Discomfort Is Not a Safety Issue

By Dylan Jade Rackley

If a trans woman in a bathroom is a safety issue, someone forgot to tell the data.

In 2018, researchers at the Williams Institute at UCLA compared cities and towns in Massachusetts with and without trans-inclusive public accommodation laws, and pulled the police records — assault, sex crimes, voyeurism — from before and after the laws changed. The finding was flat. Trans-inclusive access did not increase incidents. Not a blip. The lead author, Amira Hasenbush, noted that the incidents opponents warn about are rare, and unrelated to the laws. Media Matters put the same question to law enforcement, school administrators and sexual violence experts across sixteen states with inclusive policies. None reported an increase.

A woman is at greater risk in a public bathroom from another cis woman than she is from a trans woman. Not because trans women are unusually virtuous. Because the fear being sold to you was never backed by a single incident report, court record, or study — anywhere. The wave of bathroom attacks by trans women does not exist. What exists is a peer-reviewed finding that trans-inclusive access changes nothing about safety. That is not a small gap between the rhetoric and the evidence. It is a total absence of evidence, dressed up as caution.

So when someone tells you a trans woman in the next stall threatens their safety, they are not describing a risk. They are describing a feeling. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where the damage gets done.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare's analysis of Private Lives 3 — the country's largest survey of LGBTIQ health and wellbeing — found that trans women and trans men are subjected to violence at rates far above the general population, and that cisgender men report the lowest rates of any group measured. The person actually unsafe in this conversation is not the one you are trying to keep out of the bathroom. It is her.

If this is a choice, why would anyone choose it?

I was an elite swimmer who represented my country. Before I transitioned, I could apply for three jobs and expect an offer. Dating was easy, with men and women both — I'm bisexual, so I had twice the field. Since transitioning, I have applied for close to a thousand jobs I was well qualified for. I was hired for two, underpaid and treated badly in both. I have been stood up roughly thirty times. I have been assaulted four times, and not one of those times was I believed. It lines up with the data. Nearly 80 per cent of trans Australians report unfair treatment because of their gender identity in the past year. Unemployment among trans Australians sits around 19 per cent — three to five times the national rate — despite trans people holding tertiary degrees at twice the rate of the general population. That is not a system rewarding a lifestyle choice. It is a system extracting a cost from people for existing as themselves. Nobody chooses a thousand rejections and a lower income over three job offers and an easy dating life. I am happier now than I have ever been, because I am finally who I actually am. That happiness was never free. It was earned against the current, not with it.

Test the safety logic against its own terms. If the worry is a person in the wrong bathroom, trans men are the obvious case. They use men's rooms. By the opposition's own reasoning, that puts a person assigned female at birth alone in a room full of men — the exact scenario the entire argument claims to dread. Nobody raises it. No campaign, no bill, no speech. The fear does not activate in that direction, ever. A fear that switches on for one group and stays silent for the identical situation in reverse is not measuring risk. It is measuring womanhood. Research on masculinity threat tracks the same pattern: when men experience a threat to their sense of masculinity, their prejudice toward transgender people rises, concentrated in men, tied to how strongly they hold traditional gender roles, and absent when women experience a threat to femininity. The alarm is not about who might be dangerous in a bathroom. It is about who is permitted to be a woman in one.

The policing does not begin at a bathroom door. It begins in the press, and there is Australian evidence for that. Researchers at the Sydney Corpus Lab built a corpus of 1,319 articles about trans people from the ten most widely read news outlets in the country. More than half came from just three mastheads — The Australian, the Herald Sun and the Daily Telegraph — all News Corp. In a sample of articles published in The Australian between April and October 2019, more than 90 per cent framed trans people and trans issues negatively. Amnesty International found the same machinery running in Britain at greater scale: four newspapers publishing 17,000 articles on trans issues in five years, roughly nine a day, overwhelmingly platforming anti-trans campaigners while trans voices barely appeared in stories about their own lives. All of it aimed at around half a per cent of the population.

That volume is the point. Coverage on that scale does not report a public concern. It manufactures one. And once a population has been told often enough that a woman in a bathroom might not be a real woman, the appraisal starts happening everywhere, carried out by ordinary people who now believe they are being vigilant rather than rude. There is no document check at a toilet door. There is only someone looking at a woman and deciding — too tall, too broad, voice too low, hair too short. That test cannot tell a trans woman from a cis woman who simply does not look feminine enough to whoever is watching. A rule built to exclude trans women can only run by appraising every woman who walks in.

When there is no evidence of harm and the fear persists anyway, that fear is not about safety. It is about perceived discomfort — the perceived discomfort of encountering someone whose existence unsettles a category you would rather keep fixed. You are entitled to that perceived discomfort. You are not entitled to dress it up as a safety concern and use it to exclude someone from public life. Conflating them is not a neutral mistake. The consequences land on the people already carrying the most risk, not on the people demanding protection from a threat that was never there.

I am not asking you to feel comfortable with something unfamiliar. Perceived discomfort is allowed. It is human, and it passes. But stop calling it a safety concern, because dressing one up as the other has a body count that perceived discomfort alone never did. The data has already answered the safety question. What is left is you, deciding what to do with your own perceived discomfort.

Sources: Hasenbush, A., Flores, A. R., & Herman, J. L. (2018). Gender identity nondiscrimination laws in public accommodations: A review of evidence regarding safety and privacy in public restrooms, locker rooms, and changing rooms. Sexuality Research and Social Policy. Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law, "Safety and Privacy in Public Restrooms and Other Gendered Facilities" (2025). Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, "LGBTIQA+ people" (family, domestic and sexual violence data, drawing on Private Lives 3). Hill, A.O., Bourne, A., McNair, R., Carman, M. & Lyons, A. (2020). Private Lives 3: The Health and Wellbeing of LGBTIQ People in Australia, La Trobe University. Bocian, K. & Bilewicz, M. (2021). The Role of Masculinity Threat in Homonegativity and Transphobia. Kroeper, K.M. et al. (2018). Gender, Masculinity Threat, and Support for Transgender Rights: An Experimental Study, Sex Roles. García, A. & Badge, J. (2021). Transgender people in the Australian press, Sydney Corpus Lab, University of Sydney. Amnesty International UK (2026). Like a Snowball: The Growth and Impact of the Gender Critical Movement in the UK.