By: Alyssa Smith
Pictured here is a woman holding up a sign that reads “It’s not about the bathrooms, as it was never about water fountains.” This powerful image challenges both racism and anti-feminism. Transgender rights have been a prevalent topic in today’s media, as legislation is continually being passed to take those rights away. In 2017, there was what seemed to be a never-ending debate about whether transgender people should be allowed to use the bathroom of the gender they were assigned at birth or if they could use the bathroom of the gender they choose. When legislation started to pass state by state forbidding trans people to use the bathrooms that went with the gender they chose, there was a massive public outcry that led to protests from feminists across the nation. Many other people made claims that this debate was simply about protecting children from potential predators that could be using the bathrooms with them, though most people understood the real reasons the legislation was being passed.
The picture shown here doesn’t necessarily take on the intersectionality of feminism and anti-racism, but it does argue against both kinds of discrimination. This woman’s sign challenges the belief that the debate is not just about the bathrooms by referencing American history and saying that segregation wasn’t about the water fountains. Both laws were put in place to dehumanize the group that it was targeting. Jim Crow laws and segregation were set up to make black people seem subhuman, and the restroom laws were put in place to isolate the transgender community as a stepping stone to targeting the rest of the LGBTQ+ community. By correlating the restroom issue to the brutal history of segregation, it calls out the issues of racism and transphobia together, even though the topic being discussed is not exactly about the race of the transgender people that are being attacked.
Works Cited
Stern, Mark Joseph. “The Bathroom Predator Myth Just Defeated Transgender Rights in New Hampshire.” Slate Magazine, 9 Mar. 2017, https://slate.com/human-interest/2017/03/bathroom-predator-myth-defeats-transgender-rights-in-new-hampshire.html.