Bathroom Cops Now Accosting Androgynous Women in Women's Restrooms

It's been a couple of years since America began its latest freak-out over LGBT people. The current freak-out is over the idea of trans-inclusive bathroom policies. The meme is that communities and businesses cannot have LGBT-inclusive non-discrimination policies or else sex predators will have free reign over public restrooms, which will leave women and children vulnerable to sexual assaults, and there will be nothing that the police will be able to do to protect those women or children.

Which has led us to the latest fall-out from the freak-out: Self-appointed bathroom cops who come into women's restrooms to protect women from other women. For example, there was this lesbian who was kicked out of the women's bathroom last December because of her gender-ambiguous style and because she didn't have photo ID proving that she's a woman. Of course, she told the cops that she is a woman and her friends all told the cops that she is a woman and I could tell that she is a woman from looking at her.

But the cops called her "Sir" and kicked her out of the restroom and presumably sent her to the men's restroom to pee with a bunch of guys. Because it's not about actually allowing women to pee with other women. I's about control and about enforcing gender norm. You can watch the video here.

Now there's a new story coming out of Dallas involving another self-appointed bathroom cop who recently chased a woman named Jessica Rush into the women's restroom at a hospital:

She was, for the record, and her situation isn't particularly complicated. Rush was born and identifies as female and has no plans to change that. "I look very much like a girl," she says. "I'm not trying to transition, nothing like that." 

But Rush wears her hair in a bleached blond fauxhawk and dresses androgynously. On Thursday, she was wearing a T-shirt from her alma mater, Texas Tech, with basketball shorts. As the man at Baylor explained after walking into the restroom behind her, it's all very confusing... 

"When I saw you enter I thought you was..." the man says. 

"A boy?" Rush offers. 

"Yeah, it was kind of confusing." Certainly she can see why. "You dress like a man," he says several times as he walks away. 

Later, in the doctor's office lobby where Rush was waiting to have a pair of broken fingers looked at, the man elaborated that he was concerned that a man had entered the same bathroom his mother was going to use. 

According to the article, Rush has been confronted several other times by people who don't think that she should use the women's restroom.

This is the new normal. Religious and social conservatives have gotten our country all freaked out over sex predators in women's restrooms and now men are harassing women in the women's restrooms.