The Cynical Conservative Lie Behind 'Protecting Women and Children'

Upon learning of the city council measure's passing, North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore interpreted this central message somewhat differently: as "a major public safety issue."

Similarly angered was Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest, who joined Moore to respond Charlotte's new anti-discrimination policy. In a short joint statement, they cited their opposition, called for a special session "in accordance with the State Constitution," and included a peculiar reason behind their objection: "We aim to repeal this ordinance before it goes into effect to provide for the privacy and protection of the women and children of our state," the document reads.

It took about a month for a corporation to step in with a response. In April 2016, Target announced that all customers and employees were free to use the restrooms and fitting rooms to which their gender identity corresponds. Unsurprisingly, the action incited conservative Texas, and the state's Attorney General Ken Paxton wrote a charged letter to Target CEO Brian Cornell to express his discontent.

"As chief lawyer and law enforcement officer for the State of Texas, I ask that you provide the full text of Target's safety policies regarding the protection of women and children from those who would use the cover of Target's restroom policy for nefarious purposes," he wrote.

This week, the Departments of Education and Justice announced they would rescind the Obama administration's guidance on protections for trans students against discrimination—which relate, specifically, to bathroom policy. As justifications for this and previous discriminatory action proliferated across conservative publications and Facebook wall posts, one nonsensical rationale keeps popping up: America needs to "protect women and children."

The idea of restrooms as protected spaces goes back to the first time someone decided girls could use one toilet and boys should use another, ideally very far away. Paris had separate toilets for men and women in the 1700s, and Massachusetts was the first US state to establish gendered bathrooms in business settings in 1887. Over the next three decades, nearly every state passed a similar law, all for the same reason: to shelter women, who had been previously basically quarantined at home, from the dangers of being in public with men. Though various groups have attempted to fight back against the standard of gender-segregated restrooms—in the early 2000s, a group of trans college students and allies even formed what they called the Restroom Revolution to fight for gender-neutral bathrooms—few outside liberal college campuses have made much progress.

"From race-segregated facilities under Jim Crow, to the 'potty politics' surrounding the Equal Rights Amendment," which refers to the fact that "opponents of the ERA used the societal fear of unisex bathrooms as a tactic for ensuring the amendment's demise," the issue of "bathroom access has long been a struggle," C.J. Griffin writes in "Workplace Restroom Policies in Light of New Jersey's Gender Identity Protection." The key word, in almost every following example of gender segregation in restrooms, is fear.

"It was the fear of losing the sacred division of gender into two that propelled opposition to the Restroom Revolution," Olga Gershenson writes in reference to gender-neutral restrooms on college campuses. "Shared bathrooms not only touched people's feelings about privacy…but it also tapped deep fears about sexual mixing, transgressing social boundaries, and ending recognition of gender differences."

With fear comes the incentive to protect—in this case, the safety of women and children. According to Zornitsa Keremidchieva, a senior political science lecturer at Macalester College who studies feminist political theory and history, the political urgency to protect women and children can most clearly trace its roots to the English Restoration, when political theorists and philosophers, like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, were questioning the role of government and how men and women fit into the new social order.

"Why are men the head of the household?" Keremidchieva asks rhetorically. "Because only they can have sovereignty. And they're motivated by proper stewardship and caring [for their wife and children]."

While the implications of the impulse to protect women and children have evolved, Keremidchieva says the dictum has been in America since the country's founding; the Colonies inherited it, and it stuck. Because there was no upending of customary law—a big part of which was the presiding roles of husbands—during the American Revolution, the belief became pervasive. Men saw it as part of their duty to protect their wife and children; if they failed, they had failed at being men. In the 1850s, the protectionism extended to maritime conduct with the unofficial "women and children first" policy, which called for women and children to be evacuated first in life-threatening situations, given that survival resources like lifeboats were often limited. When the Titanic was sinking, Captain Edward Smith supposedly called for the officers to assist that "vulnerable" group first, and as a result 75 percent of women onboard survived—compared to just 17 percent of men.

Today, the supposed dangers facing women and children are not opponents in war or an undetected iceberg, but trans women. According to Edward Schiappa, an American scholar of communication and rhetoric and head of Comparative Media Studies/Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while the bills apply to both genders, the ridiculous furor surrounding them mainly applies to trans women using the women's restroom, where, the story goes, they might watch or molest people in there.

"Allow people 'born male' to use the ladies room, and you open the floodgates of bathroom abuse," Schiappa says sardonically. "Utter nonsense. But that is what [supporters of these bathroom bills] try to argue."

Ironically, trans and gender nonconforming individuals are the actual targets of abuse in public restrooms. According to a 2013 survey conducted by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, 70 percent of trans and gender non-conforming respondents in Washington, DC, reported some form of discrimination or harassment in public restrooms. "Eighteen percent of respondents have been denied access to a gender-segregated public restroom, while 68 percent have experienced some sort of verbal harassment and 9 percent have experienced some form of physical assault when accessing or using gender-segregated public restrooms," the paper reads.

Stephanie Martin, a professor of political communication at Southern Methodist University who has researched and written about conservative and evangelical discourse, digs further into how orthodoxy and masculinity—two factors she sees in how supporters of the bills justify their stance—aggravate this prejudice. She argues that through the eyes of the conservative, it's "much more offensive for men to behave like women instead of women to behave like men, [because] you believe in economic stewardship by men and are deeply offended by the feminization of culture."

What's more, as it has become less acceptable to voice blatant prejudices, those with them have found ways to make their opinions less obviously revolting, more seemingly necessary. Today, the best way to actively discriminate is to make the discriminatory discourse ostensibly positive and altruistic.

"There's a focus right now on political correctness, so it is no longer legit to publicly bash people who identify as queer," Martin says. "You have to find a way to seem compassionate while still making claims that [seem] legitimate."

Blatantly misguided beliefs around female weakness aside, the phrase "for the protection of women and children" is one that could be considered at least half-noble: Conservative politicians care about the safety of women and children. That is, if it weren't being used to shroud the offensively untrue conviction that trans women are predators.

"[Advocating for the protection of women and children] is a go-to strategy because it is a proven successful fear appeal," Schiappa says. He cites conservatives' response to California's Proposition 8, which defined marriage as strictly heterosexual, when reports suggested the measure would fail: Organizations like ProtectMarriage.com vocally supported the policy through television ads about the "horror" of children learning that they could marry someone of their shared gender—voters were urged to protect them from this. While the proposition was eventually ruled unconstitutional by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2010, and that ruling was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2013, it originally passed in 2008 with 52.3 percent approval.

"This campaign spent much of its money on advertisements… which exploited parental fears by focusing on the supposedly harmful effects of legalized same-sex marriage on children—namely the harms resulting from student participation in mandatory same-sex marriage lectures in schools," Joyce H. Hahn writes in "Proposition 8 and Education: Teaching Our Children To Be Gay?"

When conservatives were attempting to block an anti-discrimination bathroom bill called Proposition 1 in 2015, Campaign for Houston released a video that was intended to instill fear in viewers that "any man could enter a woman's bathroom, simply by claiming to be a woman that day," as dramatic music played in the background. "Protect women's privacy, prevent danger, vote no on Proposition 1," the voice-over warns. The clip ends with an apparently cisgender man stepping into a bathroom stall with a fearful, wide-eyed prepubescent girl.

Aside from prejudice-based fear tactics and the fight to preserve masculinity, the bathrooms bills—and many instances in which appeals to the safety of women and children are made—can often be traced back to one more divisive issue: the role of the government in people's lives. While opponents of big government typically argue against the rights of the government to interfere with matters of the body, stances often shift when transphobia and homophobia factor in, Keremidchieva says.

"In the private spaces, the idea is that government can't peek… until it's [concerning] a gay couple," she says. "The only time government can invade private space is as a benevolent savior."

In the cases surrounding the bathroom bills, the government steps in to "save" the vulnerable women and children supposedly at risk when they have to pee as well as the ideologies of masculinity and heteronormativity. Prejudices and backward views masquerade as altruism. Ultimately, the men who deliver the line "for the protection of women and children" don't care if women and children are in danger (though they're not). They see the strength of the patriarchy under threat.

"If you consider the phrase post-9/11, with the reforms in immigration and steps toward securitizing domestic and foreign policy, you cannot have a government like America's say that it stands up to protect men, because that would emasculate them," Keremidchieva says. "America would not stand for that."