MoveOn.org Petition demanding TN Rep. Floyd resign for violent transphobic comments

MoveOn.org is circulating a petition demanding that Tennessee state representative Richard Floyd should resign. Floyd, along with state senator Bo Watson, introduced a transphobic “bathroom bill” in Tennessee’s General Assembly recently. Shortly thereafter, Watson withdrew his version of the bill after pressure from state and national organizations and blogs, and after Rep. Floyd made a comment that he would “stomp a mudhole” in women who are transgender and who choose to use the same dressing room/restroom as his wife or daughter at the same time they’re using it

Violent transphobic rhetoric is one thing but he appears to want to back up his words with state-sponsored action against people who are transgender in a state that’s already hostile to that community.

You know what to do.

Help sign and spread this around!

Odious new anti-transgender bill introduced in Tennessee General Assembly

Crossposted at The Huffington Post and Daily Kos

[UPDATE: Senate version of bill WITHDRAWN!]

A new anti-transgender “bathroom bill” was filed in Tennessee’s General Assembly today by a Republican state Senator. The bill “restricts access to public restrooms and public dressing rooms designated by sex to members of that particular sex.” There is a monetary fine for people who violate the law. And since in Tennessee it’s legally impossible to get your sex changed on your birth certificate (and only a little less impossible to get it changed on your drivers’ license), this affects all transgender and gender non-conforming people.

Tennessee has been proposing and passing some of the most homophobic and transphobic bills in the country – it is, after all, the state that passed HB600 stripping local jurisdictions of LGBT antidiscrimination provisions. There are ongoing court challenges to that law I’ll be discussing soon. There’s also the “license to bully” bill. And the “Don’t Say Gay” bill was introduced there as well.

The response to many of those bills came too late – HB600 is now law, and it went almost entirely unremarked upon until its passage. But this one was introduced January 10th in the House and will be introduced today in the Senate, so hopefully we can mobilize to rally against its passage fairly quickly.

The purpose of the bill is entirely unclear unless they are just trying to erase people who are transgender and stigmatize them permanently as sexual predators who want to prey on unsuspecting victims in public accommodations. The bill seems to be trying to criminalize gender variance – not something that’s unheard of. And it’s obvious that there is no way to enforce this if it becomes law. They can’t possibly employ bathroom police all across the state of Tennessee to make sure that someone going into a female bathroom possesses a birth certificate proving they have the requisite body parts for that bathroom and that they have had those same parts since birth.