But a few years into her job in Wichita Falls, before she had earned tenure, Beverly and her husband had divorced, and there wasn’t much keeping her in Texas. She felt like she wasn’t able to tear through her students’ defenses against the information she was trying to convey. Thinking maybe a more liberal place might be more welcoming, she started looking at job listings in California.

Jess, Part I

Violations of gender norms have a unique ability to unnerve. As late as 1965, a Philadelphia lunch counter that was popular with LGBTQ people began refusing to serve these customers, who, as one newspaper put it, wore “nonconformist clothing.” In 1960, federal postal authorities monitored the mail of cross-dressers and prosecuted them for exchanging racy letters.72

In more recent years, President Donald Trump has sought to ban transgender people from the military, and lawmakers in several states have introduced “bathroom bills,” which would require transgender people to use the bathroom corresponding with the sex assigned to them at birth in public buildings. This would, presumably, mean a trans man who had a full beard, a flat chest, and a penis would be compelled to use the women’s restroom.

The very idea of gender-segregated bathrooms came about because of gender norms, and what policymakers believed to be the intrinsic, immutable differences between men and women. Gendered bathrooms arose in the late 1800s, during the industrial revolution, when legislators in some states decided they could no longer tolerate having men and women who worked in factories side by side relieving themselves in the same place, as well. Women were considered weaker, delicate. Ideally, the thinking was, they should be at home, in their own sphere. But since they insisted on working, wrote the law professor Terry Stuart Kogan, “legislators opted instead to create a protective, home-like haven in the workplace for women by requiring separate restrooms, along with separate dressing rooms and resting rooms.”73 The new restrooms went perfectly with the female-only cars on trains in those days and the female-only reading rooms in public libraries. We have to protect the women, the thinking seemed to be. Or, in the words of North Carolina lawmakers more than a century later, bathroom bills were meant to protect women’s “right to basic safety and privacy.”74

In 2017, Jess Herbst, the mayor of New Hope, Texas, traveled four hours south to Austin to testify against Texas’s version of this kind of bathroom bill.

Jess is transgender, but she didn’t focus on her gender identity in her remarks.75 Instead, she appealed to the state legislators as a fellow public official.

“I am the mayor of a town and oftentimes I do the things that you do, just for a little smaller constituency,” she said in her quick twang.

There are already laws against voyeurism and assault, she said in her testimony, so there is simply no need for a bill to protect people specifically in bathrooms.