I do love a good, righteously angry column. This, by Patrick Lennon in The Shot, gives anti-trans bigots both barrels: The toilet police are here and they want you to know they are very serious.

They want you to think they’re asking important questions about women’s rights (despite overwhelming evidence that most cis women support trans people), about being censored and shut down (despite mostly just being served consequences), that they are serious professionals with grave and momentous concerns (despite being toilet police). They want to be seen as the lone voices of reason. They want the various woes and censure and outrage that their bigotry has created to be seen as proof of their importance, as a reason to take them seriously. They are desperate to be martyrs to the evils of “trans ideology” because they believe it will give them credence. They are desperately, furiously, trying to rebrand from weird little toilet cops, snooping genital inspectors, believers in the magical sanctity of the public bathroom, into something less embarrassing. 

…It’s a deeply unserious belief, inscrutably stupid – and while anyone who believes it, who gets hoodwinked by bathroom propaganda or spreads it for their own grift, shouldn’t be taken seriously, there is a serious reason why it’s happening. It’s not JUST because these people are idiots and crooks – it’s because the bathroom has been the strange and also weirdly effective battleground of choice for bigots throughout time. 

…These commode cops, these lavatory law enforcers, these powder-room pigs, are trying to gatekeep going to the bathroom in order to diminish and demean the integrity of trans identity, to remove agency and dignity from the LGBTIQ community.