Tennessee Withdraws Bathroom Bill from Senate

As we previously reported, the Tennessee General Assembly was pushing a bathroom bill through the Senate that states that bathrooms would only be accessible to people based on the gender on their birth certificates, essentially barring transgender people access to their appropriately gendered facilities.  The Chattanooga Times Free Press reports that the bill has been withdrawn.

“I understand Rep. Floyd’s passion about the issue, but we have more pressing issues before us that we need to focus our attention on and we don’t need to get sidetracked,” Watson said.

Floyd introduced the bill after reading a news article about a Texas woman who said she was fired from Macy’s after stopping “a male teen dressed as a woman” from using a dressing room.

“It could happen here,” Floyd said. “I believe if I was standing at a dressing room and my wife or one of my daughters was in the dressing room and a man tried to go in there — I don’t care if he thinks he’s a woman and tries on clothes with them in there — I’d just try to stomp a mudhole in him and then stomp him dry.

“Don’t ask me to adjust to their perverted way of thinking and put my family at risk,” he said. “We cannot continue to let these people dominate how society acts and reacts. Now if somebody thinks he’s a woman and he’s a man and wants to try on women’s clothes, let them him take them into the men’s bathroom or dressing room.”

There would be a fifty dollar fine for the offender, as a misdemeanor.

This would have further complicated matters, since the state does not allow the changing of gender on birth certificates on residents born in Tennessee, even after having surgical gender reassignment.

The full article can be viewed on the Chattanooga Times Free Press.