Mississippi State University anti-discrimination policy protects transgender people in their choice of restroom so all people are allowed to use the restroom that matches their gender regardless of whether their gender correlates with their genitals. On MSU’s campus, no person, trans or otherwise, has to fear harm or arrest for simply needing to empty their bladder.

Over in Houston, Texas, a war of words has been waged over the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, or HERO for short. Abc13.com reported that though the ordinance does not give protected classes (race, age, sexual orientation and gender  identity) any rights not already afforded to them by other laws, HERO does allow Houstonians an option to file discrimination complaints with city hall rather than filing a federal claim.

According to the Human Rights Campaign, the Nov. 3 election took away this one alternative of having to navigate the federal court system for something like discrimination in the workplace. The vote failed miserably with 61.1 percent voting for the repeal, according to the Caspio political database.  

This vote was disheartening to people across the nation, not just Houstonians, especially because polls in October were suggesting a large margin of success for keeping the ordinance in place.

What’s strange is the ordinance explicitly protected not only LGBTQ people, but people of all races, ages and disabilities, yet all of the backlash against the ordinance was based upon the completely erroneous and defamatory idea that transgender people are inherently rapists looking to attack people in bathrooms.

Why is that? Well, it’s far easier to attack a thing most people are ignorant about than something that has already been taken into common knowledge as not at all someone’s choice. It would be just as absurd, but surely far less viable of an argument, to claim age was a clear indicator of identifying sexual predators.  We all get older, unless we die prematurely, so this argument would strike us as absolutely nonsensical.  Not everyone is transgender and not everyone personally knows a trans person, however, and there is still the prevalent belief that one can simply choose to be trans or not. Combine this with the twisted view our society has for “acceptable” masculinity and suddenly everyone becomes suspicious of a gender-nonconforming or trans person either perceived as a man or who was designated male at birth. 

Stir  up  some   fear against a little-known group of people and your true intentions can be masked rather easily. It is a fear of the unknown that drives this mob mentality while stripping protections away from anyone who is not a straight, white, able-bodied, neurotypical, gender-conforming, middle-aged, Christian man. There is no evidence to suggest that a trans woman, someone designated male at birth who identifies as a woman, regardless of appearance or medical history – or a trans man, for that matter, is more likely than any other person to become a rapist by sneaking into the wrong bathroom. 

Never mind that the ordinance was not even about bathrooms and there is no law that permits anyone to assault anyone and the Rape Response Service reports “approximately 50 percent of transgender people experience sexual violence at some point in their lifetime,” a statistic for sexual violence only second to those with disabilities. All of this was ignored while anti-HERO lobbyists screamed about protecting only a portion of women, stating, “the straight and not trans ones, in bathrooms.” Also, everyone can simply ignore the fact that if the anti-HERO lobbyists only wanted to strip protections from trans people and not other minority groups, they could have lobbied for about a two or three word change to the ordinance instead of having HERO in its entirety repealed.

But this was all about scary “men in dresses” wanting to rape women in bathrooms, right?