Opponents of transgender equality have long argued that respecting people’s gender identities will somehow endanger women and make them vulnerable to assault or invasion of privacy. A group of psychiatrists recently investigated this claim, however, and found almost nothing to support the argument.
In a new study published in The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, a team of researchers sought out any evidence they could find that sexual predators are somehow taking advantage of transgender equality. Despite searching various archives, the only claims they found were those being peddled by anti-LGBTQ groups like the Family Research Council, American Family Association, and Liberty Counsel. Those lists did not survive the researchers’ scrutiny.
“A thorough review revealed that only a small number of cases actually involve perpetrators who were transgender, perpetrators who falsely claimed to be transgender, or perpetrators who attempted to disguise themselves as a member of the opposite sex to gain restroom access,” the report stated.
In an op-ed for HuffPost Tuesday, lead researcher Brian Barnett, a psychiatrist in Cleveland, Ohio, was a bit more blunt. “We found only one instance — one! — of a transgender perpetrator in an alleged sex crime in a changing room,” he wrote.
“Likewise,” he continued, “we found just one case where a man (who, frankly, sounds like a provocateur) allegedly entered a women’s locker room without disguising his gender in any way and stated that a new local law expanding transgender bathroom access allowed him to be there.” That man was a provocateur, and the Washington State Human Rights Commission clarified immediately afterward that the law in no way protected his behavior.
(Analysis by Media Matters similarly found no evidence that passing transgender protections has led to any increase into sexual assault.) Read more via Think Progress
The Transgender Bathroom Debate at the Intersection of Politics, Law, Ethics, and Science
Brian S. Barnett, Ariana E. Nesbit, Renée M. Sorrentino
Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law Online Jun 2018, 46 (2) 232-241; DOI:10.29158/JAAPL.003761-18
Abstract
The debate over whether transgender individuals should be allowed to use the public restrooms (including locker rooms and changing rooms) that correspond to their currently expressed gender rather than their biological sex has been of recent interest nationally. The first state law addressing transgender access to restrooms was in North Carolina in 2016. This law prohibited transgender individuals from using the restroom that corresponded to their gender. The terms used in the bill and other legal documents caused it to be referred to as the “bathroom bill.” Shortly thereafter, such bills were proposed in many states. Proponents of the bills identify the need to protect public safety by mandating that individuals use the facility that corresponds to their biological sex. Opponents describe such bills as discriminatory. The debate about these bills incorporates ethics-related, legal, and biological arguments. In this commentary, we review the history of such bills in the United States as well as the ethics-related, legal, and evidence-based arguments raised in the debate.