Riki Wilchins: ‘Not Passing is Now a Criminal Offense’
Thanks to the Trump administration, policing gender is becoming the norm -- and it's about much more than trans women.
A Tucson Walmart called the police on a Black “stud”-identified lesbian last month, claiming a man had entered the women’s room.
The two male Pima County sheriff’s deputies accosted 19-year-old Kalaya Morton just after she had used a tampon and while she was in the stall still trying to pee.
They demanded that she come out immediately, which she was unable to do. Even after she finished her business and exited the stall, lifting her shirt to show the two men that she was a cisgender woman, one of the male deputies still complained that Kalaya “looked like a man.”
And there you have it.
Anti-transgender bathroom laws are publicly characterized as intended to force transgender people to use facilities corresponding with their bio-sex and keep male perverts out of restrooms. But they aren’t really about either one: they’re about “passing” as a woman.
Because red states haven’t (yet) mandated biometric scanners outside public restrooms to determine our sex, anti-trans bathroom laws have to depend upon citizen vigilantes willing to police gender.
As a result, anyone who thinks that a person going into the ladies’ room is “too masculine” is now empowered to call the police and have them arrested. Or, like Kalaya Morton, rousted from the restroom while peeing and forced to prove their sex.
But the mathematics are off: only about one in every hundred women is transgender, so the odds of that “masculine-looking person” in the ladies’ room being cisgender are about ninety-nine-to-one.
This just happened on Capitol Hill, where professional transphobes Reps. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) barged into the House women’s restroom, seeking to confront the first out transgender Member of Congress, Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.) to tell her, “You shouldn’t be here.”
Except it wasn’t McBride.
McBride aside, as with Kalaya, this kind of gender policing inevitably falls most heavily on women of color, whether cisgender or trans, who are viewed by white people as failing to embody traditional Eurocentric ideals of white femininity.
Even in cases where just trans people are concerned, laws restricting bathroom access disproportionately impact trans women.
Trans men are generally unaffected by such laws because males, in general, tend to feel less offended by genderqueer occupants of their restrooms (as the many women who have dashed from ridiculously long women’s room lines to “liberate” the men’s room can attest). It’s not always true, but it mostly is.
Such laws are also unlikely to affect the many trans women I see on X who proudly post selfies as they defiantly breaking red state bathroom laws. I haven’t conducted actual scientific polling, but many look to me like conventional middle-class, predominantly white women.
The trans people who are most harmed by bathroom bans, as currently enforced, are those trans women who can’t or don’t “pass” — women who are non-op, pre-op, have more masculine facial structures, or (like me) have taller, wide-shouldered, small-breasted bodies and offend the sensibilities of MAGA white women and lesbian TERFs who have self-anointed themselves as enforcers of what a “real woman” should look like.
Without make-up and with short hair and in androgynous clothes, I don’t pass as much of anything these days. Still, I’ve learned enough tricks of the trade to usually (if not always) not attract too much attention from the other female occupants of Florida’s women’s rooms.
But these laws will disproportionately penalize trans women who are younger, still transitioning, and still learning the “game.” And, of course, they will also penalize cisgender lesbian butches who refuse to conform to traditional notions of femininity or beauty.
In other words, not looking cisgender enough has now been criminalized. And lesbian youth of color, like Kalaya, are the most likely to be targeted as part of this ongoing crackdown against gender nonconformity. Where is the lesbian nation of butches I see proudly at the forefront of every summer Pride Parade standing with “Dykes on Bikes” to denounce such laws and stand up to those who push for them?
Riki Wilchins runs a news ticker of trans stories as they break at @rikiwilchins.bsky.social. She blogs about trans issues and politics at www.medium.com/@rikiwilchins. Her latest book is BAD INK: How the NYTimes SOLD OUT Transgender Teens.
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