A transgender school scholar declared, “I am here to break the law” earlier than getting into a girls’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 toilet restrictions handed by quite a few state legislatures throughout the nation.
Capitol police had been alerted and had been ready for Rheintgen, 20, when she entered the constructing in Tallahassee on March 19.
They informed her she would obtain a trespass warning as soon as she entered the ladies’s restroom to clean her fingers and pray the rosary, however she was later positioned beneath arrest when she refused to go away, based on 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 Could.
“I wanted people to see the absurdity of this law in practice,” Rheintgen informed The Related 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.”
A minimum of 14 states have adopted legal guidelines barring transgender girls from getting into girls’s loos at public faculties and, in some instances, different authorities buildings.
Solely two — Florida and Utah — criminalize the act.
A decide on Wednesday briefly blocked Montana’s new toilet legislation.
Rheintgen’s arrest in Florida is the primary that American Civil Liberties Union attorneys are conscious of in any state with a legal ban, senior employees lawyer Jon Davidson stated.
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 together with her intercourse assigned at beginning.
The Illinois resident stated her act of civil disobedience was fueled by anger at seeing a spot she loves and visits frequently develop hostile towards trans folks.
“I know that you know in your heart that this law is wrong and unjust,” she wrote in her letter to lawmakers. “I know that you know in your heart that transgender people are human too, and that you can’t arrest us away. I know that you know that I have dignity. That’s why I know that you won’t arrest me.”
Her arrest comes as many Republican-led states which have enacted restroom restrictions grapple with learn how 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 non-public people to report violations.
In Utah, activists flooded a tip line created to alert state officers to attainable violations of its toilet legislation with hundreds of hoax stories 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 toilet legislation, Rep. Rachel Plakon and Sen. Erin Grall, didn’t instantly reply Thursday to telephone messages, emails, and visits to their workplaces to hunt touch upon Rheintgen’s arrest.
They’ve stated the restrictions are wanted to guard girls and ladies in single-sex areas.
Opponents of the legislation, reminiscent of Nadine Smith, government director of the LGBTQ+ advocacy group Equality Florida, stated it creates harmful conditions for all by giving folks license to police others’ our bodies in loos.
“The arrest of Marcy Rheintgen is not about safety,” Smith stated. “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.”
If Rheintgen is convicted, she worries she might be jailed with males, compelled to chop her lengthy hair, and prevented briefly from taking gender-affirming hormones.
“People are telling me it’s a legal test, like this is the first case that’s being brought,” she stated. “It’s how they test the law. But I didn’t do this to test the law. I did it because I was upset. I can’t have any expectations for what’s going to happen because this has never been prosecuted before. I’m horrified and scared.”
