Should transgender people use the bathroom that matches their identity?

Encyclopedia of Opinion

Question: Should transgender people use the bathroom that matches their identity?
Position1 of 4›: Transgender people should use the bathroom that matches their identity
Argument1 of 4›: Trans identities are valid

Being a trans woman is no different to being a cis woman, and they should not face different treatment.

The argument

The Civil Rights Act demonstrates that forbidding a transgender individual from using the restroom corresponding to their expressed gender would be a form of discrimination. Transgender people have as much right to use the bathroom of their expressed gender as a cis man or woman does, and the legal basis for saying so is already on the books rather than something that would need to be newly created. The relevant provision is the clause in the Civil Rights Act referring to sex-based expectations, which protects the trans community from discrimination of this kind. A rule that assigns restrooms according to birth sex penalises a person precisely for not meeting the expectations attached to that sex — which is the form of discrimination the clause identifies, whatever the rule's stated purpose. The Obama administration took this view and protected the trans community under federal anti-discrimination laws, so the interpretation has been applied in practice and not only advanced in argument. A second constitutional protection is offered by analogy. The First Amendment protects citizens' religious freedoms, and religion is essentially a matter of a person's own identity — something the state protects not because it can adjudicate whether the belief is correct, but because such determinations are not the state's to make. On this reasoning the transgender community should be protected by the same amendment, since those individuals have made a determination about their personal identity in the same way and should receive the protections that come with it. The parallel is what carries the argument: a society that already declines to second-guess one deeply held account a person gives of themselves has no principled ground for second-guessing this one.

Context

Section VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 clearly states that no person should suffer discrimination with respect to compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges because of their ethnicity, colour, sex, religion or nationality. It specifically lists restricting the use of company facilities as a form of discrimination.

Premises

[P1]The Civil Rights Act's protection against sex-based discrimination means forbidding a transgender person from using the restroom matching their expressed gender is itself a form of discrimination—a view the Obama administration affirmed under federal anti-discrimination law. [P2] The First Amendment protects citizens' choices about personal identity, so transgender people are entitled to the same recognition and protections as cisgender men and women. [C] Therefore, because trans identities are valid and legally protected, transgender people should use the bathroom that matches their identity.

Counter-arguments

Transgender citizens are not automatically covered by the Civil Rights Act. It refers to sex but not gender. It is up to the individual state to clarify what segments of the population are protected by anti-discrimination laws. Currently, most states don’t include the LGBTQ+ community in anti-discrimination laws. Only 20 states specify that citizens can be discriminated against based on gender identity.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Anti-discrimination laws do not apply to discrimination on the basis of LGBTQ+.