It seems Republicans in the Ohio General Assembly are not done targeting the rights of the state’s transgender community.
First, the veto-proof Republican supermajority wanted to make it illegal for doctors to give various forms of gender-affirming care to minors and wanted to ban transgender girls from participating in women’s sports. Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed that bill, but it could still be resurrected by the full legislature.
Now, it seems, they are well on the way toward appointing themselves the Bathroom Police for students in Ohio’s K-12 schools and universities with House Bill 183, which would make it illegal for a transgender person to use a school bathroom that corresponds with the gender they have adopted.
The two sponsors of the bill, Republicans Beth Lear of the village of Galena in Delaware County, and Adam Bird of New Richmond, appear mostly concerned about trans girls using girls’ bathrooms.
“We don’t want young ladies to feel they are subject to a possible assault,” Bird said at a hearing before the Ohio House Higher Education Committee in October. “Those alleged assaults have happened in bathrooms across America and we don’t want them to be exposed in an indecent way.”
There is little to no evidence to support that argument, however.
In fact, the opposite is true. A 2019 study found that transgender teens in schools with bathroom restrictions are at higher risk of sexual assault.
House Bill 183 seems to assume that if that trans girl walks into a girls’ bathroom, she is up to no good.
“It really seems to be an obsession with them at this point,” said Maria Bruno, public policy director at Equality Ohio, an LGBTQ+ advocacy and legal aid organization.
House Bill 183, Bruno said, “is partisan politics at the expense of an already discriminated-against minority. [Republicans] are trying to create a culture of fear where there was no fear.”
The bill that Lear and Bird introduced last year has 19 Republican co-sponsors — some of the most conservative, MAGA members of the Ohio House.
A week ago — at about the same time House Republicans were voting to override DeWine’s veto of the earlier anti-trans legislation — the Higher Education Committee adopted some amendments to the bathroom bill.
The amendments created some exceptions for custodial workers, families of young children, helping the disabled and emergency situations.
There was no vote in the committee on the bill, but the ban remains.
Democrats on the committee say the proposed bill would be challenged in court under Title IX, a federal law protecting people from discrimination on the basis of sex in educational programs and activities.
“Boys cannot become girls; girls cannot become boys,” Lear said in the October hearing. “You cannot change DNA.”
State Rep. Munira Abdullahi, a Columbus Democrat who is very much opposed to House Bill 183, asked Lear a straightforward question in the hearing: “Can you tell the difference between a trans woman and a biological woman?”
“Some people can; some people can’t,” Lear responded. “The point is that it’s not safe for our kids.”
“You are opening her up to a multitude of harassment,” Lear said. “You are opening them up to danger.”
In that hearing, State Rep. Joe Miller, a Democrat from Lorain County, pointed out a fact that proponents of the bill apparently did not consider.
“We already have laws on the books against exposure and indecent exposure,” Miller said. “There’s already a law against that, whether it is in the bathroom, in the basement, in the bedroom… It doesn’t matter where it is at.”
State Rep. Dani Isaacsohn, a Democrat from Cincinnati, said in an interview that he believes this kind of conservative social engineering legislation is causing young people — particularly recent college graduates — to leave Ohio.
“Michigan is kicking our butts on this,” Isaacsohn said. (And on the redistricting process, I might add.)
Last year, LGBTQ rights were written into Michigan’s anti-discrimination law.
“Is everybody in Ohio schools going to have to carry around their birth certificates and tattoo their gender identity to their foreheads?” Isaacsohn said. “This legislation is a purely a political stunt. They are just playing to their base.”
And because most of the social conservative legislators pushing the “Bathroom Bill” come from rural, small town and suburban districts that are so heavily gerrymandered in favor of the Republicans, they will suffer no consequences come Election Day.
There’s no question that the Republican supermajority has the votes to pass this bill, if they decide policing school bathrooms is what they want to do.
If it passes the House and Senate, it will go to DeWine.
The last time an anti-trans piece of legislation landed on his desk, the governor vetoed it, saying government should not be getting involved in the personal lives of Ohio citizens.
We’ll see then if he applies the same standards to school bathrooms.
