North Carolina is catching a lot of heat for its controversial law barring transgender people from using bathrooms in schools and government facilities that correspond with their gender identity.
But it turns out North Carolina is not so unique. At least 15 other states have tried to pass, or are currently considering, similar measures. These include Texas, South Dakota, Missouri, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin, as well as Tennessee, where lawmakers again decided to push the bill to a later session.
The central idea behind these bills is the myth that if transgender people are legally permitted to use the bathrooms of their choice, sexual predators will take advantage of the law to enter women’s bathrooms and sexually harass or assault them.
So in order to protect women, state lawmakers decide to further restrict a significantly marginalized group of people. But research has not shown women to be more vulnerable in public bathrooms than in any other public space.
And since sexual assault and harassment are generally already illegal, these laws would essentially be ineffective in reducing this risk. In fact, experts from 12 states with LGBTQ protections told Media Matters they can’t identify a single reported instance of sexual assaults of this nature in bathrooms.
So why does this myth persist?
Though the issue of transgender bathroom bills received national attention just recently, it repeats troubling rhetoric used to discriminate against marginalized groups throughout history. Mainly, rejecting or criminalizing a disadvantaged group for the sake of “women’s safety.”
The US has discriminated against minorities on behalf of women since the transatlantic slave trade
The idea that different groups threaten women’s virtue and safety has been repurposed and resold for decades. Consider the way black men have been perceived in the US. The so-called “black brute” caricature took hold after slavery during the Reconstruction period from 1865 to 1877.
During this period, many white thought leaders argued that black people were inherently animalistic and criminal; without slavery, blacks would revert to their savage ways, they said. This image of the “black brute” established the foundation for the ways we link black men to violence in modern society.
David Pilgrim, a sociology professor at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, told Vox that newspapers played a big role in portraying black men as creature-like and morally depraved.
Headline in the New York Times on May 15, 1916.
Headline from the Daily Messenger of New York on November 8, 1937.
“I have a subscription to a newspaper archive, and I went and typed in ‘black brute’ one day. It’s just hundreds and hundreds of newspaper articles that refer to black men in that way,” he said. “This was especially the case for black men who were accused of one of two crimes: either murdering a white male or raping a white woman.”
Pilgrim founded Ferris State’s Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, which houses a collection of illustrations and writings that paint the picture of a terrifying, sexually deviant black man terrorizing a scared, fragile white woman.
This became a common motive for torturing and lynching black men throughout the Southern US. One infamous example is the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, who was beaten, mutilated and dumped into a river in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman.
These ideas remain deeply rooted in our discussions of black men, sexuality, and crime today. Similar comparisons now extend to other minority groups, particularly other men of color.
Concern for protecting women derailed a constitutional amendment to, well, protect women
The current hubbub over the sanctity of gendered bathrooms is nothing new. Safety was one key reason Congress failed to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. The amendment was introduced in 1972 and would have guaranteed equal rights for women.
The ERA, however, fell three states short of full ratification after conservative activists began a campaign that claimed the amendment could hurt women by forcing them to serve in the military and mandating unisex bathrooms.
In fact, ERA opponents began referring to it as the “Common Toilets Law.” Activist Jane Mansbridge wrote in her book, Why We Lost the ERA, that once this idea was introduced, the campaign instilled images of predatory men in bathrooms raping and assaulting women.
Politicians use sexual assault as a reason to curb immigration
One of the most controversial discussions of the 2016 presidential campaign season is immigration. It’s no secret that Republicans want to drastically reduce the influx of people coming into the country. But while most of the candidates stuck to the typical script of painting immigrants as terrorists and job thieves, Donald Trump took it a few steps further.
During his presidential campaign announcement last summer, Trump kicked off a series of headline-making statements about his position on immigration:
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume are good people.
Trump’s statements don’t deviate much from global arguments against migration, more recently regarding migrants in Europe.
Christine Chin is a professor at American University who specializes in the political economy of transnational migration. She told Vox that the rhetoric we see today is part of the “processes of othering” migrants — especially those who come from low-income, non-Western regions. These processes typically intensify when countries receiving the migrants feel strained, she said.
“We rarely talk about issues with migrants during times of economic prosperity,” she said. “But in times of economic crisis, when resources are scarce, migrants become scapegoats. Now [we say] they’re ungrateful. They’re taking our jobs. They’re attacking our women.”
Though exploiting women’s vulnerability is an effective way to instill fear about immigration, a look at the data shows the numbers just don’t add up. A 2015 report by the Immigration Policy Center notes that between 1990 and 2013 the proportion of foreign-born people in the US increased from 7.9 percent to 13.1; the number of unauthorized immigrants increased from 3.5 million to 11.2 million.
Meanwhile, violent crime fell by 48 percent in the same time period, according to FBI data. A 2010 survey by the same authors said incarceration rates among men ages 18 to 39 were lowest for immigrants, particularly those from Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala.
When it comes to reproductive rights, politicians try to protect women from themselves
After Texas passed an abortion restriction bill in 2013, the state attorney general at the time (current Texas Gov. Greg Abbott) described it as “a vindication of the careful deliberation by the Texas Legislature to craft a law to protect the health and safety of Texas women.”
But this claim to protect women’s safety is a “sham,” and it is not supported by any major medical groups, Julie Rikelman of the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) told Vox.
In Texas and elsewhere, anti-abortion activists have recently ramped up efforts to close abortion clinics across the country. Since 2011, at least 162 abortion providers have either stopped offering the procedure or shut down completely; only 21 clinics have opened in that time, Bloomberg reports.
In that time the number of clinics in Texas has dropped from 41 to 19 today. Now the US Supreme Court is expected to rule on the constitutionality of the Texas law, which requires clinics to install hospital-grade facilities. Rikelman said the policy creates an overreaching burden that forces clinics to close because they can’t afford to comply.
Instead of protecting women, the law has placed a burden on women across the state of Texas, Rikelman said. With so few providers in the second-largest state in the nation, many women are forced to travel long distances to have an abortion. If the law were enacted in full, it would further reduce the number of clinics to fewer than 10. That means an estimated 900,000 women would have to travel more than 150 miles to the nearest abortion clinic.
So are women really endangered by abortion procedures? Not according to what experts tell us.
In 2014, a Texas OB-GYN and medical director of a Planned Parenthood affiliate testified in court that getting an abortion is safer than a shot of penicillin. That doctor added that only 0.1 percent of women who get abortions experience complications that require emergency care.
Still, more than 200 anti-abortion measures have passed throughout the country.
Whether it’s reproductive rights, gender identity, or race relations, there’s a clear historical trend of using women as pawns in a game to maintain power. There’s no doubt sexual assault and rape culture are real issues that must be addressed. Yet in many instances people in power exploit fear of marginalized people for their own gain.
Even with examples from history and current data showing the harmful effects, this tactic clearly holds a lot of weight. It’s hard to say what can stop this cycle, but perhaps the backlash against North Carolina is one place to start.
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