Dangerous. Discriminatory. Chilling. Hurtful.
Those are words used by House State Affairs Chairman Byron Cook to describe bathroom legislation headed to his committee in the Texas House in the coming days.
The Republican from Corsicana said legislation that would force transgender people to use bathrooms in line with their birth sex “puts people at risk,” but stopped short of saying what he plans to do with the bills headed to his committee during the special legislative session.
“Requiring those people to go to the women’s restroom when they look like men, that can be dangerous. Requiring men who are trans women and wear dresses and makeup and look just like women, requiring them to go to the men’s room creates a dangerous situation,” he said.
[…]
The State Affairs Committee, considered the gatekeeper to control whether the bathroom bill advances to the House floor, will “try to do what is in the best interest in the state of Texas,” said Cook. “That’s what we always try to do.”
Cook on Wednesday walked a careful line on his stance on bathroom legislation in an essay on Texas GOP Vote, a Republican website that serves as a community forum on issues before the Legislature.
“As for my position on the ‘bathroom’ bill, I support legislation that limits admittance (based on gender at birth) to multi-stall bathrooms and locker rooms in our schools and requires local school districts to develop single-stall bathroom policies for its transgender students,” he wrote. “Beyond clarifying this policy for our public schools, we already have strong laws in Texas against sexual predators. Therefore, I do not condone duplicitous grandstanding on this issue and/or discriminatory legislation; nor do I support laws that will adversely affect our state’s economy.”
Like I said, mostly good news. There’s room in there for something like the watered-down bathroom bill that passed the House in the regular session to emerge, and if it does maybe this time the Senate agrees to take it to a conference committee and see what happens. It’s not over till adjournment, and you can be sure there will be attempts to attach something like the Kolkhorst bill to other legislation. At least the good news there is that the opportunities to do that are necessarily limited. Keep those calls to your legislators coming.