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Dangerous anti-trans ballot initiative filed in Washington State

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Anti-trans extremists in Washington State may have lost in the legislature, but now they’re turning to the ballot box. Last week, they filed a ballot initiative aiming to ask Washington voters to approve government-run discrimination this November.

The initiative goes farther than almost any state law that has been considered this year, including the school bathroom bill that got vetoed in South Dakota. For starters, the bill requires schools to segregate restrooms and locker rooms according to birth anatomy and chromosomes. Each student who runs into a trans person in a school facility can sue their school—and if they can show that the school didn’t do enough to stop the trans person from using the restroom matching their gender identity, they can collect $2500 for each time they see the trans person. Think about it: if a trans student uses the restroom twice a day, and encounters two classmates each time, a school could be on the hook for $50,000 per week. That means that a school that does the right thing and lets trans kids use the right restroom—or even a school that doesn’t aggressively monitor its restrooms, whether it’s because they don’t have the resources or because they recognize that teachers should be spending their time providing an education rather than monitoring bathrooms—could easily lose hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that’s just the minimum: students who win their lawsuit are entitled to compensation for any “emotional harm” they suffered, no matter how unreasonable their reaction to simply seeing a trans kid in the same room is. This initiative punishes schools that can’t afford to divert staff and teacher time to sifting through students’ medical records and guarding restroom entrances—and ultimately, the students suffer when their school’s money goes to fighting lawsuits instead of investing in their education.

The ballot initiative doesn’t just stop there. It would permit anyone who operates a public restroom to demand proof of sex before letting someone go in, with no safeguards to prevent that authority from being abused. It overturns the regulations put out last year by the Human Rights Commission that made clear that transgender people have the right to use restrooms consistent with their gender. And it prevents city and county governments from passing laws or policies protecting trans people from discrimination in restrooms.

The initiative proponents have until July 8 to collect about 250,000 signatures in order to get the initiative on the November ballot. Now, it’s up to the people of Washington State to make sure that all students are safe and protected, and that their state doesn’t become the first to require this kind of discrimination against trans students and adults. Reach out to the Washington SAFE Alliance to find out how you can get involved.  

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