Anti-Trans 'Bathroom Bills' Are Based On Lies. Here's The Research To Show It.
TERFs and transphobic right wing extremist are presenting a narrative where allowing trans women into women’s bath rooms will lead to violence against cis women.
A new scientific paper published in Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law documents that this is nonsense.
One of the scientists, Brian Barnett, explains in the Huffington Post:
“We found only one instance ― one! ― of a transgender perpetrator in an alleged sex crime in a changing room. Likewise, we found just one case where a man (who, frankly, sounds like a provocateur) allegedly entered a women’s locker room without disguising his gender in any way and stated that a new local law expanding transgender bathroom access allowed him to be there.
And what about cases where cisgender men dressed up as women to enter bathrooms or changing rooms and commit crimes? We found a grand total of 13 alleged cases in the U.S since 2004 ― approximately one per year. When we included international crimes, five more cases were added to the tally going back to 2003…
In comparison (though we were not specifically looking at this issue for the purposes of our study), during our research we found 154 cases in the U.S. since 2004 of cisgender men who allegedly committed bathroom sex crimes and did not attempt to disguise themselves as women or claim to be protected by laws expanding transgender bathroom access.”
“The safety concerns of those opposing the expansion of transgender bathroom access aren’t based in reality,” Barnett concludes.
Note also that an analysis by Media Matters found no evidence that passing transgender protections has led to any increase into sexual assault.
Moreover, the Williams Institute, a think tank focused on gender identity at the UCLA School of Law, has examined restroom crime reports in Massachusetts cities of similar size and comparable demographics. The researchers found no increase in crime and no difference between cities that had adopted positive transgender policies and those that had not.