The recent spate of anti-LGBT bathroom bills across the country were built to solve a problem that doesn’t exist—that of sexual predators busting into ladies’ rooms by pretending to be women. It’s also creating a fun new problem by empowering ordinary folks to pretend as though they have a unique ability to gaze into people’s minds/hearts/shorts and determine where they should be peeing.
Earlier this week, a video went viral of a lesbian being forced out of a bathroom by male police officers who didn’t think she looked like a woman. And now, via the Dallas Observer, we have this charming video of a man interrogating a woman to make sure she’s peeing in the right spot.
Reporter Eric Nicholson writes that the video was shot by Jessica Rush at the Baylor Medical Center in the suburb of Frisco on Thursday. (Full disclosure: I used to work at the Observer and Eric is my friend.) Rush was born female. She identifies as a woman. She was in the right place, bathroom-wise, but because she had on basketball shorts and has short hair, the dude had to check things out.
“You didn’t look like a girl when I saw you enter,” he explains, from the door of the bathroom. “I thought you was...”
“A boy?” Rush responds dryly.
“Yeah, it was kind of confusing,” he says. And then: “It’s difficult. You’re dressed like a man. You’re dressed like a man.”
“That’s the shit we deal with,” Rush says, sounding resigned, as the man retreats.
This is going to keep happening. Our legislators have guaranteed that it’s going to keep happening. And while the self-appointed toilet patrol is annoying enough, what’s much more worrisome is that, inevitably, one of them will escalate to an act of violence.
Here’s the video shot by Rush. One person in it is standing at the door of the wrong bathroom, inquiring about something that’s none of his business. See if you can spot who it is!
Image via Voice Media Group/screengrab