okay so someone tell me why this won’t work
transgender people should get to use the correct bathroom and not be misgendered, and it is an issue of basic rights. and trans people are not going into bathrooms to commit sex crimes, that whole idea is absurd
but the conflict is not relevant to most people in the country and they view it as either a distraction, or just more culture war or at worst an attempt to sexually threaten precious and vulnerable women. pushing on the issue almost unavoidably creates disproportionate blowback because to the majority of people, the issue is being given a disproportionate focus and that means it must be nefarious
so why haven’t we, instead of saying “we keep pushing in exactly the same way, casting it as an issue where everyone who opposes us is ideologically befouled and deserving of punishment, thus getting disproportionate blowback and alienating people who we should not be alienating because that leads to a loss of our political power”, and instead of saying “we get so much blowback from how we present this issue as one where people must bend the knee to us or be cast out of respectable society, so we should give up on trying to secure rights for trans people as it’s not convenient for us to do so any more”
why don’t we make the law “people are allowed to use the bathroom of their gender identity, but if someone is convicted of sexual assault in a bathroom that they entered by pretending to be a different gender, their sentence is more severe”?
like from our point of view, we’re not losing anything. we know trans people are far less likely than baseline to commit sex crimes and bathroom access is not about enabling sex crimes. but for the people who don’t already agree with us, it looks like we’re both taking measures to deter the thing they don’t want to happen, and putting our money where our mouth is, instead of telling them “this is how things are you are not allowed to notice otherwise now bow to our worldview”. by making it a sentencing rider, we don’t increase the ability of transphobes to frame trans people for sex crimes – if we are afraid this law would encourage them to do so we should be exactly as afraid of them doing so without this law.
like if your position is “we should allow X because it is just, and will not allow Bad Thing Y at all” and your opposition says “we should not allow X because it will just promote Bad Thing Y”, it seems to me that “How about we allow X, but punish Bad Thing Y more harshly if it gets promoted by X, so people don’t do it?” is pretty much the easiest compromise ever.
so why won’t that work?
I imagine people would just say it’s already creating a dangerous situation where sexual assault is more likely to happen and reject it. They will say you are already allowing a risk and that in itself is unacceptable. (Same reasoning why same sex parents adopting kids is not allowed here, even when there is heaps of data showing kids elsewhere are fine, they insist we cannot put children at such a risk not knowing the consequences (even if we DO know!) and it’s too much of a gamble.)
Also we both know cases of fake sexual assault stories, who are widely believed even when there is plain evidence of the contrary, exist. What makes you think it would not happen in this case, when trans women are seen as even more inherently predatory than men?
If they say “Punishing people more won’t deter them from doing bad things” then we just won a huge victory and we get to reduce all the Draconian sentences for all this other shit, since they are the exact people who say we need to have incredibly harsh sentences to prevent people from doing bad things. But I doubt they’ll say that.
And yes, we do know cases of fake sexual assault stories exist. The point is that by being a rider on a sexual assault conviction instead of a crime in and of itself, it does not increase the ability of anyone to frame trans people for sexual assault. It doesn’t even increase the incentive to do so, as it isn’t like the utility of framing someone for being trans is correlated with the number of years they serve is convicted.
We keep saying that there’s no reason to be afraid because letting trans people use the right bathroom is not exposing anyone to danger. If we won’t do this, then either
A: we believe that trans people will commit enough sexual assault in bathrooms that this will be a problem and that means we have been lying this whole time, or
B: we believe that trans people using the right bathroom in transphobic areas will lead to a rash of them being falsely accused of sexual assault, in which case why the fuck are we trying to push this law on transphobic areas when we believe it will just lead to trans people being falsely accused?
right-wingers keep saying “The left wants to let people into the women’s room to assault them because they can claim they ‘identify’ as a woman! It’s just a way for perverts to threaten (precious, wonderful) women!”
we keep telling them “That isn’t what this law is about and that isn’t a thing that happens anyway, the thing you are concerned with is not an event that occurs, you are imagining it, this is only about not harming people for being trans”
if the slightest token effort to put our money where our mouth is and say “this is so much not about letting people attack women in the bathroom that if anyone actually tries to do that we’ll come down way harder on them, because we want to show that we are not about letting women get attacked, and because we don’t think trans people being allowed to use the right bathroom will cause them to attack women” gives us pause, then we need to stop and figure out how we have fucked up because we have fucked up very very very badly.
I am all about this kind of ideological trade.