This Year’s Bathroom Bill Loses by 'Winning'

The annual “bathroom bill” — an effort to keep transgender individuals out of gender-specific bathroom spaces — has suffered the same fate as all previous versions. This year’s bill, however, is on the way to earning its defeat by the unusual and paradoxical fact of actually being passed.

Which is to say, the bill has now been amended to the point of being moot. It no longer seeks to define “indecent exposure” in the context of a person designated at birth as a member of one gender using a bathroom (or “rest room, locker room, dressing room, or shower”) reserved for members of another gender.

In fact, an amendment added to the bill (HB1151/SB2097), before scheduled deliberations on it on Tuesday in both House and Senate committees, stripped it of any reference to gender at all. The bill now merely names the aforementioned venues as places where indecent exposure can occur and be properly penalized.

This development underscores previous objections to the bill in the House by Rep. Antonio Parkinson (D-Memphis). Parkinson pointed out in debate that, inasmuch as indecent exposure was already illegal everywhere, any and all spaces and places — even, as he put it, a hallway, a janitor’s closet or the Speaker’s chamber — could as easily be named as off limits.

The bill was scheduled for hearing in House Judiciary on Tuesday but was held over until the committee’s Wednesday session by committee chairman Michael Curcio (R-Dickson) on grounds that the Tuesday morning session’s hourlong time limit did not permit proper discussion. (Last week's discussion of the bill didn't make it past the preliminary stage.)

Rep. Karen Camper (D-Memphis), the House minority leader, protested that the postponement was unfair to the Rev. Alaina Cobb, who is transgender and had traveled all the way from Chattanooga, her home base, in order to oppose the bill.

Rev. Cobb would have that opportunity in the Senate’s Judiciary Committee, which met later Tuesday and heard the bill as its first order of business. To the surprise of some attendees, who were unaware of the new amendment transforming the nature of the bill, the bill passed unanimously on an 8-0 vote and has now been referred to the Senate Calendar Committee, one step away from floor action.

As indicated, the bill will be considered by House Judiciary again today, with equally good chances of success.

Chris Sanders, executive director of the Tennessee Equality Project — which had opposed the bill as discriminatory — professed himself as unconcerned about the bill in its amended form. He did, however, wonder aloud, perhaps with tongue in cheek, if the new genderless version might open the way to charges of same-sex indecent exposure in sports teams’ locker rooms.

For the record, the Rev. Alaina Cobb did get to appear before Senate Judiciary to state her opposition to what she saw as the purpose of the original, unamended bill — to target transgender people like herself on a “political battlefield” and to penalize them for merely pursuing the “natural bodily functions” that restrooms exist for.