The Politics of Bathrooms

On Monday, Loretta Lynch, the U.S. Attorney General, and Pat McCrory, the governor of North Carolina, announced that they would be suing each another over the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act, a new law requiring that North Carolinians use only the public bathrooms that correspond to the “biological sex” listed on their birth certificates. In Texas, a parallel conflict began brewing between the retailer Target, which has announced an open-bathroom policy for transgender employees, and the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton. (Paxton has demanded, in a letter to Target’s C.E.O., that the company provide the full text of its “safety policies regarding the protection of women and children from those who would use the cover of Target’s restroom policy for nefarious purposes.”) And inn Chicago, a legal battle is being waged over which high-school locker room a transgender student ought to use. Yesterday, the Obama Administration issued a directive telling all public schools to allow students to use bathrooms or locker rooms matching their gender identities. Across the country, in other words, controversy is following transgender people who step into sex-segregated spaces.