When Gender Policing Backfires

Recently, I was coming home from a conference, and I had just gotten through TSA at an airport that I had been to before. I noticed something that I had noticed the previous time I was there, which is a startlingly long line. The line that I had noticed previously is the line to the women’s restroom. I usually notice the line to the women’s restroom at major events, whether Comic-Con, a concert, a speech, or a book signing; the lines for women and men are literally night and day. This moment at the airport was no different. As per usual, there was no line for the men’s room; men and boys went in and out of the restroom like clockwork. Yet the line for women and girls moved more slowly than molasses on a cold winter’s day.

The long women’s bathroom line is not an unusual phenomenon, but it is still painful to witness. We can make planes, trains, cars, and Wi-Fi fast, but not the restroom line designated for women and girls. One reason that the women’s line is longer is because of anatomical, biological, and sartorial differences—including menstruation and the structure of women’s garments. Men can simply zip and unzip their pants while women have to squat. However, the problem isn’t just biology or the complexity of a garment but the number of toilets designated for women in comparison to the number of toilets and urinals that men have in their restrooms. Secondly, the flow to enter and exit a women’s restroom versus a men’s restroom is designed better. Lastly, given the politics of care, women and girls are less likely to go to the restroom alone. They are more likely to have a child or elderly person in their care or another woman along with them for safety.

As a nonnormative human, I often think of the domino effect that will impact marginalized and dispossessed people when policy changes are enacted to make cisgender, heteronormative bodies (which are mostly white) “feel safe.” My gut instinctively knew that when Roe v. Wade was overturned, it was only a matter of time before trans and gender-expansive folks would feel the wrath of the political right. For example, social, political, financial, and legal regression occurs whenever a cisgender male (typically white and problematically conservative) feels threatened with the idea of having to share anything. In these instances, the pendulum swings in the direction of oppression.

The policing of bodies is as old as the colonization of the Americas. In the seventeenth century, the Jesuits wrote of how indigenous women chose their partners, when and if they became pregnant and bore children, whether their partners were casual or long-term, and if they wanted to obtain or pursue roles in leadership. Indigenous women’s ability to choose for themselves or their right to full autonomy threatened the worldview of European patriarchal imperialism. These women lived full lives without the consent of men. Consequently, Jesuits and, more broadly, the genocidal regime of Europeans and their creolized offspring eradicated Indigenous, femme, and queer gender-expansive cosmologies and ideologies.

By the nineteenth century, the policing of gender and sexuality became a marker of global imperial power. British colonies began having anti-buggery laws added to their local laws and constitutions. In the United States, single-gender designations began to appear in restrooms, lodging, and other gatherings. Gender policing and the regulation of who could live where didn’t just impact unmarried couples, queer, and trans and gender-expansive people, but also single, cisgender, and presumably straight folks, too. By the end of the nineteenth century, numerous cities and towns established laws that controlled not only which bathrooms and buildings you could enter but also the number of unrelated women who could live in the same dwelling. These housing occupancy laws also impacted whether sororities could have their own houses on university campuses.

By 1920, over forty U.S. states adopted legislation that systematized the binary relationship we have to public restrooms. Bathrooms, housing, and subsequently clothing were policed by legal and social changes that dictated who could use what bathroom. Laws also passed to regulate gender-specific clothing, which policed gender expression and reinforced the rigidity of binaries. The nineteenth century also saw laws passed that regulated gender expression. In the 1840s, anti-cross-dressing laws began to pass nationally, and, by the end of the nineteenth century, over forty cities had laws banning cross-dressing. Yet the regulation of restrooms, housing, and clothing didn’t just impact the regulation of bathrooms based on gender but also impacted race.

The laws on gender expression and what bathroom someone could use began around the time that the United States began enacting the fugitive slave laws. According to Jen Manion, there is a correlation between the policing of enslaved people who became fugitive and the history of trans policing. One harrowing example of cross-dressing and fugitivity from enslavement is that of Ellen Craft and her husband William Craft. There are numerous accounts of enslaved people who cross-dressed to evade being captured and put back into slavery, so laws were passed to deter enslaved people from fugitivity, and those who assisted runaways were also prosecuted or killed.

Before I continue with the discussion, I need to define a few terms. For example, “biological sex” is the label assigned by a medical professional at birth based on physical characteristics (genitalia) and other biological determinants. Yet the appearance of male or female genitalia is the determining factor because infants do not yet have distinct characteristics of biological sex, nor have they experienced puberty or the socialization of gender roles.

Gender roles are based on social and legal constructions that vary by culture, which can impact one’s gender identity.

Gender identity is each person’s individual experience of gender. It is their sense of being a woman, a man, both, neither, or anywhere along the gender spectrum. A person’s gender identity may or may not be the same as the sex that one is assigned at birth.

Gender expression is how a person publicly presents their gender. This can include behavior and outward appearance, such as dress, hair, makeup, body language, and vocal expression.

Historically, gender policing resulted in women who wanted to live together, someone who fled enslavement, or someone who identified as trans or gender-expansive facing criminalization because of white, heteronormative patriarchy. Policing gender began with women, people of color, and trans and gender-expansive people being penalized for exercising their freedom of expression. Centuries later, women, people of color, and trans and gender-expansive people are still experiencing discrimination when they choose to use the restroom or express themselves.

On December 5, 2024, trans activists led a sit-in inside the women’s bathroom closest to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s office on Capitol Hill to protest Republican-led efforts to keep transgender people from using restrooms that match their gender identity. The protest was meant to bring visibility to legally sanctioned policies that would impact trans and gender-expansive people under a second MAGA administration. Subsequently, in 2025, over one thousand anti-trans bills were under consideration, ones which would negatively impact the lives of trans and gender-expansive people. Trans and gender-expansive people are banned from serving in the military, and in many states, banned from using the bathroom that aligns with their gender expression and from living their lives without discrimination. Trans and gender-expansive people are not only often unable to use public spaces such as restrooms, participate in government jobs, or receive affirming care but learning about being transgender is also under surveillance and restriction.

Currently, women, people of color, trans people and gender-expansive people are being stopped, harassed, and are more likely to face discrimination than cisgender white men. The policing happens while people are performing mundane tasks such as shopping, going out to eat, or being patrons at a hotel and using the bathroom.

Cisgender women and trans and gender-expansive people are not safe because the U.S. proves profusely that it does not care about women. The U.S. only cares about silencing their voices, removing their agency, removing their ability to choose for themselves, and exploiting their safety to criminalize trans and gender-expansive people as well as people who do not fit their problematic images of what women should look like. This is not just a bunch of pedants on podcasts, blogs, or social media; it includes the White House, too. On January 20, 2025, the 47th president submitted executive order 14168 titled, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” It states in section one:

“Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers. This is wrong. Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being. The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system. Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.”

The current presidential administration appears to have the rights of cisgender women at the forefront, but these women do not have the right to choose because of the dismantling of Roe v. Wade. If they are women of color, they face maternal mortality or being kept alive because of anti-abortion laws. If a person using a bathroom appears cisgender enough (passes the “cisgender test”), presumably it will be safe for them to use it.

The quote from executive order 14168 is an example of how political ideology impacts social, intellectual, and personal safety for individuals who choose to live their lives authentically. Policing gender does nothing but create more problems for women of color and trans and gender-expansive people. Secondly, it does nothing to address systemic racism, health disparities, and queer- and transphobia. Lastly, it shows that the definitions of biological sex, gender roles, and gender identity conflict with what the political right thinks it knows and is doing. In other words, the political right thinks that it is defending cisgender women and girls, but it is policing their ability to express themselves and have agency outside of patriarchy, and it vilifies trans and gender-expansive people, as well as people whose appearance is gender ambivalent but are cisgender. Gender policing erases the reality of intersexed people whose gender identity and expression do not fit neatly because their biological sex is outside of the binary of XX and XY chromosomes. Lastly, policing of gender does not ensure the safety of women and girls, especially Black women and girls, when they actually call for law enforcement to protect them.

The policing of bathrooms and gender overall does not address the reality that women and girls are inconvenienced when it comes to bathroom usage. It also harms men and boys who may have to accompany a child or elder of the opposite gender. Rarely do men’s rooms have changing tables for use when a parent or guardian accompanies a child to the restroom. Nor does this policing address the reality that caregivers are not just women. If anything, it further stigmatizes the role of care work as being exclusively for women and girls. Yet gender-neutral bathrooms can provide more safety because each stall is locked and the only thing that is shared is the sink. Gender-neutral bathrooms could also expedite the wait in lines, and women and girls would not run late, missing flights or portions of concerts and events because they were waiting to use the restroom.

The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Elisabeth Paquette or the Associate Editor Shadi “Soph” Heidarifar.