A transgender faculty scholar declared, “I’m right here to interrupt the regulation” earlier than coming into a ladies’s restroom on the Florida State Capitol and being led out in handcuffs by police.
Civil rights attorneys say the arrest of Marcy Rheintgen final month is the primary they know of for violating transgender rest room restrictions handed by quite a few state legislatures throughout the nation.
Capitol police had been alerted and have been ready for Rheintgen, 20, when she entered the constructing in Tallahassee on March 19.
They instructed her she would obtain a trespass warning as soon as she entered the ladies’s restroom to clean her palms and pray the rosary, however she was later positioned beneath arrest when she refused to go away, in line with an arrest affidavit.
Rheintgen faces a misdemeanor trespassing cost punishable by as much as 60 days in jail and is because of seem in court docket in Might.
“I wished folks to see the absurdity of this regulation in observe,” Rheintgen instructed The Related Press. “If I’m a felony, it’s going to be so arduous for me to reside a standard life, all as a result of I washed my palms. Like, that’s so insane.”
At the least 14 states have adopted legal guidelines barring transgender ladies from coming into ladies’s loos at public faculties and, in some instances, different authorities buildings.
Solely two — Florida and Utah — criminalize the act.
A choose on Wednesday quickly blocked Montana’s new rest room regulation.
Rheintgen’s arrest in Florida is the primary that American Civil Liberties Union attorneys are conscious of in any state with a felony ban, senior employees legal professional Jon Davidson mentioned.
Rheintgen was on the town visiting her grandparents when she determined to pen a letter to every of Florida’s 160 state lawmakers, informing them of her plan to enter a public restroom inconsistent along with her intercourse assigned at delivery.
The Illinois resident mentioned her act of civil disobedience was fueled by anger at seeing a spot she loves and visits repeatedly develop hostile towards trans folks.
“I do know that in your coronary heart that this regulation is unsuitable and unjust,” she wrote in her letter to lawmakers. “I do know that in your coronary heart that transgender persons are human too, and which you can’t arrest us away. I do know that that I’ve dignity. That’s why I do know that you simply received’t arrest me.”
Her arrest comes as many Republican-led states which have enacted restroom restrictions grapple with the right way to implement them.
Legal guidelines in Alabama, Kansas, Kentucky, and North Dakota don’t spell out any enforcement mechanism, and even the state legal guidelines that do largely depend on personal people to report violations.
In Utah, activists flooded a tip line created to alert state officers to doable violations of its rest room regulation with 1000’s of hoax reviews in an effort to defend transgender residents and their allies from any legit complaints that would result in an investigation.
The Republican sponsors of the Florida rest room regulation, Rep. Rachel Plakon and Sen. Erin Grall, didn’t instantly reply Thursday to cellphone messages, emails, and visits to their workplaces to hunt touch upon Rheintgen’s arrest.
They’ve mentioned the restrictions are wanted to guard ladies and women in single-sex areas.
Opponents of the regulation, similar to Nadine Smith, govt director of the LGBTQ+ advocacy group Equality Florida, mentioned it creates harmful conditions for all by giving folks license to police others’ our bodies in loos.
“The arrest of Marcy Rheintgen is just not about security,” Smith mentioned. “It’s about cruelty, humiliation, and the deliberate erosion of human dignity. Transgender folks have been utilizing restrooms aligned with their gender for generations with out incident. What’s modified is just not their presence — it’s a wave of legal guidelines designed to intimidate them out of public life.”
If Rheintgen is convicted, she worries she might be jailed with males, compelled to chop her lengthy hair, and prevented quickly from taking gender-affirming hormones.
“Individuals are telling me it’s a authorized check, like that is the primary case that’s being introduced,” she mentioned. “It’s how they check the regulation. However I didn’t do that to check the regulation. I did it as a result of I used to be upset. I can’t have any expectations for what’s going to occur as a result of this has by no means been prosecuted earlier than. I’m horrified and scared.”
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