Odessa, TX, puts $10,000 bounty on trans bathroomgoers
Last week, Odessa’s city council passed an ordinance barring trans people from the correct bathrooms and allowing anybody to sue suspected violators of this ban. This is, shockingly, a really terrible idea!
Humor by Alyssa Steinsiek
Texas, as usual, is doing it bigger.
By it, of course, I mean bigotry. Texas is on a multi-year tour de force of anti-trans legislation including a statewide ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth, interstate subpoenas issued by Attorney General Ken Paxton to Washington and Georgia to try and hunt down trans kids receiving treatment outside the purview of The Lone Star State, and more than one attempt to assemble a list of transgender Texans (and bar them from altering their identification) for unspecified nefarious purposes. Without a doubt, Texas is one of a handful of red states who have turned legislative transphobia into a professional sport, and then banned trans people from competing in it over concerns about fair competition.
Now the Odessa, Texas, city council has betrayed the inclusive familial values of coach Eric Taylor by both banning transgender people from using the correct bathrooms and explicitly allowing Texans to sue anybody they believe to be in the wrong bathroom for damages of $10,000 at a minimum, which—as Erin Reed points out in her reporting on the ban—is almost identical to Texas’ anti-abortion bounty hunting scheme.
Hold on, was the Friday Night Lights TV show also set in Odessa, or was that just the movie?
The ban was passed 5-2 by the city council last Tuesday after local Odessans spent the better part of an hour fervently arguing against the heinous measure. You have almost certainly heard their points before:
For a start, enforcing bathroom bans is nearly impossible. Despite what some absolutely unhinged people would have you think, identifying a transgender person at a glance is rarely easy. The natural variance in secondary sexual characteristics and social signifiers of gender (things like hair styling, makeup or the clothes we choose to wear) make assumptions of gender risky business.
Besides that, transgender people in public bathrooms is simply not a “real problem,” as PFLAG Midland/Odessa chapter president Alexander Ermels argued during the meeting. “Instead, it's creating one, making people worried about something that just is not an issue.”
Bathroom policing bills could also open the city itself up to liability lawsuits, which is why city ordinances rarely make allowances for new lawsuits at a local level. Imbuing every Odessan with the God-given right to litigate against a stranger for looking the “wrong” way in a public bathroom is, simply put, begging for trouble. Consider the high stakes drama that occurs between PTA parents, then picture one Karen lawyering up to try and squeeze ten grand out of some “boy mom” she testifies must have a penis because she’s 5’8” with a choppy pixie cut.
It’s gonna get ugly fast.
The new ordinance makes allowance for opposite sex parents of kids under the age of 12 accompanying them into the restroom but, importantly, does not extend the same courtesy to disabled people who may need a second party’s help when using the restroom. I doubt the dignity and comfort of disabled people is ever a priority for bigoted lawmakers like those on the Odessa city council, but it’s no surprise to me that any concern for marginalized people would go straight out the window when an opportunity to harm trans folks is on the table.
What else is there to say? It’s a new low in the stark landscape of anti-trans legislation, a “solution” to a problem that does not exist that threatens to bog down the local court system in frivolous lawsuits. Is there a solution in sight? Is there a remedy for this kind of malicious ideological lawmaking? What can we do in the face of such evil?
My advice is to just shit in the street until the city council changes their mind.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer who spends too much time playing video games!
