Summary

Marcy Rheintgen, a 20-year-old transgender college student, was arrested at the Florida State Capitol after intentionally entering a women’s restroom in protest of the state’s transgender bathroom law.

Civil rights lawyers say it is the first known arrest under such laws in any U.S. state.

Rheintgen faces a misdemeanor trespassing charge and could face up to 60 days in jail.

Florida is one of only two states to criminalize such acts.

  • GiveOver@feddit.uk
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    3 months ago

    I’ve said this before but I really want to hear some stories of trans men using the womens bathroom in these places. Big muscular men with bald heads and beards, barging in pissing everywhere and leaving toilet seats up.

    I want to see the meltdown when people find out they’re just following the law. Please trans bros do this for me.

    • parody@lemmings.world
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      3 months ago

      Barge in

      Woman runs out screaming to her boyfriend

      RIP

      [edit mainly for intl readers, this place def has some gun action going on, like anywhere but feels especially dangerous state for this civil rights experiment, as domestic readers will intuitively understand]

  • xorollo@leminal.space
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    3 months ago

    “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.”

    She wrote a letter and sent to 160 lawmakers letting them know she was going to be doing an act of civil disobedience. Let’s elevate this full letter. This is much better than any article about it. (Article is fine)

  • Lady Butterfly @lazysoci.al
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    3 months ago

    I do NOT want that girl going in a man’s bathroom!! If any woman’s going to be attacked in a bathroom, it’s her… she’s young, petite and gorgeous. It’s so wrong

        • onitoring@feddit.it
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          3 months ago

          Disagree about what?

          The difference between the picture used by article in OP and the second in my link is undeniable

          Taste is subjective matter of course but in one pic you can barely tell she’s transexual while in the other you can clearly tell she was a man.

      • Vreyan31@reddthat.com
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        3 months ago

        That is how many cis men think, and we are talking about her risk going into a space where there frequently won’t be any other witnesses.

        It is not a weird thing to say, it is a relevant point.

    • acargitz@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      I don’t want people being attacked in bathrooms period. Men’s bathrooms are not supposed to be lawless dens of brutal violence, just places to fucking pee, poop and wash hands.

      • Paddzr@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        I’ve seen girls that looked below 10 in men’s bathroom. The women’s had a massive queue. Literaly no one cared, she went into cubicle, came out, washer her hands and left. No drama.

        But I guess I live in civilised world.

    • Pyr@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      I don’t understand the argument for attacks in restrooms. How often does that happen in America?

      And how is it that separate washrooms are supposed to prevent it? If a man is going to attack a woman ina restroom, is a sign saying they aren’t allowed in really going to stop them if no one else is around?

      • IamSparticles@lemmy.zip
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        3 months ago

        These laws are stupid and pointless, full stop. There are already plenty of existing laws against doing the sort of things that would actually be harmful. Just having a law to stop someone from entering the “wrong” restroom is stupid because there are plenty of reasons why someone might need to do so, even if they aren’t trans or intersex or whatever. Just entering a restroom is not harmful to anyone. And as you point out, this law doesn’t stop them if they have the intent to do harm. All it serves to do is give the people in authority an easy way to punish a group they’ve identified as “bad”.

    • xorollo@leminal.space
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      3 months ago

      She is gorgeous, but let’s not create a false bar of its ok if you’re pretty. We also have a story circulating right now in Florida about a very tall cis woman being harassed for using the women’s bathroom and BEING FIRED FROM HER JOB FOR NOT REPORTING IT RIGHT.

      We all need a place to take a shit. Pretty or not.

      • Lady Butterfly @lazysoci.al
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        3 months ago

        It’s not that, it’s the fact that she can easily become a target because she’s young, petite and gorgeous. It can happen to anyone, and the law is wrong full stop.

  • AugustWest@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    You know they have no actual reason for this law aside from intimidation, threat, and leverage for the weak minds who need something to be mad at.

    If anyone really cared, they would just make the hand-washing area open, and private stalls for people to do their business. No need to have Mens/Womens. Many places I have been to do this, and it just works.

    But then again, there really is not a problem to solve, and the “solution” is removing trans people from society and has nothing to do with bathrooms.

  • DominusOfMegadeus@sh.itjust.works
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    3 months ago

    “The arrest of Marcy Rheintgen is not about safety,” Smith said. “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.”

    It’s not. I’m sure the conservative assholes are delighted by this aspect, but the real goal is to distract the plebs with ragebait non-issues so they don’t get upset at the actual loss of all the rights, benefits, and government services they rely on.

  • Matt@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    3 months ago

    Being arrested certainly brings awareness to the real threat, but she didn’t think she’d be arrested. Maybe the protest would’ve been more successful by going in with a group of women saying that one of us is trans.

    • xorollo@leminal.space
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      3 months ago

      I believe she did think she would be arrested. But her letter points out all the reasons arresting her is biggotry. So she took away their ability to deny the bigotry of it.

      This is exactly the purpose of civil disobedience.

  • LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    3 months ago

    Bathroom laws are unenforceable and largely function instead like: “conform as closely as possible to gendered expectations of appearance and presentation or get the shit kicked out of you”.

    This mostly affects cis women. Having broad shoulders and short hair is all it takes really. The more these laws are promoted, the more cis women who don’t conform to social body standards for women will suffer. Wearing a skirt and growing your hair long and wearing makeup every single day could legitimately become a matter of your own safety.

    Biological gender essentialism is just gender roles all over again. They’ve packaged it as a way to force trans people out of society, and it does for anyone who can’t go stealth. But far more than it affects trans people, it affects cis people. They know that. That’s actually the point in the first place. They want to socially enforce patriarchy. The goal is to force women to submit to men and male scrutiny of their gender.

    • jve@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Wearing a skirt and growing your hair long and wearing makeup every single day could legitimately become a matter of your own safety.

      Damn. I hate how spot on this sounds.

    • parody@lemmings.world
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      3 months ago

      Short hair, yup. Short thick curly hair, hat, unique voice… Once spoke with someone for an hour and was shocked when their friend the bartender gendered them.

      They might’ve been conservative too who even knows. Super important point I hope* someone popular and wealthy relays to the US president frequently. “Nobody wants creeps in the bathroom Mr. President but my mom has broad shoulders…”

      (*Hopefully at +13hr after I’m safe from someone taking my hope in a reply)

  • sfu@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    Bathrooms just need to be single person use. Then neither side could complain. Who wants to go to the bathroom with other people anyway?

  • F_OFF_Reddit@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    What you people fail to realize is that this will fix the economy, once all trans people are in jail everything is going to be fucking dandy, no more overpriced eggs, no more wagestealing, no more corruption…

  • sugarfoot00@lemmy.ca
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    3 months ago

    Trans activists are going about this all wrong. Instead of sending someone like Marcy in to violate the law, they need to do this:

    Send in the biggest, burliest, hairiest ftm trans dudes into busy ladies rooms, the room that the state insists he must now legally use. And record the reaction of the women and girls leaving for broadcast media. Because by focussing on mtf trans in ladies rooms, I really feel the dipshits that make these laws haven’t thought their cunning plans through very fully.

    • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Idk if its any fairer to send trans men in. Plus a pretty girl garners more sympathy.

      Realistically trying to make them enforce them with genital inspections is the only thing that will make the public think about the ramifications

      Edit: I’m not going to advocate saying this but I think the funniest take would be to say gender restricted bathrooms are part of the gay agenda and if girls and boys can use the same restroom at home they can use them in public.

      • SassyRamen@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        You gotta understand that they don’t see a pretty girl. What they see is a freak, a pervert, or in my moms words “a demon from the pits of hell”.

        • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Idk andrew tate - who is a freak and sex predator attuned to right wing sentiments- begs to differ.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Send in the biggest, burliest, hairiest ftm trans dudes into busy ladies rooms, the room that the state insists he must now legally use.

      I mean, that’s what we’ve functionally done. The distinction is that the biggest, burliest, hairiest dude isn’t ftm trans, he’s a fucking cop.

      In an exclusive interview with The Advocate, Morton detailed the humiliating and distressing encounter. She said that she had entered the restroom with her ex-girlfriend, who handed her a tampon, when two male deputies stormed in, shining flashlights into the stall and demanding she exit. Morton, still using the toilet, was stunned.

      “They were flashing lights on our feet and saying, ‘You have to get out of here. You have to come out. We need to talk to you,’” Morton said. “I’m telling them, ‘I’m still using the restroom. I’m sitting down, I’m peeing. What is the issue?’”

      When she finally exited the stall, she said she lifted her shirt to prove she was not a man, expecting the ordeal to end. Instead, she said one deputy continued to question her appearance, insisting she “looked like a man.” Morton started recording, later posting a 9-second clip to TikTok, where it has since been viewed more than 3.7 million times. “They came in here in the girls’ restroom because I’m a girl and they didn’t think I was a girl, so they tried to come take me away,” she says in the video.

      Like, this is the fucking future. The problem is that - outside of specifically LGBTQ media like The Advocate - it gets virtually no press. Cops terrorizing women in the restroom and demanding that they prove they aren’t Transgender just aren’t something the deeply conservative and heavily Trump-pilled local media oligarchs want appearing on TV.

      You get stories like OP’s instead, specifically because they do feed into the “Men are trying to sneak into the women’s room to attack your daughter/wife/girlfriend”