Let’s be real. America only gets outraged when something challenges the version of the world it’s comfortable with. That version almost always protects white men, guns, and systems of violence — and targets anyone who exists outside those lines.
This country will defend gun rights endlessly. It will argue that we can’t punish everyone just because a few people abuse the system. Even when kids are shot in classrooms. Even when mass shooters walk into grocery stores, churches, concerts, and hospitals. The story never changes. The guns aren’t the problem. It’s always something else.
But when trans people want to use the bathroom that matches who we are, suddenly that logic doesn’t apply. The idea that we deserve safety? That we should exist in public spaces without fear? That becomes a debate.
Let me say it clearly. I am a trans woman. I am not a threat in a bathroom. I am not dangerous. I am not some hypothetical scenario.
There has never been a single verified case in the United States of a transgender person assaulting someone in a public restroom. Not one.
What does happen, over and over, is that trans people are harassed, followed, threatened, or attacked just for being in a place we have every right to be. I cannot count the number of times I’ve had to assess a public space before entering it. Is someone going to stare? Am I going to be questioned? Do I have time to be calm and shrink myself to avoid becoming a target?
And trans men are often forced into women’s restrooms by these laws. Men who look, sound, and live as men — because they are men — are being told to use women’s spaces. That doesn’t make anyone safer. It creates confusion, fear, and violence. It puts people exactly where they’re most likely to be harmed.
This isn’t about safety. It never has been.
It’s about control. About power. About a system that would rather police bodies like mine than confront the truth about where the real danger is.
White cisgender men are responsible for most mass shootings in this country. That’s not an opinion. That’s data. But there is no national emergency declared about them. No legislative campaigns to restrict their access to weapons. No obsession with keeping them out of public spaces.
Instead we get bills attacking drag performers. We get laws banning gender affirming care. We get headlines about protecting children from LGBTQ people instead of protecting children from gun violence, from poverty, from the people who are actually hurting them.
Because confronting the real causes of harm would mean confronting whiteness, patriarchy, capitalism, and the fact that the people in power are often the ones causing the most damage. So they don’t. They scapegoat us.
Trans people become the distraction. The villain. The reason to pass laws that strip us of dignity, safety, and access.
But here’s the thing. You can’t say you believe in freedom while policing our existence. You can’t claim to care about women and children while putting guns in the hands of people who use them to kill, and stripping trans people of the right to exist safely in public.
If you trust someone with an assault rifle but not with a bathroom stall, that says more about you than it does about me.
We are not asking for special treatment. We are demanding what every person should already have — safety, respect, and the freedom to exist without fear.
The fact that we are still having this conversation in 2025 is exhausting. We should be moving forward. We should be expanding rights and care and visibility. But instead, we’re watching this country spiral backward, clinging to fear and calling it protection.
Trans people are not going anywhere. We have always been here. We have always resisted. And we are not going to be silent just because our existence makes someone uncomfortable.
If America wants to call itself free and just, then it needs to start acting like it.
You don’t get to erase us just because you refuse to understand us.
Gemma Ortwerth 
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