It’s a sad day in our nation when citizens overwhelmingly vote against equal rights and in favor of discrimination.
Sixty-one percent of Houston voters did exactly that Nov. 3 in a referendum on the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, which prohibited bias and discrimination in housing, employment, business services and city contracting, according to the New York Times. Only 39 percent of voters voted in favor of keeping the ordinance.
Many of those who voted against it were no doubt swayed by a virulent campaign that played on transphobia and ignorance to suggest that HERO, passed by the Houston City Council 18 months ago, would result in a wave of sexual assaults by transgender women against cisgender women in public bathrooms.
Using the slogan “No Men in Women’s Bathrooms,” opponents of equal rights for transgender people pandered to the voting public’s ignorance about who and what transgender people are and are not. They argued rejecting HERO would protect “our grandmoms and our mothers and our wives and our sisters and our daughters and our granddaughters,” in the words of Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, an opponent of the ordinance.
Nevermind that transgender women are not men, they go into bathrooms for the same reasons as the rest of us, and there are exactly zero documented cases of sexual predators posing as transgender to attack cisgender people in bathrooms, according to mic.com.
The Twitter hashtag #wejustneedtopee shows just how ridiculous it would be to try to force people to use the bathroom of a gender they don’t identify as. Burly, bearded transgender man Michael C. Hughes posted a now-viral selfie he took in a women’s bathroom to Twitter with the hashtag. Is Michael’s presence in a women’s bathroom really the outcome anti-HERO voters were hoping for?
Interestingly, it is trans people, not cisgender folks, who are at a far higher risk of being attacked in public bathrooms — or anywhere else. As of late August of this year, 20 trans women had been murdered in 2015, apparently the victims of anti-transgender hate crimes.
Transgender people also attempt suicide at far higher numbers than non-transgender people, with 41 percent of transgender people having attempted suicide as opposed to 1.6 percent of the general population, according to lambdalegal.org.
We, the Editorial Board, believe not only is the hatred directed against transgender people in the anti-HERO campaign abhorrent, it has also led voters to strike down legislation that would have helped many groups of people, not just transgender people trying to use the bathroom.
The ordinance offered protection from discrimination to all people and covered 15 different categories including sex, race, color, ethnicity, national origin, age, familial status, marital status, military status, religion, disability, sexual orientation, genetic information, gender identity and pregnancy.
Apparently, the loss of protection against discrimination for all these categories was just collateral damage in the eyes of those who campaigned against the ordinance.
This Editorial Board thinks no one’s rights should ever be put to a vote.
What would our country look like today if the questions of interracial marriage and school segregation had been decided by majority vote in the 1950s?
The anti-HERO campaign played to the lowest common denominator, fear, in order to deny rights and equal protection under the law to an entire class of people.
Opponents of equal rights for transgender people might be declaring victory in Houston, but let’s make no mistake: the rejection of HERO is a loss for us all, transgender and non-transgender alike.
