Republican Puts $2,500 Bounty on Transgender People
This week in transphobic bathroom panic: A Kentucky Republican has introduced a bill that would force students to use school restrooms and locker rooms in accordance with their “biological” sex in order to “protect” cisgender students — but wait, there’s more. State Sen. C.B. Embry’s so-called Kentucky Student Privacy Act would also actively punish schools that attempt to accommodate transgender students, forcing them to pay students who encounter trans people in the “wrong” bathroom.
Think Progress breaks down the insanity:
The bill provides that any student who encounters “a person of the opposite biological sex” in a bathroom or locker room shall have a legal cause of action if it’s because the school gave the trans student permission or didn’t explicitly prohibit the trans student from using that facility. The “aggrieved” student would be entitled to $2,500 from the offending school “for each instance” he or she encountered a trans student in a sex-divided facility in addition to monetary damages “for all psychological, emotional, and physical harm suffered” and attorney fees.
Embry has stated that the bill will help schools avoid the “potential embarrassment, shame, and psychological injury to students” that he believes naturally occurs when trans people are allowed to use restrooms in accordance with their gender identity. There is certainly no embarrassment, shame or psychological injury to be felt when trans kids are forced to conform to the gender identity assigned to them at birth, or are singled out from their peers because they, like the rest of us, sometimes need to pee while they’re at school. Nope, none of that at all!
The law would contain provisions requiring schools to provide separate, single-stalled toilets or unisex restrooms for trans students, but those accommodations could be limited to just one per campus. That the bill was introduced by a lawmaker who opposed anti-bullying legislation in 2013 should come as no surprise. It seems that Embry, like fellow transphobic bigots Bill O’Reilly and Steve Doocy, does not really understand what bullying is, given that he is attempting to terrorize trans children on a statewide level.
