Every time I hear lawmakers say they’re protecting women, something in me pushes back. Protecting women’s sports. Protecting women’s privacy. Protecting women’s spaces. The words sound familiar, but the actions don’t match. It feels less like protection and more like performance.
Across red states—and now at the federal level—lawmakers keep pushing bills that ban transgender women from sports teams and public bathrooms. They sell these laws as care for women and girls, but all I see is a fixation on controlling a small group of people while ignoring the problems most women face every day.
Women have asked for equal pay for decades. We’ve asked for affordable childcare, paid family leave, better maternal healthcare, and real accountability for sexual assault. We’ve asked for rape kits to get tested instead of collecting dust for years. We’ve asked for protection from harassment and violence in our workplaces, schools, and homes. Yet lawmakers keep choosing a different fight—one that costs them very little politically and fixes nothing materially.
Texas now enforces laws that block trans students from using restrooms that align with their gender identity and threatens universities with massive fines if they don’t comply. Other states follow suit, redefining sex so narrowly that trans women disappear from public life altogether. On the federal stage, politicians try to rewrite civil rights protections under the banner of “fairness in women’s sports,” even though those efforts target a tiny population.
That’s what makes this feel dishonest. Trans women make up a very small percentage of the population, yet politicians center them again and again, not because they pose some widespread threat, but because they serve as a convenient symbol. Fear mobilizes voters faster than compassion ever will.
What bothers me most comes down to enforcement. Every time someone argues for bathroom bans, I ask the same question: who enforces this? Who checks? Who decides whether someone looks “female enough” to walk into a bathroom without getting questioned, stares, or worse? These laws drag all women into surveillance. They turn restrooms into spaces of suspicion. They invite strangers to police bodies—and that should disturb every single one of us.
Women didn’t ask for this. I don’t know a woman who said, “This solves my problems.” I know women who feel exhausted. Who feel unheard. Who juggle work and family without support. Who navigate healthcare systems that dismiss their pain. Who worry about safety far more often than about who stands next to them in a bathroom.
When lawmakers claim they’re helping women while ignoring everything women actually demand, it feels insulting. It feels like being used as cover. Like our lives function as talking points instead of realities that deserve serious solutions.
These laws don’t protect women. They divide us. They cast trans women as threats and treat cis women like props. They deflect attention away from broken systems and redirect it toward a group with the least power to push back.
Real support for women would look different. It would center economic security, healthcare, autonomy, and safety. It would expand opportunity instead of shrinking who belongs. It wouldn’t rely on humiliation, surveillance, or fear.
When politicians talk about protecting women, I pay attention to what they choose to protect us from—and what they choose to ignore. Right now, they ignore pay gaps, healthcare disparities, childcare crises, and violence against women. Instead, they police bathrooms.
The fact that we now have to ask who belongs in a bathroom tells me everything I need to know about how far off track we’ve gone.
