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Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.
“I just don’t know how to go to the bathroom in the free world!” — Ray Durem, “Award (A Gold Watch to the FBI Man Who has Followed Me for 25 Years),” 1964
Three weeks ago, the Texas Women’s Privacy Act, or Senate Bill 8, went into effect. Judging a law by its title, one might guess that legislators voted to rescind some of our state’s draconian restrictions on reproductive choice.
In fact, the opposite was the case. Last session, in a separate bill similarly dressed up in delusive euphemism, the Republican-controlled Lege passed the Woman & Child Protection Act, which empowers self-appointed avengers to sue out-of-state healthcare providers for hundreds of thousands of dollars should they mail women medication to terminate unsought pregnancies.
No, instead SB8 represents — after years of failed attempts — Republicans’ successful passage of a so-called “bathroom bill.”
The new law proscribes all government buildings, from universities to prisons, to “take every reasonable step to ensure” that transgender men, boys, women and girls be barred from availing themselves of the restrooms and locker rooms to which they’ve grown accustomed to using without incident. The first time a state agency lets trans people access the facilities of the gender with which they align, they could face a $25,000 civil penalty, and another $125,000 every time after that.
“Each day of a continuing violation constitutes a separate violation,” the law reads. And the Texas Attorney General may recover “court costs, attorney’s fees, investigative costs, witness fees” and other financial compensation from the offending institution.
Would strip-searching a student to check their “reproductive system” constitute a “reasonable step” to keep restrooms transgender-free?
Despite GOP lawmakers wasting nearly a decade to craft this bill, it doesn’t say.
We are informed that custodians and maintenance workers are exempt, however, as are emergency technicians and cops, and the ban doesn’t apply to those assisting young children or the elderly or the disabled, who may need help using the toilet. Nor, presumably, does it apply to those imminently chasing down a purse thief.
As of today, “San Antonio is committed to complying with the Texas Women’s Privacy Act,” according to the city’s official website — under a tab cynically marked “Civil Rights.”
“This isn’t about protecting girls, it’s about turning neighbors into narcs,” State Rep. Jolanda Jones told the Houston Chronicle back in August. “It’s creating what I call ‘vagina vigilantes’,” she continued, or “strangers empowered to decide gender based on nothing more than their prejudice, ‘Who is man enough, who is woman enough to use a restroom?'”
While Jones is largely right, she appeared to miss the larger, more worrisome target: many supporters of legislation such as SB 8 want to erase transgender people altogether.
Longtime San Antonio Current hate-reader and right-wing activist Jack Finger, for instance, facetiously expressed his desire to castrate trans women for using their familiar lavatory.
“I’ve seen it at least a couple of times in San Antonio,” Finger said in open testimony before the Committee on State Affairs this summer, “and I was tempted to help that gentleman save money on his transgendered operation by physically helping him get there.”
Or consider an indicative headline from far-right online magazine The Federalist: “It’s Time To Eradicate Transgenderism From Public Life.” And how does the publication’s senior editor propose to accomplish that? “We should treat the ideology of transgenderism the way we treated radical Islamism after 9/11 or communism in the 1950s,” he wrote, referring to the racist Bush-era roundups of Muslim Americans and the indecent Constitution-shredding of the McCarthy era, respectively. “Anyone advocating or working to advance gender ideology should be treated as a criminal and an enemy of the people.”
Sadly, such villainization goes well beyond idle rhetorical fantasy. Writing for the Texas Newsroom last week, investigative reporter Lauren McGaughy discovered through a records request that the Department of Public Safety “has amassed a list of 110 people who tried to update their gender between August 2024 and 2025,” and it’s “unclear what the state is doing with this information.” On the flip side though, when have idle government enemies lists ever come back to haunt us?
Many Texan parents of transgender children aren’t waiting around to find out. In 2022, after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton threatened to sic protective services on parents who dare to follow the consensus medical advice of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association and the Pediatric Endocrine Society regarding age-appropriate gender-affirming care, the intrepid 12-year-old activist Sunny Bryant fled Red America altogether. Her family is no doubt one of hundreds, and we’re a less friendlier state for it.
Religious and non-religious people alike have historically stigmatized LGBTQ+ people as perverted delusional freaks. The Republican Party of Texas platform still refers to homosexuality as “an abnormal lifestyle choice.”
Yet two of the loudest demands insisted on by the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement in this country were marriage and military service. What could be more normal and middle-of-the-road than that?
Well, except perhaps micturating in peace or participating in interscholastic sports.
“Whenever I hear the simplistic edict that there should be ‘no men in women’s sports’, my first instinct is to agree,” prolific author and current PEN America President Jennifer Finney Boylan wrote. “Because transgender women are not ‘really’ men. We are women. ‘No men in women’s sports’ or ‘There are only two sexes’ make great bumper stickers. ‘Common sense’ is what the president calls it. But just because arguments against trans people’s right to exist are easy to make, that does not make them any less wrong.”
And what of those serving in uniform? This month, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals let stand Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s ban on trans troops.
“I’m very disappointed,” a transgender Marine told the Associated Press in June. “I’ve outperformed, I have a spotless record. I’m at the top of every fitness report. I’m being pushed out while I know others are barely scraping by.”
Adding insult to this suspension of merit-based recruitment, the Air Force has announced it will deny full retirement benefits to trans personnel.
“I’ve been in this race five days and I’ve had a lot of interviews with national media, but no one’s ever asked me about the cost of housing, prescription drugs or childcare,” Democratic Texas Rep. James Talarico vented early in his U.S. Senate campaign. “The only thing the media wants to ask me about are trans athletes.”
More strategic than the senseless distraction is turning vulnerable communities into culture war wedges.
“The only minority destroying this country is the billionaires,” Talarico elaborated. “Trans people aren’t taking away our health care. It’s the billionaires and their puppet politicians.”
Or to quote Emmy Award-winning actress Laverne Cox, ”At the end of the day, trans people are less than 1% of the population. We’re not the reason that you can’t buy a house or your rent is too high. I think [this administration is] focused on the wrong 1%.”
Maybe you feel called to read the Bible like a science textbook. Maybe you’re not up to date on all the hip new terms and are afraid of faux pas as much as neurotic columnists such as myself. But surely we can all agree there’s a kinder, less humiliating way to treat each other than Senate Bill 8, and far more effective ways of giving folks their privacy.
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