By Ann Rostow –
Aux Armes, Citoyens!
Let’s talk bathrooms, shall we? I’m not sure how many states now outlaw transgendered men and women from using their appropriate facilities, but I’m confident many such laws apply only to bathrooms in public offices. Nonetheless, the outsized political attacks on trans people have created a kind of open season on anyone who might look out of place in this or that toilet. Take the South Carolina transman, Luca Strobel, who was assailed back in May for using the ladies’ room in a bar after seeing that the stalls in the men’s room were all taken. Now this is a guy who would be required by law to use the ladies’ room in several red states (not including South Carolina). None the less, the bar owner forced him out of the stall, police were called in from outside, he was handcuffed to the point of pain, called names, and forced to part with a bond of $500.
Luca’s story gained attention through his TikTok video. I tried to find it but I couldn’t navigate through a zillion unrelated posts, including one that featured three puppies chewing up a pair of expensive suede boots. Why this amusing act of destruction would find a place in the “Luca Strobel” TikTok search results is beyond me, but I enjoyed it. I did, however, find many other reports about Luca’s story, so there you go.
Anecdotally, there are citizens’ arrests all over the country featuring far right vigilantes complaining about masculine women in the john to store managers and other authority figures. I read about these incidents every week, but I found several items in the last five minutes just by searching for “lesbian women’s bathroom,” including one from last month when a lesbian teen was followed into the bathroom by a staffer at a Minnesota Buffalo Wild Wings and asked to prove her gender.
Or how about Ansley Baker, a 28-year-old lesbian who was confronted a couple of months ago by a security guard at Boston’s Liberty Hotel and forced to show her ID? She complied, (because what else could she do under the circumstances?) and when she and the guard left the toilets, CBS reports that the other women in line yelled things like “get him out of here.” Baker called it “my worst nightmare.”
Of course, you don’t have to be a lesbian to draw suspicion. You just have to have that non-binary look and the bad luck to catch the eye of some narrow-minded crow with their head up their cloaca.
Rare High Court Decision Goes Our Way
The Palmetto state’s bathrooms are in the news for a bigger reason. Perhaps you recall that five school districts in Virginia recently refused to change their trans-friendly policies, even under the threat of losing federal funding. The schools explained to the Trump Department of Education that, under rules laid out by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, they were bound by law to allow trans kids the full use of school facilities. I’ve gone into too much detail lately about the Fourth Circuit’s key opinion in the Gavin Grimm case, so I’ll spare you that analysis here. Suffice it to say that the Grimm case, which gave Virginia transboy Gavin Grimm the right to use the boy’s room at school, was appealed to the Supreme Court and, after a back and forth, the Court decided not to accept review and thus let the ruling stand.
Now, a South Carolina transgender student has won what passes for a High Court victory these days. Like Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, and West Virginia, South Carolina falls under the jurisdiction of the Fourth Circuit. And, given the Grimm case, the Fourth Circuit issued an injunction, forbidding South Carolina from restricting this boy’s use of high school facilities during litigation. The state quickly asked the Supreme Court to waive the injunction pending a court resolution of the question, and, surprise! The Court refused.
This is the infamous “shadow docket,” the emergency motions that question preliminary rulings, injunctions, and the like before the merits of whatever might be at issue are even briefed. Years of court action might lie ahead, but when an injunction is overturned or upheld by the High Court without discussion or explanation, the matter is (often) effectively settled by fiat. We have become used to defiant breaches of settled constitutional law reaching the appellate courts, being stopped pending litigation, and then being cavalierly restored in one-paragraph comments by the conservative justices. This case seems to be an exception to the new pattern.
In the five-sentence announcement, the Court noted that the case did not meet “the standards applicable for obtaining emergency relief from this court,” which is nice but mystifying, since most of the other astounding decisions on the shadow docket would also have failed that test. Injunctions are granted when the moving party has a likelihood of success and would suffer harm if the policy or action were allowed to continue.
The Court also made clear that the denial was not a reflection on the underlying merits of the situation. And in the final sentence, we learned that Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch would have overturned the injunction. We seem to be hanging onto some shred of legal responsibility based on the “centrist conservative” trio of Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.
As you know, the new Court session is now getting underway, and after giving a green light to banning health care for transgender minors last session, the Court will next consider transgender sports participation and the Free Speech question of whether states can ban antigay conversion therapy. They have yet to take a bathroom case, but they are whittling away the rights of transgender Americans one issue at a time.
Hook ‘Em
What else is new, you ask? Before I answer, have you read about the new “pisser” trend on TikTok that showcases videos of students peeing in public areas? Really, kids? You have vast communication systems at your disposal and this is how you chose to present yourselves to the massive audience that social media provides?
Meanwhile, I have dozens of GLBT items to relay, from the businesses and individuals in
Orlando who have painted rainbows on their property to protest the state’s destruction of the rainbow crosswalks that memorialized the Pulse shooting, to the activist in Morocco who was ordered to jail for wearing a T-shirt that said: “Allah is a lesbian.” According to The Independent, Ibtissam Lachgar was charged with blasphemy and violating a law that forbids offending Islam. Am I the only one that thought Morocco was a fun place to visit? We’ll see if she wins her appeal.
The Pope made some bland comments about welcoming everyone to the Church while also noting that Catholic doctrine on homosexuality will stay the same, whatever that means. There are many people out there who like to parse every excruciating detail of papal commentary, but it’s all too opaque for me.
And the president of Texas A&M has resigned after a brouhaha led to the dismissal of a lecturer in children’s literature. The lecturer, Melissa McCoul, was secretly videotaped discussing gender when an insipid female student interrupted her and complained that, um, like, she wasn’t sure McCoul’s comments were “legal” because the president had said that there were only two genders? McCoul defended herself, but the video was posted by a GOP state representative and the poor woman was terminated. Also demoted, according to The New York Times, were the head of the English Department and the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.
President Mark Welsh, a retired Air Force General and former member of the Joint Chiefs, could not survive the episode, even though he was the one who fired McCoul under pressure from the various far-right apparatchiks of the Texas Republican party. He then released a vague goodbye letter thanking the students and staff of the university and pledging devotion to Aggieland. He described Texas A&M as “a shining city on a hill … a place where history, tradition, pride, legacy, and belief in something bigger than yourself swirl around you as you walk the campus.” I know I’m straying well beyond the actual gist of the story, but I’m a Longhorn, so please spare me. That said, hundreds of students gathered to wish him well and protest his apparently forced departure as he left the campus September 19.
Fear Not
I said I had dozens of items that answered the question, “What else is new?” And, indeed, I could have written several more. But it’s tough to focus on our community’s problems when people are warning of general violence and holding huge outdoor tributes to the disturbing ideology of the far right.
I remember having the sudden realization that my parents lived through several years when they had no idea whether the life they knew and their assumptions about the world were going to collapse. In their 20s, they watched Hitler take power in Germany, manipulate the country, crack down on Jewish citizens, take over Austria, invade Poland, rain bombs on the U.K., take over France, attack the Soviets, declare war on the U.S., and, for a time, appear poised to control the western world and destroy its history and traditions at will. I’m not sure exactly how much people at the time knew about the concentration camps, but they knew that Hitler was a tyrannical murderer, and he seemed unstoppable.
Prior to this thought, I looked back on World War II as an inevitable triumph of good over evil. But at the time, it was surely terrifying—as terrifying as our current situation, if not more so. I never asked my parents specifically about this uncertainty. My father was an intelligence officer based in London. My mother was part of a team that translated reports from the French resistance in a dusty open conference room in D.C., where hundreds of large flies lumbered in from the open windows in the summer. They soldiered through, so to speak, and married in 1947.
We have a tendency today to extrapolate doomsday scenarios from the most limited knowledge. Pundits speculate it’s the end of the American dream. Essayists suggest democracy is dead, the Constitution shredded. Perhaps it will take a generation to reconstruct our institutions. Maybe the government’s infrastructure is beyond repair, the electoral system is permanently skewed right, the courts are above the law, and the whole notion of bipartisan compromise is gone indefinitely.
Maybe, maybe not. We don’t know what the country will look like ten years from now, do we? We live in the here and now, where we know that Trump’s poll numbers are underwater. We know the majority of the nation dislikes his policies, sometimes by 20 or 30 percentage points. We know that the country opposes deportations, tariffs, and the threat to social services. We even saw some right-wing sycophants condemn the idea that the government could and should control free speech in the media. We feel, or at least I feel, that a hard line exists in America below which not even Trump and company can survive.
When Roosevelt told us that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, he was referring to the economy. But the words are true in all contexts. When we operate out of fear, we campaign on fear—fear of those aforementioned extrapolations we read every day. When we turn instead to hope for the future, we’ll bring the country along because, in a sick way, that’s why the country voted for Trump in the first place. We all want to make America great. We must define what that means, because our fellow citizens are beginning to realize that Trump’s version contradicts everything they truly believe.
arostow@aol.com
GLBT Fortnight in Review
Published on September 25, 2025
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