Transgender bathroom restrictions advance from Louisiana Senate committee

A Louisiana Senate committee easily passed a controversial anti-transgender bill Tuesday to its final legislative stop. 

House Bill 608 by Rep. Roger Wilder, R-Denham Springs, unanimously cleared the Senate Committee on Judiciary C. The committee’s sole Democrat, Senate President Pro Tempore Sen. Regina Barrow of Baton Rouge, was absent. 

Wilder’s bill, which he’s dubbed the “Women’s Safety and Protection Act,” would segregate all bathrooms, changing rooms and sleeping quarters by sex in public schools, domestic violence shelters and correctional facilities. The bill also defines the terms “man,” “woman,” “girl,” “boy,” “male” and “female.” These definitions specifically exclude gender identity, which the bill does not define. 

The bill was opposed by several LGBTQ+ rights advocates, who argued the bill needlessly harms transgender people. The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law estimates there are approximately 20,000 transgender people living in Louisiana. 

Transgender people tend to experience higher rates of domestic violence and have higher suicide rates than people who identify as the gender they were assigned at birth. While many domestic violence shelters already turn away transgender people, Wilder’s bill would require they do so unless they have the space to offer separate sleeping quarters and bathrooms for transgender people. 

“This bill represents a deeply troubling attempt to deny the humanity and dignity of an already vulnerable population by seeking to eliminate legal recognition of gender identities beyond the binary,” SarahJane Guidry, executive director of Forum for Equality, an LGBTQ+ rights organization, told committee members. 

Terry Landry, a policy advocate with the Southern Poverty Law Center, said he thought the bill was “eerily similar” to the racial segregation of bathrooms during the Jim Crow era. 

Landry added that, as a father of daughters, he did not believe the bill would make his children safer. 

As the bill has progressed through the legislative process, Wilder has not been able to point to a specific incident in Louisiana in which a woman was harmed by a transgender woman in a restroom or changing facility. 

While Wilder pitched his bill as a way to keep women and girls from feeling uncomfortable or unsafe when men enter private areas, the legislation would require a transgender man, even one who has transitioned via hormones and gender affirming surgery, to use facilities designated for women. A transgender man is a man who was assigned female at birth. Transitioning refers to actions taken by a transgender person to align their bodies with their identified gender. 

The bill will next be discussed by the Senate.