“Moral panics about trans people and other queer communities are not new. So why have queer and trans people been the subject of so many moral panics?” assistant professor of criminology at Saint Mary’s University, Dr. Allyn Walker, said at a recent panel.

Bathrooms, Sports Teams, and Moral Panics: Trans Rights Now! hosted by The Gender and Sexualities Studies Institute (GSSI) at The New School for Social Research featured a panel of queer authors and academics to discuss the historical sex segregation of bathrooms, sports, and public spaces. The event on Tuesday, Feb. 25 accumulated a virtual audience of 300 registered attendees, listening in on Zoom hoping to better understand the current dialogue on trans-inclusion and recent anti-trans legislation — especially after President Donald Trump’s re-election and push of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.

Sarah McBride — the first openly trans person elected to the House of Representatives for Delaware  — was banned by a bill from using a congressional bathroom that aligns with her gender. Just prior, Congress passed a bill barring transgender athletes from participating in female sports teams in schools. Solidifying his stance on queerness and inclusion, one of Trump’s initial executive orders officially recognizes only two genders, leading to the erasure of LGBTQ resources on the CDC website and the shortening of “LGBTQ” to “LGB” on the Stonewall National Monument website.

Rachel Schreiber, professor of art, media, and cultural history at GSSI, organized the event. The event posting stated the panel was created “to discuss and investigate the current culture wars, and to contextualize these within the history of previous gender-based moral panics.”

“Lately, we’ve been seeing a rising wave of anti-trans moral panic, … fears about transgender people in bathrooms and sports teams have recently been ramping up across meetings and social media outlets,” Dr. Walker said.

Panelist Susan Stryker, affiliated scholar at Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research, spoke on the history of bathroom segregation and why sex-separated restrooms are typical, yet an impractical design.

“What both sides of this debate have taken for granted is that sex-segregated toilets are sort of the norm, and that fight is about who gets to be at which one, so that we’re fighting over issues about identity and embodiment,” Stryker said. “… Rather than fight over who’s a man, who’s a woman, what if we just had a fundamentally different design sensibility about what we expect from public restrooms?”

Private spaces like restrooms that reinforce a binary gender separation are non-inclusive of transgender bodies, as well as many public spaces, and communities — namely sports, according to Stryker.

Award-winning writer, Frankie de la Cretaz, delved into the intersectional issue of trans-inclusion in sports, as they described. De la Cretaz explained how there is a deep-rooted fear of the other, of those “who do not conform to certain white western ideas of femininity or gender.”

“Over the last century, their worries have been that athletics would make women masculine. They might threaten their ability to reproduce. They used to think that people’s uterus would fall out, or if they got hit in the breast they would develop breast cancer, that they would be less desirable to men, that they would have less time to have a family and be a wife,” de la Cretaz said.

The panel concluded that trans issues do not exist within a vacuum, and the fight for trans-inclusion is only beginning, and one of the ways to begin combating anti-trans rhetoric is to reimagine how the public views the trans experience and how it respects transgender bodies in society.

“One of the things that often gets said about trans people is that we imagine that we’re trapped in the wrong body. Well, why do you think about embodiment as a trap? … That you imagine that your body is an anchor whose particularities bind you into some kind of permanent, unalterable, natural social order,” Stryker said. “… Why do we imagine the body as property? We could imagine it as a condition of freedom and connection to other people.”