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.
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.
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.
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 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.
The harassment and danger is the point. It’s meant to drive trans people away from public spaces. It’s disgusting.
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.
“I wanted people to see the absurdity of this law in practice,” Rheintgen told The Associated Press. “If I’m a criminal, it’s going to be so hard for me to live a normal life, all because I washed my hands. Like, that’s so insane.”
She’s an absolute legend. Thank you to her for her activism.
Brave as fuck. I’m terrified for her.
Bathroom laws are unenforceable and largely function instead like: “conform as closely as possible to gendered expectations of appearance and presentation or get the shit kicked out of you”.
This mostly affects cis women. Having broad shoulders and short hair is all it takes really. The more these laws are promoted, the more cis women who don’t conform to social body standards for women will suffer. Wearing a skirt and growing your hair long and wearing makeup every single day could legitimately become a matter of your own safety.
Biological gender essentialism is just gender roles all over again. They’ve packaged it as a way to force trans people out of society, and it does for anyone who can’t go stealth. But far more than it affects trans people, it affects cis people. They know that. That’s actually the point in the first place. They want to socially enforce patriarchy. The goal is to force women to submit to men and male scrutiny of their gender.
Wearing a skirt and growing your hair long and wearing makeup every single day could legitimately become a matter of your own safety.
Damn. I hate how spot on this sounds.
Conservative bitches are jealous that Marcy is hotter than all of them.
🙄OMG, let’s turn the tables and ban these conservative trolls from ALL bathrooms! Why should they have the privilege of relieving themselves when they’re relieving us of our basic human rights? They can hold it in until they burst, for all I care. Trump is literally kill ing trans people. What’s next is he gonna TARIFF them as well? 🙄
Trans girls are the true embodiments of womanhood, and these closed-minded fools are just scared of what they don’t understand. Their fear is a pathetic attempt to maintain a fake sense of power. Let’s give them a taste of exclusion and see how they like it.
Everyone else can go bathe in their own bigotry. #TransRightsAreHumanRights
What’s next is he gonna TARIFF them as well?
Hey now, don’t give them any ideas, they might tax the fuck out of HRT drugs
What you people fail to realize is that this will fix the economy, once all trans people are in jail everything is going to be fucking dandy, no more overpriced eggs, no more wagestealing, no more corruption…
Trans activists are going about this all wrong. Instead of sending someone like Marcy in to violate the law, they need to do this:
Send in the biggest, burliest, hairiest ftm trans dudes into busy ladies rooms, the room that the state insists he must now legally use. And record the reaction of the women and girls leaving for broadcast media. Because by focussing on mtf trans in ladies rooms, I really feel the dipshits that make these laws haven’t thought their cunning plans through very fully.
Send in the biggest, burliest, hairiest ftm trans dudes into busy ladies rooms, the room that the state insists he must now legally use.
I mean, that’s what we’ve functionally done. The distinction is that the biggest, burliest, hairiest dude isn’t ftm trans, he’s a fucking cop.
In an exclusive interview with The Advocate, Morton detailed the humiliating and distressing encounter. She said that she had entered the restroom with her ex-girlfriend, who handed her a tampon, when two male deputies stormed in, shining flashlights into the stall and demanding she exit. Morton, still using the toilet, was stunned.
“They were flashing lights on our feet and saying, ‘You have to get out of here. You have to come out. We need to talk to you,’” Morton said. “I’m telling them, ‘I’m still using the restroom. I’m sitting down, I’m peeing. What is the issue?’”
When she finally exited the stall, she said she lifted her shirt to prove she was not a man, expecting the ordeal to end. Instead, she said one deputy continued to question her appearance, insisting she “looked like a man.” Morton started recording, later posting a 9-second clip to TikTok, where it has since been viewed more than 3.7 million times. “They came in here in the girls’ restroom because I’m a girl and they didn’t think I was a girl, so they tried to come take me away,” she says in the video.
Like, this is the fucking future. The problem is that - outside of specifically LGBTQ media like The Advocate - it gets virtually no press. Cops terrorizing women in the restroom and demanding that they prove they aren’t Transgender just aren’t something the deeply conservative and heavily Trump-pilled local media oligarchs want appearing on TV.
You get stories like OP’s instead, specifically because they do feed into the “Men are trying to sneak into the women’s room to attack your daughter/wife/girlfriend”
Idk if its any fairer to send trans men in. Plus a pretty girl garners more sympathy.
Realistically trying to make them enforce them with genital inspections is the only thing that will make the public think about the ramifications
Edit: I’m not going to advocate saying this but I think the funniest take would be to say gender restricted bathrooms are part of the gay agenda and if girls and boys can use the same restroom at home they can use them in public.
You gotta understand that they don’t see a pretty girl. What they see is a freak, a pervert, or in my moms words “a demon from the pits of hell”.
Idk andrew tate - who is a freak and sex predator attuned to right wing sentiments- begs to differ.
No. No he doesn’t, he plays to their “boys will be boys” montra
Ah they did say the demons of hell could take a deceivingly pretty appearance 🤔
Even genital inspections aren’t a catch all
“The arrest of Marcy Rheintgen is not about safety,” Smith said. “It’s about cruelty, humiliation and the deliberate erosion of human dignity. Transgender people have been using restrooms aligned with their gender for generations without incident. What’s changed is not their presence — it’s a wave of laws designed to intimidate them out of public life.”
It’s not. I’m sure the conservative assholes are delighted by this aspect, but the real goal is to distract the plebs with ragebait non-issues so they don’t get upset at the actual loss of all the rights, benefits, and government services they rely on.
That’s why this gets reported, but not millions on the streets yesterday.
It’s both. They’re not pretending to be bigots.
Fuck Florida. FUCK Florida.
Considering the other places with bathroom bills had cis women attacked by cops…
Honestly I hope they can figure something out for her, Marcy will not survive 60 days in prison
Transfolk are absolutely their next big target after they’re finished removing the immigrants.
And then the gays.
And then their allies.Anti-trans is just the foot in the door.
This keeps me up at night.
Being arrested certainly brings awareness to the real threat, but she didn’t think she’d be arrested. Maybe the protest would’ve been more successful by going in with a group of women saying that one of us is trans.
Land of the free eh?
She should have pissed on their capitol’s floor.
