School bathroom ban gives rise to Trans Day of Non-Compliance

Juniper Czaja has experienced moments of paralysis in recent weeks as she has processed the unrelenting flood of legislation being pushed by Republicans both nationwide and in Ohio, including Senate Bill 104, which goes into effect today (Tuesday, Feb. 25) and prohibits transgender students at K-12 schools statewide from using the facilities that align with their gender.

“It’s very easy, even as an organizer and activist, to kind of disassociate from how bad each thing is, because there are so many bad things happening all at once,” said Czaja, who then added that certain news items or images, including the photos that circulated on social media last week of new “biological men” bathroom signs being installed at the University of Cincinnati, have a way of snapping her back to reality. “Moments like that bring me back into my body, usually very uncomfortably, knowing that this is something we’re going to see in history books, and that we’re going to talk about how unequivocally terrible it was, and how it was probably the start to even worse things. Personally, the last couple of weeks I have woken up with an unshakeable sense of dread and panic. … And I can’t even imagine what closeted trans middle schoolers are feeling right now, knowing what the future could hold.”

Czaja views SB104 as the latest in a series of political escalations taken against the trans community, driven by people who either “view trans people as the enemy” or who have adopted them as pawns in a larger cultural war, predicting it will lead to an increase in violence against trans individuals along with further legal restrictions. “This is just a ramping up where the next bill begins to feel inevitable from the last one,” she said. “It’s not going to be a direct shift into this completely anti-trans world, but rather this slow, steady build.”

Organizing, at least, has helped to bring at least some comfort amid this corrosive slide, with Czaja finding needed community in Trans Experimental Action (TEA), a newly founded group of young, primarily working-class trans and nonbinary individuals and their allies. Together, this collective is staging a series of actions around central Ohio today in response to SB104, including a handful of school walkouts and solidarity events, all culminating in a Trans March of Liberation that kicks off at the Ohio Statehouse at 6 p.m.

Dorian Lou, a student TEA organizer at a central Ohio school with what they termed a “dense population” of trans individuals, worked with their administrators to coordinate a Trans Solidarity event, during which they expect more than 100 students to gather and send emails to state legislators relaying their opposition to the bill. “Supporting trans youth is so important right now,” Lou wrote via email, sharing a number of ways the larger community can step up in this moment, from checking in on trans friends to contacting legislators to voice opposition to a law they said can place trans youth at greater risk of physical danger. “Even if they are complying and using the restroom that corresponds to their ‘biological sex,’ if they present as trans or non-conforming, they are at heightened risk of being subjected to hate speech or potential hate crimes in a space where they are at the mercy of other bathroom occupants.”

“School should be a place where you feel safe to explore your gender identity, and your identity as a whole,” Czaja said. “But as schools become more and more hostile, a lot of queer kids will have no respite. They will be at home, being constantly berated for being queer or trans, and then they will go to school and have the same experience.”

The actions coordinated by TEA are part of a larger, statewide Day of Trans Non-Compliance organized in opposition to SB104 and predicated in part on the idea that small acts of defiance can have an outsized cumulative impact. “What we see at this stage of fascism in so many countries around the world is that everyday people doing mundane compliance is what allows them to scale up quickly, so we need our allies to be actively non-compliant in every way available to them,” Dara Adkison, executive director of TransOhio, said in a November interview, noting the impact a person can make by simply going about their business if they happen to see a trans person using the bathroom of their choosing. “If you can just not see something, don’t see something.”

At the University of Cincinnati, for instance, some students responded to the appearance of signs designating campus bathrooms for “biological men” by simply removing them from the walls.

“Hundreds of small actions can weigh out one grand action,” said Czaja, who reiterated the importance of allies taking a variety of supportive actions in this moment. “We need more people speaking out. We need more legal challenges of things like SB104. … And, for me, the best way to support trans people is to get to know them and see how interpersonally you can help them. You need to be in community with the trans people around you. … All of the trans people I know weathering everything that’s happening the best are the ones who are supported by a strong community.”