Asheley LeFors, Minot

Last week there was a Legislative hearing for HB 1473, also known as “Segregate Transgender People from Restrooms/Showers” bill. This bill asserts that women are weak and naive and need to be protected from undocumented dangers that could possibly be in a public bathroom.

The bill states that boys should use the boys bathroom and girls should use the girls bathroom. That transgender people should use the bathroom of their gender assigned at birth regardless of what they look like on the outside. This bill was directed at state mandated facilities, like domestic abuse shelters, that already have policies in place that keep their survivors safe.

The real point of this bill is to give private citizens the “permission” to challenge any person they feel don’t meet the “right” criteria to enter a bathroom. This “heightened scrutiny” is unnecessary and will only lead to more public displays of aggression and assault. Why would we want to subject our weak and innocent women and children to those types of spectacles? Who decides how old is too old for a child to follow their mother or father into the bathroom?

The insinuation that trans people are predators and perverts are insane and it needs to stop. I have yet to meet a trans person (as the weak female I am) and feel threatened by them. I can tell you that I walk with my keys between my fingers to my car from the grocery store not in fear of a trans person, but in fear of a cisgender male.

I fear actual predators. The type of person who will not follow a law that has no consequences. The type of person who will victimize someone based on opportunity, like being alone in a public bathroom.

My own child was transgender. My child completed suicide in September of 2022. Their least safe place was the bathroom of their assigned sex. My child was assaulted by their peers in a state mandated high school locker room, because those kids felt entitled enough to “show” my child a lesson. They took it upon themselves to “educate” my child on what it meant to be a man, and that my child was doing it wrong. I ask you, who is in the wrong here? This bill will only support those kids, and their parents who raised them to believe they had a right to put their hands on someone out of hate.

Where is the legislation that asserts that reported assault is taken seriously even without witnesses? Who protects the individuals who are weak because no one supports them, and assumes that their journey to self-authentication makes them less than that of a cisgender individual?

Why are North Dakotans supporting politicians who use our tax dollars on telling us which bathroom to use? Who present policy that aren’t researched, for concerns that are already being managed successfully? It looks like too much government and wasteful politicians to me.