Xenia’s Zombie Propaganda: Trumped-Up Charges of Indecency Haunt Hearing on Bathroom Ban

A trans woman was acquitted of public indecency charges for changing in a women’s locker room, but the persecution of trans people is only getting started in OH.

by Evan Urquhart

In Ohio yesterday about 30 people testified in favor of HB 183, a bill that would ban transgender people from school bathrooms in all K-12 schools and colleges in the state. According to the Ohio LGBTQ+ news site the Buckeye Flame, “nearly every transphobic trope in the conservative playbook, from deadnaming to using outdated language to rampant fear-mongering” was employed by conservative proponents of the bill. In addition, coverage of the hearing in both the Buckeye Flame and the Ohio Capital Journal noted that much of the testimony revolved around an incident in Xenia, OH, where a trans woman was accused of public indecency for using a women’s locker room at the YMCA.

The story in Xenia is an example of how smear campaigns and harassment that target innocent transgender people linger as weapons against the transgender community even after they are discredited. It started when a Republican official solicited conservative women who had used the YMCA locker room with a local trans women, encouraging them to make bogus police complaints. The right-wing media trumpeted the story, but a judge ultimately found the trans woman had done nothing inappropriate. Now, the presence of a trans woman in the TMCA in Xenia is being used to argue for a ban on trans girls using girls bathrooms at school, on the basis that some cis girls might be uncomfortable with them being there.

Examples of trans girls and women behaving inappropriately in women’s bathrooms or locker rooms incredibly rare. In addition to one known case of this happening in 2021, right-wing media have made numerous attempts to manufacture an incident, not just in Xenia but in Randolph, VT, Springfield, IL, Santee, CA. None of these stories ultimately turned out to involve inappropriate behavior on the part of the trans woman, or even the incidental exposure of genitalia while showering or getting changed.

There have likewise been few, if any, reported cases of sexual assaults by men posing as trans women to gain entry into women’s spaces. A report by the Williams institute in 2018 found no link between nondiscrimination policies protecting trans people and reports of privacy violations or crimes.

Still, the effort to restrict trans people to spaces according to their birth-assigned sex marches on. In Ohio, proponents were quite direct about their disinterest in the safety or wellbeing of trans people in their state. As one proponent of HB 183, Ohio State Board of Education Member Brendan Shea, stated according to the Courier-Journal, “I’m not primarily concerned about those who identify as transgender individuals.”

Other proponents were either lying or misinformed. Representative Bill Dean, from Xenia, seems not to have understood that trans men use men’s bathrooms and locker rooms, too. Here’s his statement to that effect as quoted in the Buckeye Flame:

screenshot from the Buckeye Flame

As legislative efforts to target the trans community continue, lies and propaganda from the right consistently grease the skids.