Marcy Rheintgen, 20, faces a misdemeanor trespassing charge punishable by up to 60 days in jail and is due to appear in court in May.

Summary

Marcy Rheintgen, a 20-year-old transgender college student, was arrested at the Florida State Capitol after intentionally entering a women’s restroom in protest of the state’s transgender bathroom law.

Civil rights lawyers say it is the first known arrest under such laws in any U.S. state.

Rheintgen faces a misdemeanor trespassing charge and could face up to 60 days in jail.

Florida is one of only two states to criminalize such acts.

  • WoodScientist@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    21010·
    2 days ago

    She did this as an act of civil disobedience and let them know in advance she was coming and was going to use the women’s restroom.

    But imagine she didn’t. Instead she went to the capitol, and, following the law, used the male restroom. Just look at her. Do you think she wouldn’t have been harassed or possibly arrested for doing so?

    In practice, trans bathroom bans work like this:

    Use the restroom the law requires you to: get harassed, beat up, and possibly arrested.

    Use the restroom that matches your presentation: violate the law, hope no one clocks you, and you don’t get arrested.

    I’m a trans woman myself. You wouldn’t know it if you saw me in public. And I don’t even have any ID documents with an “M” on them. If I wanted to obey the Florida bathroom law, I would have to use the men’s restroom. But then when I inevitably caused a scene, I wouldn’t even be able to show an officer that I was just complying with the law.

    Trans bathroom bans are ultimately just a means of driving trans people from public life entirely. Comply with the law? Get assaulted by some chud who thinks you’re violating the law. Disobey the law? Risk arrest for actually violating it.

    There’s a reason labeling this a genocidal movement is not hyperbole.

    • ctkatz@lemmy.ml
      2·
      19 hours ago

      and then there are the opposite cases, where in order to comply with the law, manly masculine men would be forced to use the women’s restrooms.

      you know, with women.

      especially the easily frightened at everything because they have been societally coddled and protected for the entire history of this country white women.

      i don’t know. I’m not ever going to personally deal with that, but I think that if all trans people were going to comply with these idiotic and pointless laws that don’t protect the people they are written to protect the trans women probably would have it easier than trans men. I really don’t see too many men being seriously traumatized seeing a woman in the men’s room (especially when cis females have used men’s rooms with men in them regularly at places like concert venues when the line to the women’s room is long or too far away).

      but then again I don’t really give a shit, just flush and wash your hands.

    • dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      725·
      2 days ago

      Trans bathroom bans are ultimately just a means of driving trans people from public life entirely.

      This is not an exaggeration, the anti-trans movement literally aims to “eradicate [trans people] from public life entirely”, those are their words.

      Here are some citations, numbers, and evidence to back up what you’re saying and why we should view trans bathroom bans as genocidal rather than about safety, like anti-trans activists claim:

      When laws permit transgender people to access sex-segregated spaces in accordance with their gender identities, crime rates do not increase. There is no association between trans-inclusive policies and more crime. As one of us wrote in a recent paper, this is likely because, just like cisgender folks, “transgender people use locker rooms and restrooms to change clothes and go to the bathroom,” not for sexual gratification or predatory reasons.

      Conversely, when trans people are forced by law to use sex-segregated spaces that align with the sex assigned to them at birth instead of their gender identity, two important facts should be noted.

      First, no studies show that violent crime rates against cisgender women and girls in such spaces decrease. In other words, cisgender women and girls are no safer than they would be in the absence of anti-trans laws. Certainly, the possibility exists that a cisgender man might pose as a woman to go into certain spaces under false pretenses. But that same possibility remains regardless of whether transgender people are lawfully permitted in those spaces.

      Second, trans people are significantly more likely to be victimized in sex-segregated spaces than are cisgender people. For instance, while incarcerated in facilities designated for men, trans women are nine to 13 times as likely to be sexually assaulted as the men with whom they are boarded.

      …

      In society at large, between 84% and 90% of all crimes of sexual violence are perpetrated by someone the victim knows, not a stranger lurking in the shadows – or the showers or restroom stalls. But trans and nonbinary people feel very unsafe in bathrooms and locker rooms, though others experience relative safety there. In fact, the largest study of its kind found that upward of 75% of trans men and 64% of trans women reported that they routinely avoid public restrooms to minimize their chances of being harassed or assaulted.

      from: https://theconversation.com/baseless-anti-trans-claims-fuel-adoption-of-harmful-laws-two-criminologists-explain-206570

      These laws aren’t designed to protect cis women, they are designed to police gender (this impacts cis people too!) and eliminate trans people from public life.

      • CalipherJones@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        5 hours ago

        From Project 2025

        “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”

        They want trans people existing to not be protected under the First Amendment.

    • andros_rex@lemmy.world
      4·
      1 day ago

      It’s funny how everyone forgets trans men.

      My state has had a bathroom bill for K-12 schools. Every day I went to work I committed a misdemeanor that could have cost my school funding and sent me to jail.

      I’ve been told that I can be comforted by the fact that trans women are the target - which, yeah, they don’t want to kill trans men. They just want to drive us out of public life and force us to either detransition or be dependent on the generosity of cis men.

      • ctkatz@lemmy.ml
        2·
        19 hours ago

        can I just say as a cis male how weird it is how everyone forgets trans men exist and that everything they say that applies to trans women also applies to trans men. I’m surprised how no one has ever brought up a 14th amendment equal protection clause argument against these laws because clearly the the intent of the laws and the language of these laws was written exclusively for trans women.

        • andros_rex@lemmy.world
          2·
          18 hours ago

          We don’t really “exist” in the fucktard framework. Trans women are evil “males” (farenghi voice) who want to peep on ladies in the restroom, because that would somehow be a smarter route to being a sex pest than becoming a youth pastor. Trans men are crazy - we get a status of being perpetual teenage girls. “Tomboys” that are refusing to grow up.

          They want to kill or imprison trans women, they want trans men to either be institutionalized or forced into submitting to a cis man (the number of gay trans men with boyfriends that misgender them is fucked up.)

    • BossDj@lemm.ee
      334·
      2 days ago

      Jesus. Breaking the law is genuinely safer for you… What insanity.

      • orcrist@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        That alone is not the crazy part, though. Of course many laws have edge cases where you should ignore them for practical reasons in rare circumstances. But here, it’s not an edge case. It’s right there in open sight.

    • Kit@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      242·
      2 days ago

      The harassment and danger is the point. It’s meant to drive trans people away from public spaces. It’s disgusting.