From The Files Of How Did We Miss This: When Bathrooms Attack

Oh, Kera Birkeland, we hardly knew thee. No, really, we hardly knew thee.

Cis bathroom panic: for illustration purposes only.

Kera Birkeland who is in the news for abruptly resigning from her position as District 4 representative to Utah’s state house — after 6 months of failing to make a required conflict of interest disclosure after she became head of a trade association that lobbies primarily (but not exclusively) in Montana — has previously received attention in Wonkette for being a rabid bigot who loves gender policing even if she can’t quite figure out how it’s supposed to work.

But in addition to that nifty little anti-sports bill that led to doxxing and threats targeting a high school student for the crime of being good at basketball, Birkeland is also the Utah queen of bathroom policing. She even got into it with the Utah state auditor when she sponsored a law requiring the auditor to maintain a snitch line for people who thought they saw a trans person go into a bathroom that one time, and shock, surprise! The snitch line became a national joke.

After they opened it, the line was instantly flooded with bogus tips. In case you are unaware, it has become part of the great collection of internet traditions to submit the entire script of The Bee Movie to such tip lines, …. Naturally, the script was submitted to the Utah State Auditor, probably many times over. But that wasn’t all. Thousands of false complaints flooded in during the first week, trolling [poor John Dougall].

But why? Why was Birkeland so obsessed with harassing people in the bathroom in the first place, Sandy Claus, why?

As it happens, she learned it from you, MAGA. She learned it from you.

In what has to be the most weirdly predictable thing I’ve ever failed to predict, before Birkeland was Utah’s hate queen, she was a beauty pageant contestant who disliked Trump. While there’s no money quote in that story about hating Trump for invading girls’ changing rooms at pageants he owned, it’s not a stretch to think that might be a factor in her bathroom worries.

But wait! There’s more! Heavy reports that while at the 2016 Republican National Convention serving as a delegate for Ted Cruz, she was threatened by Trump’s supporters while in the bathroom.

Birkeland said the threats came from two “pro-Trump” women because of the floor fight over rules at the convention […]

“They said: ‘You should die. They should pull the protection from the Utah delegation. You should all die,'” Birkeland told the [Salt Lake Tribune].

For the record, there’s no mention of Birkeland telling anyone the women who threatened her were trans. And yet, that’s — again — hardly surprising. Cis dude violates the dressing room of cis beauty pageant contestants, then another cis pageant contestant gets death threats in the bathroom from cis Trump supporters, and the only bill that pageant contestant can come up with to make bathrooms and changing rooms more safe is to ban trans people.

What does this sound like to you?

Does it remind any of you of how sexual assault was defined as stranger danger for decades when all along the people most likely to abuse you were those who already had a close relationship with you? Parents, priests and pastors?

There is a well known psychological phenomenon in which people avoid thinking about the real scary thing to focus on a fictional scary thing because the real thing is actually too scary and too difficult to control. The fact that trans people are a tiny minority is an asset for people like Birkeland who were threatened in bathrooms by members of their own tribe. Birkeland can’t ban all Republican women from peeing, even though that response would make sense given what happened to her. But she can redefine the threat as coming exclusively from trans people and then ban us.

During my career as an anti-violence activist, I met more than one woman who described how she tensed up walking from her work to her car, ready to use her keys as a weapon in case she was attacked, only to go home to an abusive partner who had raped her in the past and did so again in the future. It’s ridiculous, it’s illogical, it’s downright horrifying, but it’s also what humans with human brains do.

As upsetting as that is, it also suggests that as the MAGA movement further splinters and devolves into attacking each other, the attacks on trans people will only increase. After all, that fear isn’t going to displace itself.

So goodbye to Kera Birkeland, a bigot who doesn’t know how to deal with the violence and harassment within her own party, but welcome in 2025, a year where we have reason to believe that things will only get worse.

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Utah State Auditor's Office Launched a Bathroom Snitch Line. How's That Going?

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Crip Dyke also writes for the delightfully cussmouthed Wonkette!

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