Not In Our Name: Cisgender Women Against Trans Bathroom Bans
House Democratic Caucus Leadership
House Representative Nancy Mace and the Congressional GOP have launched a campaign of harassment not just against newly-elected trans Democrat Rep Sarah McBride of Delaware, but against all trans and nonbinary people, through a newly proposed piece of legislation called the "Protecting Women's Private Spaces" Act, which would restrict bathroom usage in all federal buildings by biological sex, forcing trans people to use bathrooms designated for a gender with which they don't identify, and which they may not present as, which dramatically increases their risk of harassment and violence. We have also seen, over the years, as these bills increase nationwide, that they don't make cis women safer either; many of us have personally experienced increased harassment in bathrooms because of how we look, or we know someone who has. Proponents of these bans continually insist that they are vital for the protection of cisgender women and girls. This makes it incredibly important for cisgender women and girls to loudly stand up and refuse to be used as a shield for this bigotry.
Please share this petition with the cis women in your life to add their names (and their stories, if they wish to share them).
Cis men, you can help by forwarding this and spreading the word; but the more signatures we can share from the population specifically being named in the title of this legislation, the more impact it will have.
Thank you all!
Petition by
To:
House Democratic Caucus Leadership
From:
[Your Name]
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, Democratic Leader
Rep. Katherine Clark, Democratic Whip
Rep. Pete Aguilar, Democratic Caucus Chairman
Rep. Ted Lieu, Democratic Caucus Vice Chair
Rep. Joe Neguse, Assistant Democratic Leader
To the House Democratic Caucus Leadership:
On November 20th, Rep. Nancy Mace introduced a federal trans bathroom ban under the title of the "Protecting Women's Private Spaces Act." While this began as an attempt to bar newly-elected Representative Sarah McBride of Delaware from using the women's restroom in her own place of work as a legislator - which is unacceptable on its own merits - it will not end there. Speaker Johnson's decree in support of Mace's proposal reiterated the same argument: that this is an act designed to protect women, to keep us safe, because "women deserve women's only spaces." To introduce this legislation on the International Transgender Day of Remembrance - a day commemorating trans people worldwide who have died due to hate and violence - is appalling. To pretend Mike Johnson and the House GOP care about the safety of women, given the candidate they just elected and the Cabinet nominations he continues to make, is beyond naive.
Over the past several years, as trans bathroom bans have been enacted in communities across the country, we have seen firsthand the cascading negative effects. No one is made safer by this. Certainly trans youth are not, as we saw firsthand from the shocking, violent death of Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old nonbinary youth in Oklahoma who complied with exactly such a bathroom restriction and was brutally beaten by classmates in February of this year. But even the women and girls these bills purport to protect are at increased risk; this legislation empowers individuals with narrow definitions of gender presentation to appoint themselves bathroom cops, and harass anyone they do not believe is publicly performing the role of womanhood correctly. Lesbians and butch women, women who are unusually tall, women who have short hair, women who wear baggy or "masculine" clothes, women of color in professional sports whose bodies are critiqued for their strength, even simply women who wear baseballs caps: all of this is sufficient evidence for increased harassment. This is not even a new phenomenon; there are news stories of exactly these cases going back to the bathroom bans of 2016. It will not just be Rep. McBride who suffers for this; it will be your own congressional staff - anyone who is queer, trans, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming, or simply does not fit the stereotype of female physical appearance - whose workplace harassment you would be enabling if Mace's proposal is allowed to pass.
I am a cisgender woman, and so are the signatories of this petition. We resist, in the most forceful terms, the use of our bodies and identities as justification for the further marginalization of one of America's most vulnerable minorities. As a cis lesbian, I have never once felt unsafe in the presence of trans or nonbinary people. On the contrary, I consider them my community and my siblings. The people who make women's restrooms unsafe are people like Nancy Mace, who are banking on the silent complicity of other cisgender women to support the lie that the majority of us feel safer and more comfortable with trans people pushed out of our spaces. The end goal of trans bathroom bans is not limited to who uses which bathroom; it is a way to test the public's compliance with eradicating trans and nonbinary people from public spaces altogether. In the wake of the recent presidential election loss, it seems clear that it is also a test of the moral backbone of the Democratic Party, and whether we will choose to abandon our progressive values for the sake of expedience and permit more Nex Benedicts to suffer.
The "Protecting Women's Private Spaces Act" does not speak for me, or for the cisgender women and girls who sign their names to this petition, and we refuse to be used as a shield for this flagrant bigotry. We strongly urge the Democratic Caucus Leadership to resist this legislation, and any further iterations of it now or in future. Individually, we pledge to speak up and interrupt any acts of aggression or harassment we see in bathrooms or other public spaces towards trans and nonbinary people, and to withhold our votes in future Democratic primaries from any candidate who refuses to stand with us to defend and support them. No more of this in our names.