South Carolina Set to Make Bathroom Ban Permanent
The South Carolina state legislature is working diligently to turn a temporary anti-trans bathroom ban into a permanent one, to the detriment of all.
by Aly Gibbs
South Carolina is angling to make a temporary transgender bathroom ban permanent through the state legislature, yet again proving that North Carolina is the superior Carolina.
Thanks to reporting from Lucy Valeski at The State, we know that a bill known as the “South Carolina Student Physical Privacy Act” has passed the state House and been sent to the Senate. The act mostly mirrors a 2024 state budget rule, but includes in-state public colleges in the rule, and would make it a permanent fixture rather than a component of the state’s budget that must be renewed every year.
If the bill passes, public schools K-12 and colleges in South Carolina would be required to prohibit trans students from using the bathroom and changing room that best aligns with their gender, as well as offering college dormitory housing based on gender assigned at birth, or risk losing 25% of their state funding. Republican Representative Tom Hartnett graciously carved out an addition to the bill that would require public schools to have at least one single occupancy bathroom on campus for trans students to use, saying, “I made a promise to someone a while back that I would stand up and try and protect them. I’m trying to give people like my friend an opportunity to protect their dignity.”
Nothing preserves a child’s dignity like being forced to trek to the other side of school in the middle of a class to pee in the only room they’re legally allowed to use without fear of being assaulted, Tom. Thanks for that.
South Carolina Republicans have done their best to frame the bill as a matter of “privacy” for cisgender children. Well, cis girls, anyway; the only kids they ever mention when these sorts of bans are proposed. House Speaker Pro Tempore Tommy Pope, the bill’s primary sponsor, said, “We want to respect that child. That child can have access to privacy, but to do it, we don’t need to rob everyone else’s daughter.”
Republican Representative Fawn Pedalino said, “For generations, restrooms, locker rooms and overnight trips have been separated by sex, not because it was political, but because it’s common sense. This is not about targeting anyone. It’s about setting firm statewide standards.”
However, rushing in to comically undercut his colleagues, Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey said, “In South Carolina, we know what a woman is, and if it falls on South Carolina to educate the rest of the country about what a woman is, we are happy to.”
It’s important that you don’t let disingenuous stooges like Tommy Pope and Fawn Pedalino sell you the lie that these bans are about “common sense,” or that they have no intention of discriminating against anybody. It’s a lie. Massey is being much more honest about conservatives’ broad desire to do harm to as many transgender people as possible. His statement makes it clear that this bill is discriminatory in nature, intended to do damage exclusively to trans kids.
Besides being harmful to trans kids, the primary target of these bills, they can also very easily disrupt the lives of cis children. Enforcing a bathroom ban on young children, whose gender presentation can vary widely, is extremely difficult to accomplish without being inappropriately invasive. Laws like this don’t help anybody, they exist only as a means of punishing trans people for existing and signaling to potential donors and voters which side of this heinous culture war conservative politicians are on.
You should know, too, that while the South Carolina state legislature works to enshrine these civil rights violations into law, their constitutionality is still being argued in high courts. An unnamed trans boy in South Carolina has sued the state for discrimination on the basis of sex, and has been granted temporary relief by the Supreme Court, allowing him to use the bathroom that aligns with his gender while the Justices review another similar case.
Except, of course, the trans boy has already left school to pursue online learning. Because the discrimination he faced both from the state and his peers, emboldened by adult bigots, made school utterly intolerable. Opponents of the bill, like Jessicka Spearman Childs, highlighted at a hearing the other trans kids who have already been harmed by the temporary law; her trans son, she says, took summer classes to graduate early “because he was exhausted due to bathroom bans in our local high school.”
These bans have serious consequences. They do tremendous harm to trans youth. Dishonest politicians will bleat about the rights and privacy and safety of cis kids, but they couldn’t possibly care less about our kids. The trans kids who have to devise plans to escape public school through online courses or early graduation, leaving friends behind and warping their school experiences, because of state harassment.
Regardless of whether or not the bill passes the South Carolina state Senate, its legality will ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court in the months to come.
Aly Gibbs (She/They) is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
