Lydia Polgreen is profound in the New York Times (May 21, 2023) on the flood of anti-trans bathroom bills:
“You don’t have to look very hard on any social media platform to find horrifying examples of trans and gender-nonconforming people being harassed in bathrooms. These videos are terrifying in their ubiquity and chilling in their cruelty … The rash of bills targets transgender people for scrutiny, surveillance and judgment. That is reason enough to reject them as an affront to human dignity.
“But my experience tells me that these laws are really about something else: a step along the path to a rigid enforcement of gender norms, roles and presentation – the routine humiliation and degradation of people who look or behave in ways a fanatical minority wants to punish. They will not step until anyone who fails to meet their rigid definitions of identity forfeits the right to feel at ease.”