Crooks and Liars:

Texas State Representative Debbie Riddle, a woman frighteningly over-concerned with your genitals, filed a bill in the Texas House that says...

...anyone over the age of 13 in a public facility of “a gender that is not the same gender as the individual’s gender” should be convicted of a class-A misdemeanor, and spend up to one year in jail and be fined $4,000. Riddle’s proposed law carves out exemptions for custodians, those helping children, or those responding to a medical emergency.

Her goal is to keep transgendered people from peeing. Anywhere, anytime. And since it would be easier to teach a mermaid to do the splits than to identity a transgender person with their clothes on, I suspect some sort of nudity check would be involved at the bathroom door. I can guarantee you this: I am not showing Debbie Riddle my nudity. Debbie wants to use your DNA to confirm your gender. I do not know if this would require a DNA testing center outside of every bathroom or if you can just get a DNA ID card for bathroom privileges.

Perhaps trans folks in Texas should bottle their urine and mail it to Debbie Riddle—or drop bottles off at her office—so that Debbie can personally see to its safe disposal.

Debbie Riddle
District Office
17207 Kuykendahl, Suite 108
Spring, TX 77379

And remember...

Right-wing assholes keep hammering away about the threat posed by trans people using public toilets. In reality, trans men and women are at higher risk of violent attack, hate crimes, and murder than any other group; trans women of color are at highest risk. (Three trans women of color have been murdered already this year.) And while it's true that cis and trans women are sometimes attacked in public toilets, these attacks are perpetrated by cis men, not trans women. (Want to make the world safer for women? Make it illegal for men to use public toilets.) And this whole revolting idea that a significant percentage of trans women are "male sexual predators [interested in] prowling ladies' restrooms" amounts to an anti-trans blood libel. This belief—that some or all trans women are actually male rapists trying to worm their way into "safe" spaces where they can attack "actual" women (because a male rapist can't walk into a women's toilet dressed as a man?)—results in violent attacks on trans women like this one. Fomenting this belief leads to more attacks on trans women.

What Debbie Riddle is doing is making Texas—not a safe place for sexual minorities generally—an even more dangerous place to be trans than it is already. Riddle should be mocked (and she should be handed bottles of urine wherever she goes) but what she's doing isn't funny.

UPDATE:


Don't mail Debbie your urine. Drop those bottles off in her office instead.