abaldwin360:
This is Richard Floyd, Tennessee State Representative and sponsor of the Bathroom Harassment Act, a bill that would fine transgender people $50 for using restrooms and dressing rooms.
True to his name, the man is a dick. Here’s a direct quote from this shining example of morality:
I believe if I was standing at a dressing room and my wife or one of my daughters was in the dressing room and a man tried to go in there — I don’t care if he thinks he’s a woman and tries on clothes with them in there — I’d just try to stomp a mudhole in him and then stomp him dry.
Don’t ask me to adjust to their perverted way of thinking and put my family at risk. We cannot continue to let these people dominate how society acts and reacts. Now if somebody thinks he’s a woman and he’s a man and wants to try on women’s clothes, let him take them into the men’s bathroom or dressing room.
Think Progress has a video of an interview with Dick Floyd, where he tries to state that the bill doesn’t “penalize anybody,” that it “protects everybody,” and that he could “care less” what transgender advocacy groups think.
Which begs the question, if this guy says that the bill doesn’t penalize anybody, does that mean he doesn’t think of transgender people as “anybody”?
Comments where someone openly describes, in explicit details, their cold-blooded fantasy about murdering a trans woman for using women’s sex-segregated public accommodations are not at all uncommon. You are likely to hear statements like Tennessee state Rep. Richard Floyd’s wherever issues concerning trans people’s rights to access public accommodations are being discussed.
The imagined scenario is almost always the same: A trans woman who attempts to use a women’s restroom or dressing room, in which a cis female is present, is killed in the most brutal way the speaker can imagine. It usually involves literally beating that trans woman into a bloody pulp. The person always describes their imagined self as acting out of the heat of the moment to protect a cis female, often a daughter or granddaughter.
I don’t know of any of these stories ever actually describing the trans woman doing anything to the cis female — the trans woman’s presence alone in the same restroom is all that is required. And the fact that these are pre-imagined scenarios betrays any sugestion that it is done in the heat of the moment.
Every time I hear these types of murder fantasies I immediately think of lynchings. Jim Crow and the lynchings and other forms of violence that bolstered this system of White supremacy used very similar arguments where all Black men were treated as sexual predators and threats to White women. And it should be noted that the majority of trans women killed in the U.S. each year are Black and Latina. While all trans women are threatened by these hateful, bloodthirsty fantasies, it’s Latina and Black trans women who are most vulnerable.
I also see how these sexual predator myths are increasingly being applied to very young trans girls. People like Floyd put these young trans girls at risk when they use restrooms and changing rooms or join female youth organizations like the Girl Scouts and it scares me. Where does a person like Richard Floyd draw the line? Would he kill a 14 or 11 year old trans girl? What about an eight or five year old girl?
The lie of Rep. Richard Floyd’s bill is that it does exactly the opposite of what it claims to do. Rather than protecting women and children, it promotes violence against women and children. Only, as he tells us himself through his own murderous fantasy, Floyd and people like him don’t think the lives of trans women and children are worth anything.
