personally, okay with having your genitals (or your birth certificate) checked whenever you use a public bathroom?

Maybe this hasn’t occurred to you. After all, we already know that the point of these bills is not to check everybody who needs a bathroom; the point is to challenge — and publicize — the gender identity of very specific people who already have their gender identity challenged every day.

Many trans people are already so terrified of being challenged on their right to pee that they will wait until they’re desperate before using the bathroom. These bills will make it clear that people are legally allowed to stop them, even at that moment.

Many trans people already avoid using public bathrooms at all costs, even if they’re out all day. Often, that cost is paid in recurrent urinary tract infections and ongoing health problems. These bills will make that worse.

Cleverly, if these bills pass, then trans and gender-non-conforming people will be challenged no matter what they do.* People who switch to the bathroom they’re comfortable with may legally be challenged at any time. Meanwhile, trans people who pass as cisgender will be challenged (inaccurately) if they follow the new rules and use their assigned-at-birth restroom.**

They will be challenged, and, often, they will be cornered. This is not new.

There is a classic and horrifying trope where school bullies corner a trans or gender-bending kid in a bathroom or locker room and force them to pull their pants down so everyone can see. And this is now meant to be codified into law? I know we’ve seen since 2015 that many school bullies never grew up, but really? Adults want this to be the law?

And if these laws pass, then how are they to be enforced? Since you can’t tell by looking (or else there would be no need for proof), the only really equitable way would be for everyone who wants to use a bathroom to prove, on the spot, that they have the legal right to use it.

I’m guessing this would seem somehow unfair, maybe even discriminatory, to those who have used bathrooms themselves without any worries at all for years.

Ostensibly, parents want these laws in order to protect their kids from (made up) scary people who might look at them funny.*** The argument falls apart once you realise that they’re perfectly happy to have other people’s kids looked at instead, in systematic and prurient ways, by other kids, or by adults.

And if the call for proof doesn’t apply to everyone, then it would have to be done by challenges, on a case-by-case basis. And if THAT happens, then I sincerely hope that there will be people, in the places that enforce such laws, who stand by the bathrooms, ready to challenge everyone who comes by.****

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*Footnote in 2023: How prescient of me, though I had no idea the laws would be written that way explicitly…

**And also outed. Of course.

***Okay, they may claim that it’s to prevent attacks, but (1) trans people are already way more likely to be attacked in bathrooms than anyone else, and (2) attacking people is already illegal!

****(Though it would be nice if there were a way to avoid challenging closeted trans people.)