Patrick Ryne McNeil, SSH Board Member

This is a fact: LGBTQ people experience public harassment – and according to our spring 2014 report, LGBTQ people in the United States are more likely than straight, cisgender people to report experiencing it (both verbal and physical forms). The sample size in our research forced us to group the entire LGBTQ community into one category. While this lumping is not ideal and cannot account for the ways that intersecting identities lead everyone to experience the world differently, it did show that queer people – as past research has shown – are victims of public harassment.

Preliminary findings from the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, out this month from the National Center for Transgender Equality, show that trans people face one particularly dangerous form of public harassment: the kind that takes place in public restrooms.

According to the preliminary results:

• 59 percent of respondents have avoided bathrooms in the last year because they feared confrontations in public restrooms at work, at school, or in other places.
• 12 percent said they’ve been harassed, attacked, or sexually assaulted in a bathroom in the last year.
• 31 percent said they’ve avoided drinking or eating so that they didn’t need to use the restroom in the last year.
• 9 percent report being denied access to the appropriate restroom in the last year.

These findings should concern and anger everyone. In the same way that street harassment can force women and other marginalized communities into making consequential life changes – like adjusting their commute, moving homes, or switching jobs – harassment of trans people in public bathrooms, as the survey shows, can cause them to avoid using public facilities or can discourage them from drinking or eating in the first place. Those are harmful choices that no one should have to make.

While 12 percent reported experiencing harassment, attacks, or sexual assault, 59 percent have avoided restrooms because they’re afraid it will happen to them. That fear – even in the absence of harassment – is unhealthy. And bills popping up across the country to restrict restroom access aren’t helping.

The full U.S. Transgender Survey will be released later this year.

Patrick works in communications at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, where he writes on a range of social justice issues. He is a board member of Stop Street Harassment and he wrote his thesis on the street harassment of gay and bisexual men at the George Washington University. He was awarded SSH’s Safe Public Spaces Trailblazer award in 2013 for his street harassment-related work.