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

Ooh, that’s not so good.

It’s actually required by law that the Utah State Auditor (presently John Dougall) maintain a snitch line about bathroom use by trans people when the bathroom is owned, operated, or maintained by state or local government. The idea here was that if trans people use the bathroom somewhere, then that might be because government is just not being harsh enough, and these reports would be used by the state government to put pressure on locals to attack trans people harder.

In law, the purpose wasn’t intended to be used in criminal prosecutions of trans people or investigations into any particular persons sex, gender or genitals, but on the other hand, nothing in the law precluded the Auditor from turning over any reports to law enforcement. Also, too, how do you tell if a trans person was illegally using a bathroom in a state that requires bathroom use to be consistent with birth certificates? They certainly didn’t intend for snitches to submit copies of the birth certificates of the people — who may or may not be trans — that they’re narcing out.

I mean, it’s not like there haven’t been high-profile false positives at detecting transness in […checks notes…] Beyoncé or anyone (both before and after she announced that all bathrooms at her Renaissance Tour dates would be gender neutral). And it’s not like asshats don’t already feel entitled to a description of the genitals and chromosomes of anyone who works anyplace they spend money. And it’s not even like anti-trans snitch lines haven’t been tried before. And failed.

So. Y’know. It’s not like they had good reason to believe this was all going to work out well for the cissexists. And, of course, it didn’t.

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, following the example of someone who first submitted TBM’s script with a prepended note implying that they were scared to speak directly but had hidden important information somewhere in the script. (There was no important information hidden in the script.) 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 the poor auditor.

Auditor Dougall, of course, felt grossly put upon that the state legislature was passing laws without thinking of the real-world implications for bureaucrats like him:

The Office created the complaint form to comply with a statutory mandate – a role we did not request. Indeed, no auditor sets out to become a bathroom monitor. Unfortunately, neither Rep. Birkeland, nor any other legislator consulted with this Office regarding this newly mandated obligation placed on the Office under this bill.

Elsewhere, he added:

I would assume the Legislature probably didn’t think through what kind of public backlash might happen.

Aww. The poor bloke. We here at TransCentralStation have no idea what it would be like to have legislators vote on bills that directly target you without ever having any idea of the real world implications.

While the anti-snitch activism has been widely reported already, we here at PJ are proud to be among the first to note that the pro-trans trolls have been exactly as successful as predicted: the site has now gone down. (Our screen shot of the failed attempt at access from earlier today is the lead image in this post.)

What’s unclear, however, is what happens next. As the auditor himself noted, he’s required by law to maintain a snitch line. Taking it down may be pragmatic, but it’s also against the law. The royal “we” here at PJ doesn’t think that Dougall is any worse than any other Republican politician, and is probably actually better than the average GOP pol in Utah given that he tried to reign in the stupidity by reminding any potentially serious users of the snitch line that taking pics of people using public bathrooms is illegal, and he wants to make this very clear, even if they do say Jehovah appear trans.

Even so, Dougall presumably voluntarily joined the Republican Party, and he’s currently running for the party nomination to the US Senate, so we are happily awaiting news that being the bathroom monitor for bigots ruins whatever is left of his political career.