'Transgender Bathroom Hysteria'? Meet Twitter.
First up, a little history lesson. This public bathroom insanity is exactly what defeated the Equal Rights Amendment for women, back in the 1970's. Think Progress reminds us:
Like the anti-LGBT activists who united against HERO, the ERA’s anti-feminist opponents offered similarly outlandish claims about what would happen if the ERA became law. Many conservative activists rallied behind a claim that a ban on official sex discrimination would necessarily forbid segregating bathrooms by gender. As the feminist scholar Jane Mansbridge wrote in her postmortem of the amendment fight, Why We Lost the ERA, “the unisex toilet issue fed the fervor of the anti-ERA forces by giving them something absolutely outrageous to focus on.” Among other things, “it could conjure up visions of rape by predatory males,” while igniting smoldering passions in a South that had recently experienced “the historical trauma of racial integration.”
The Unisex Toilet Issue. And here we are again. The New York Times editorial board wrote today, under the title "Transgender Bathroom Hysteria, Cont'd"