Trump vs. Cruz: Should Transgendered Females Be Able to Use The Ladies' Room?

Ted Cruz, Attacking Donald Trump, Uses Transgender Bathroom Access as Cudgel

By TRIP GABRIEL APRIL 29, 2016

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas at a campaign rally in South Bend, Ind., on Thursday. Credit Joe Raedle/Getty Images

INDIANAPOLIS — As Senator Ted Cruz of Texas seeks every possible edge to stop Donald J. Trump, he has seized on a once-obscure issue with a proven power to inflame conservatives: letting transgender women use women’s bathrooms.

Mr. Cruz mentions it constantly in Indiana, a state with many social conservatives that is all but a last stand for him in his fight to deprive Mr. Trump of the Republican presidential nomination.

With polls showing a narrower lead for Mr. Trump in Indiana than in the five Eastern states that he swept on Tuesday, the Cruz campaign’s private polling indicates that the bathroom issue has the power to help close the gap. Moreover, it is fresh in Indiana voters’ minds because of high-profile battles in the state in recent years over gay rights.

“Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton both agree that grown men should be allowed to use the little girls’ restroom,” Mr. Cruz said on Tuesday night as a crowd in Knightstown, Ind., booed heartily. He made the remarks after coming before the crowd with his two daughters, 7 and 5, who wore matching pink dresses.

Mr. Cruz has alternated between mockery and outrage nearly every day in highlighting Mr. Trump’s stance, seizing on it after Mr. Trump said last week that people should be free to “use the bathroom they feel is appropriate.” Mr. Trump was responding to the furor over a North Carolina law that stripped legal protections from gay and transgender people.

In leveraging the issue, Mr. Cruz has raised the specter of sexual predators in women’s restrooms, which conservatives around the country have effectively invoked to defeat anti-discrimination laws — and which gay rights advocates denounce as a myth.

The topic could surface in July at the Republican convention, where a fight is already brewing in the platform committee to overturn the party’s historical objection to same-sex marriage. In a little-noticed move this winter, the Republican National Committee called on states to pass laws limiting access to school bathrooms and locker rooms based on students’ “anatomical sex.”

The potency of the issue was demonstrated in Indiana this winter, when a Republican-sponsored bill in the General Assembly to protect lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender residents was scaled back under pressure to remove the protections for transgender people.

“Some folks went off the deep end on the whole bathroom issue,” said State Senator Travis Holdman, the Republican author of the bill. “It just became so toxic — I realized I couldn’t get it done with the ‘T’ there in our caucus.” He was referring to transgender people in the abbreviation L.G.B.T.

Even with the transgender protections deleted, the bill died.

Social conservatives in Indiana have been on high alert since last year, when Gov. Mike Pence and fellow Republican lawmakers amended a religious exceptions law, bending to a national outcry that the legislation would let businesses refuse service to gay men and lesbians.

One social conservative leader who objected to what he called watering down the law, Micah Clark, executive director of the American Family Association of Indiana, campaigned this week with Mr. Cruz.

He said Mr. Cruz’s attack on Mr. Trump was meant to show that Mr. Trump is a liberal who supports the right of transgender people to “choose the bathroom that aligns with their identity that day.”

Though Mr. Clark said bathroom access was not at the top of voters’ concerns, he predicted that Indiana Republicans would reject Mr. Trump on the matter because “Hoosiers have common sense."

In Houston, Mr. Cruz’s hometown, voters repealed a broad anti-discrimination ordinance last year after opponents said it would allow sexual predators to enter women’s restrooms.

But it was North Carolina that thrust the issue into the nation’s consciousness last month, after state lawmakers passed a law prohibiting transgender people from using a public restroom that does not correspond to the gender on their birth certificate.

The law led to a boycott of the state by celebrities like Bruce Springsteen and businesses such as PayPal, which canceled a plan to expand in North Carolina, dividing two traditional Republican constituencies: big business and social conservatives.

Mr. Trump waded into the debate in a television interview last week, saying there had “been very few problems” with transgender people using public bathrooms, and advising North Carolina to “leave it the way it is.”

He said he would be fine with Caitlyn Jenner, the former Olympic gold medalist in the men’s decathlon and a reality television star, using any bathroom she wanted to at Trump Tower.

Later, Mr. Trump amended his stance, saying it was up to cities and states to decide on their own.

That did not stop Mr. Cruz from saying the country had gone “stark raving nuts.”

He attacked Mr. Trump for political correctness and yoked him to Mrs. Clinton as a liberal. “If Donald Trump dresses as Hillary Clinton, he still can’t use the little girls’ restroom,” he said in South Bend, Ind. “And I apologize for putting that image in your mind.”

Earlier, Mr. Cruz said, “If the law says that any man, if he chooses, can enter a women’s restroom, a little girls’ restroom, and stay there, and he cannot be removed because he simply says at that moment he feels like a woman, you’re opening the door for predators.”

A coalition of groups that fight sexual assault and domestic violence issued a statement last week saying that in the 18 states that protect transgender people’s right to use any restroom, there has been no increase in sexual violence.

“People have been in public restrooms with transgender people for many years and didn’t know it,” said Tracey Horth Krueger, interim director of the Indiana Coalition to End Sexual Assault. “It’s never been a big deal.”

She added that 85 to 90 percent of sexual assault victims know their attackers. “Pay attention, read the news, get an understanding,” she said. “This whole argument about going to the bathroom is just ridiculous.”

Mr. Cruz hopes to use the issue to turn out social conservatives in Indiana, and interviews with voters at his rallies there showed a lack of acceptance of, or much knowledge about, transgender people.

“The Bible says he created them male and female, so therefore that’s what it’s supposed to be,” said Mike Haley, a retiree from Greenfield who supports Mr. Cruz.

His granddaughter Emily Haley, who works at an adoption agency and also plans to vote for Mr. Cruz, said it was “disgusting” to allow transgender women in women’s restrooms. “You’re asking for the rape rate to go up,” she said.

Gerri Nottingham, a nurse from Indianapolis, recalled Mr. Trump’s saying it would be too expensive to build separate restrooms, and she agreed. “If you’ve got that issue, just go home,” she advised. “You just have to plan.”

Ms. Nottingham, too, plans to vote for Mr. Cruz. She said she found it hard to accept that a person born one sex would identify as another. “I work in labor and delivery,” she said. “They come out one gender.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/30/us/politics/indiana-republican-transgender-rights-bathroom.html?ribbon-ad-idx=4&rref=politics&module=Ribbon&version=context&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Politics&pgtype=article