For starters, I apologize in advance if this topic has already been covered in a different thread, and I apologize if it is more suitable for a different forum.
The Question: Setting aside debate over the rightness or wrongness of transgender bathroom bills, why did these laws suddenly become a hot button topic of 2016?
I can’t recall any specific incident inciting public outrage over this topic. Transgendered people have been using whatever bathroom they think is right for years now, and nobody seemed too concerned about it until just recently. Even the South Dakota governor said it was a solution in search of a problem. So from a purely factual perspective, what chain of events made this topic a public concern that suddenly needed to be addressed?
The media/industrial complex always needs new hot button material. There’s a journalism adage in the new paradigm: It is easier to make news than to find it.
I think the OP is asking what event, if any, triggered the chain of events. My understanding is that some cities started extending anti-discrimination laws to include gender identity, and others started to try to curb this trend - e.g. North Carolina’s bathroom bill was, in part, a response to Charlotte passing an anti-discrimination ordinance.
But it’s not a matter of the media - it’s been largely actions or attempted actions by governmental bodies.
I think a lot of what got it started is reaction to the Caitlyn Jenner story from last year.
But it’s being blown up so much by the Republicans because they see it as something to whip up outrage in lower echelons of their voter base, and offset some of the damage Trump is doing.
Or, according to a March 2015 article in Mother Jones titled “Get Ready for the Conservative Assault on Where Transgender Americans Pee,” it may be due in large part to one specific conservative lobbying group:
ETA: the above article predates Caitlyn Jenner coming out as transgender.
During election years, they like to find “non-issue” things to argue about (abortion, gay marriage, etc.)…
Instead of discussing REAL issues which affect us every day - like jobs, healthcare, why the US is giving away billions of dollars to foreign countries, yet does not have the money to repair our bridges here, why only some presidential candidates are in the news, how big corporations and foreign governments pay off our elected officials, etc.
The City Council had passed this inflammatory rule but activists forced it onto the ballot. The ads for HERO showed wholesome folks of all descriptions explaining how it would protect them. The ads against were frightening pieces of scaremongering, all focusing on the nonexistent problem of Transgender Molesters In The Ladies Room.
The anti-activists were appalled to discover that Houston had a Lesbian Mayor! (Annise Parker is mayor no longer–because of term limits. She served 3 two-year terms. From now on, the limit is 2 four-year terms.)
HERO failed in the election & bigots everywhere took notice.
In 2015, Houston voters overturned a recent law to protect certain people. This included trans people’s rights to use the suitable bathroom. Among many others.
The people opposing it had a very large agenda. But they found that focusing on the “perv men in little girl’s bathrooms” nonsense was incredibly effective.
Other anti-whatever groups have learned this lesson to initiate their own discriminatory laws. As long as the trans-bathroom issue is one part of it, they can rile people up with the “perv” crap. The rest of these laws gets ignored, of course.
The roots of this movement can actually be traced back to the anti-ERA movement in the 70s which used bathroom propaganda. A lesson, in turn, learned from the “whites only” bathroom laws of the Jim Crow era. (The basic starting point for the POV of a large segment of the voting public.)
Without getting int GD territory, it should be noted that the first laws that were passed were the ones, as in CA several years ago, requiring places, including schools, to allow anyone to use the bathroom corresponding to that person’s “gender identity”. Plus you have the whole Caitlyn Jenner phenomenon. It should not be too surprising that some folks would react thinking that social change was being forced on them. We’ve seen this many times in the past.
It’s a cultural marker issue. Do social conservatives actually have a day to day problem with trans people continually in bathrooms that social conservatives think they should not be in? No.
But politicians who want to appeal to social conservatives need an issue they can fight for loudly that show they are social conservatives. Someone who is just quietly a social conservative isn’t going to get free publicity just for being so. But someone who loudly proclaims they are passing a law to show how voraciously socially conservative they are will get free headlines out the wazoo. And then of course the social progressive politicians get to play the game from the other side by showing how progressive they are by fighting back fiercely. Or the whole thing could be the other way around, swapping roles.
It’s like a guy in a bar trying to impress a woman over how tough he is, and consequently starting a fistfight over someone who accidentally spills the woman’s drink. The spilled drink is a little irritating, but would under normal circumstances be shrugged off. But it becomes a way of grandstanding to show your credentials as a protector.
Yes. I was a bit unclear in my first post since I mentioned the CA law, but didn’t mean that I was only referring to that particular law. There are others in other states.
And that Jenner story is the media, which by your admission, the governmental bodies reacted to. The media decides what comes to public attention, and legislatures knee-jerk. One radical fringe state legislator introduces a goofy bill (based on what he read in a tabloid or saw on daytime-FoxNews or heard about in his barber shop), and nobody dares vote against it, because they’d look like atheo-commies.
