Jessie Lewthwaite reflects on her lesbian rugby coach and why today’s transgender bathroom debate echoes a longer history of LGBTQ+ suspicion and exclusion.
My high school girls’ rugby team was very bad at the sport. We were from a poor school; most of our players had to drive over an hour to get to practice, and for two years our coach was also the music teacher, who knew basically nothing about rugby; she was just one of the few women on staff who lived close enough to the school to watch us at practice. However, in my last year at school, they finally hired a female PE teacher. She knew how to play; she was passionate and motivational; she actually taught us the game at practice and even hired a bus so we could get to games. We still lost every game that season, but that wasn’t her fault.
However, no matter what happened, she never came into our locker room. A massive fight breaks out? Too bad; the strong will survive. A kid is throwing up? The team captain had better have a strong stomach. It was only after I left school and was training to be a teacher myself that I learnt that she had been a lesbian. Experience had taught her that it was better for one of us to die in that locker room than for a lesbian teacher to be caught setting foot in there. I took this learning with me into my own teaching career.
Here’s the thing that gets me every time this bathroom nonsense cycles back around in the news and politics: history repeats itself. Long before anyone was debating which stall a trans woman should use, lesbians were the ones cast as the lurking danger in women’s spaces. Lesbian teachers copped it especially hard. The logic went: a woman who doesn’t want men has clearly gone wrong somewhere, and wherever women and girls undress or use the toilet unsupervised, she must be lurking with intent. We have already seen this bathroom hysteria impact cis women who look gender-nonconforming, but people only seem to care when it is a cis woman who is impacted.
So when I hear “we’ve never had to worry about this before; it’s a new problem”, I want to hand people a history textbook. The bathroom panic is a rerun. Black women were once barred from white women’s toilets on the same ‘protection’ logic during segregation. Gay men were entrapped by police in public toilets in the 1950s and ’60s under obscenity laws. Lesbians got flagged as classroom predators near girls’ bathrooms and changing rooms. Now it’s trans people. The target rotates. The tactic doesn’t.
So why is it always bathrooms with these people? Basically, toilets are one of the last spaces still legally sorted by sex, so it’s an easy lever to pull if you want to make an entire group of people sound dangerous without any actual evidence. Every study done on this ‘bathroom predator’ claim has found the same thing: nothing. There has been no spike in assaults and no bogeyman waiting behind the cubicle door. What they have found is that, for decades, the fear of sexual violence has been used as a weapon against whichever minority is politically convenient at the time.
Each time a new bathroom monster is announced, they are villainised, and we are told the concerns are ‘reasonable’. Well, it wasn’t reasonable when Black women were the monsters; it wasn’t reasonable when lesbians were the monsters; and it isn’t reasonable now.
The moral of this story, which my coach taught me when I was 16, is clear: it is always claimed to be about ‘safety’, but in truth, it’s about scapegoating and control.
