During the Jim Crow era, Black people in the United States were legally excluded from using the same bathrooms as white people—a segregation highly visible through signs outside bathrooms that stated “Whites Only.” Sixty years later, transgender people in the United States are facing a similar form of legal exclusion from public facilities, albeit without the placards.
According to the Trans Legislation Tracker, there have been 793 bills this year under consideration in forty-three states, all designed to strip civil rights from trans people. Of these measures—which seek to block trans people from accessing health care, autonomy, and legal recognition—fifty-five have passed, seventy have failed, and the rest remain active. Even in my liberal blue state of Massachusetts, the legislature has introduced six anti-trans bills.
Many of these bills seek to limit trans people’s access to public space by barring them one of the most routine aspects of daily life: using the bathroom. Bathroom bills seek to restrict trans individuals from using public restrooms and other sex-segregated facilities including locker rooms, that correspond with their gender identity. There are currently forty-five bills under consideration nationwide that, if implemented, would restrict trans people from accessing public bathrooms. The majority of these laws would impose steep fines and serious legal consequences for individuals who knowingly enter a public restroom or changing room that is not aligned with their sex assigned at birth, as well as for public institutions or individuals that fail to enforce the policy.
While many of these bills have yet to be enacted, some bathroom bills are already signed into law. In March, Idaho Governor Brad Little approved into law House Bill 752, which makes it illegal for trans people to use public or private bathrooms that align with their gender identity, with the exception of extenuating circumstances, including instances of natural disaster, providing assistance to law enforcement, or performing custodial services. Violating the law, which goes into effect on July 1, can result in a misdemeanor charge, and a second offense within five years can result in a felony conviction and up to five years in prison.
Before the bill was passed, Nikson Mathews, a resident of Boise, Idaho, wrote about his experience as a trans man with a beard in The Advocate. “As a transgender man, if I use the men’s bathroom, I risk being reported, questioned, or arrested, because someone believes I don’t belong there. And if I use the women’s bathroom, as the bill would require, I risk something else entirely,” Mathews wrote, later adding, “There is no good choice. Risk imprisonment, or risk a beating or worse at the hands of cis men.”
The struggle for safe bathroom access is not new for trans people in the United States. Anti-trans bathroom bills gained national attention in 2016, when North Carolina passed HB2, the first state law in the country to restrict transgender restroom access. The following year, the Trump Administration rescinded guidance from President Barack Obama’s administration that had allowed transgender students to use facilities that aligned with their gender identity, arguing that existing civil rights law did not explicitly cover gender identity. As Laverne Cox, a Black trans woman, actress, and activist, explained in an interview on Hardball with Chris Matthews, these policies reach far beyond bathrooms—they shape whether trans people can safely participate in everyday life.
“When trans people can’t access public bathrooms, we can’t go to school effectively, go to work effectively, access health-care facilities—it’s about us existing in public space,” Cox said at the time. “And those who oppose trans people having access to the facilities consistent with how we identify know that all the things they claim don’t actually happen. It’s really about us not existing—about erasing trans people.”
Since then, the fight around bathroom bans has continued to center on a fundamental question: Who has the right to exist freely in public space?
As an African American, I see unmistakable parallels between the denial of restroom access to transgender people today and the segregation of Jim Crow, when Black Americans were barred from lunch counters, water fountains, and restrooms in public spaces. As a lesbian, I also recognize how policing who belongs in which bathroom harms not only trans people, but also nonbinary and gender-nonconforming individuals—especially when judgments are made based on appearance, such as labeling a woman as “too butch” or a man as “too effeminate.”
Look no further than Boston, Massachusetts, where last year a hotel security guard accused a lesbian cisgender woman of being a man inside the women’s restroom, kicking her out and forcing her to provide identification to prove her gender.
Cisnormative assumptions about gender roles and appearances, which treat cisgender identity as the default, create misperceptions that affect many people, including cisgender women whose appearances have changed due to health issues. I saw this firsthand when a friend of mine was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had never before faced any incorrect assumptions about her gender from others, but after she underwent a radical mastectomy and lost her once-admired dreadlocks due to radiation and chemotherapy, that changed. During a day jaunt to Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, me and my sistah-friends stopped at an upscale, all-white restaurant, where we noticed eyes were on us the moment we entered. The experience quickly turned humiliating and insulting when my friend was mistaken for a predatory Black man entering the women’s bathroom. Outraged, we immediately left the restaurant.
Public restrooms were a flashpoint during the Jim Crow era, much as they are now. Following the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision and lasting through the mid-1960s, a tapestry of segregation laws took root in the United States and particularly in the South, often requiring Black and white Americans to use separate public restrooms. Like modern anti-trans bathroom bills, businesses refusing to enforce these laws could face fines or even lose their operating license, while Black individuals in violation were subject to strict criminal penalties and vigilante violence.
States across the country are making laws based on a binary view of gender that places an individual into one of two distinct categories determined at birth, just like they used to make laws based on a binary view of skin color. These laws are employing the same framework of fear, othering, exclusion, and stigma. During Jim Crow, African American men were portrayed as sexual predators and a physical threat to white women; today, trans women are portrayed in the same way, as a threat to cisgender women in restrooms.
For many social conservatives, support for anti-trans bathroom bills is rooted in a literal interpretation of the Bible that views biological sex as a divinely ordained binary and immutable, akin to skin color. This perspective continues to influence public policy debates, even as it collides with the lived realities of transgender people whose gender identity differs from their biological sex assigned at birth. Meanwhile, many of these bills are justified with claims about safety—invoking fears of trans people as predators and voyeurs who will perpetrate assaults in public restrooms. Yet there is no credible evidence that trans-inclusive policies increase the risk of assault. Research shows the opposite: No evidence points to an increase in safety or privacy violations when the right of transgender individuals to use appropriate facilities was protected. But when denied access to gendered spaces, transgender individuals are more likely to face harassment or violence.
Most often appearing on stickers in public restrooms, the slogan “A trans person peed here and no one was harmed” cuts through the transphobic and fear-mongering rhetoric. It highlights a simple truth: Inclusion does not create danger, but exclusion does. Denying trans people access to safe restrooms puts them at risk, reinforcing the urgent need for inclusive, all-gender, or gender-neutral restrooms.
Bathroom bills effectively criminalize a routine human need, turning it into what amounts to a “toilet crime.” However, the real crime lies in the failure of lawmakers to protect the dignity and safety of transgender people. Access to a restroom is not a privilege—it is a basic human necessity. When that access is denied, it becomes a question not just of policy, but of fundamental equality.
A previous version of this article appeared in LGBTQ Nation.