This nice lady is Debbie Riddle. She is the Congresswoman representing House District 150 in the Texas House of Representatives. She has held that office since 2002.
She is MY representative in the Texas House.
And she hates transgender people.
I have several personal philosophies that govern my activism. Very high on the list is this: never be afraid to go where the battle is. Marriage equality, anti-discrimination ordinances, anti-bullying policies--these things don't come easily. They are not achieved by "bench warmers." So every time I get the chance, I love to seize the opportunity to engage the other side on their home turf. Such an opportunity presented itself a few days ago.
I was at a monthly luncheon put on by a genuinely fine group to which I belong: the Spring-Klein Chamber of Commerce. Spring is an old suburb of Houston; neighboring Klein is a somewhat newer area, younger, and with more McMansions. Like most of Houston, it is a prosperous area; and like most of Texas, it is, on balance, conservative. Debbie Riddle represents our area with a shotgun in one hand and a "Don't Tread on Me" Tea Party banner in the other. She was recently dubbed "the 4th most conservative representative in the Texas House," and she has sponsored every type of far right whackadoodle legislation you can possibly imagine, from our new "campus carry" law, designed to turn our state university system into one giant shooting range, to a ridiculously redundant Religious Exemption bill that accomplishes nothing, other than making sure that Ms. Riddle got to deliver one last good, hard slap across the face to same sex couples in Texas. But the most onerous is a bill that she has been crafting and introducing on the House floor for a while now. This bill would make it a crime for a transgender person to use the public restroom that matches their sexual identity, with a healthy fine and jail time for anyone caught doing so. Sort of a statewide "bathroom bill," if you will. She is, to use a phrase, a "piece of work."
I love belonging to organizations like the Spring-Klein Chamber because, while most of the members are conservative (some very) there is a keen interest in including me and my viewpoints in the name of diversity. Some of this is a morbid fascination with "the open gay guy," and some of it is a genuine spirit of inclusiveness. And the respect I have for the group is mutual. So I will admit to a certain amount of glee when I discovered that Ms. Riddle was to be the speaker at the membership luncheon--with Q & A.
In all fairness, it was Ms. Riddle who brought up the bathroom bill. In the midst of patting herself on the back for accomplishments such as single-handedly securing the Mexican border and killing public school funding, she said this. It's not word for word, but it's very close:
"I remember a time when we didn't have to put up with nonsense like who was going to use which bathroom. Men used men's bathrooms and women used women's bathrooms. Now we have all these freaky people who might decide that they feel like a woman that day and want to use the women's bathroom. Well, I don't know about you, but I don't want my 8-year-old granddaughter to see something like THAT in the bathroom. That's why I'm working on my bathroom bill. I don't want pedophiles in women's bathrooms, and I'm sure you don't either."
When Q & A began, I made sure she could not avoid my hand. Courteously, Ms. Riddle came directly to the back of the room where I was sitting, and I stood up. This is what I said:
"My name is John Lazo, and I am a member of the chamber and one of your constituents. I should tell you up front that I am also hold a seat on the Houston Ryan White Planning Council, I am a member of the Houston GLBT Political Caucus and I am a volunteer with Houston Unites, which is working for passage of the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance. I don't have an issue with the Religious Exemption law. It is unnecessary and redundant and was clearly intended as a rebuke to marriage equality, but I can live with that. But please, PLEASE, before you introduce any more "bathroom bills," will you accept my invitation to meet with some of the transgender people that I am working with on the HERO campaign? They are not freaks, and they are most certainly not pedophiles. They are decent people who work hard, pay their taxes--and vote. and they just want to use the restroom that makes common sense."
By this time the entire room had turned around and was staring intently at us--two people who could not be further apart on the political spectrum, eyeball-to-eyeball. Walking away from me and returning to the front of the room, Ms. Riddle replied: "This gentleman asks a very sensitive question. My door is always open. But the priority for me is and always will be keeping predators out of bathrooms." And on to the next question she went, which was about open carry.
So to wrap up, let's try to follow the logic. We don't want pedophiles in public bathrooms. So the way to accomplish that is to prevent a transgender woman, who has undergone or is undergoing reassignment, and who looks like a woman, from using the woman's bathroom--the bathroom that corresponds to her gender identity. And if that is the case, then one of two things must be true. Either A) all transgender people are pedophiles or B) a sexual assault committed in that bathroom is the transgender woman's fault.
The beauty of the American system is that there is a process available to a citizen whose elected representative is in the business of crafting discriminatory legislation. It's called the election process. And my next campaign commitment is to volunteer, canvas, and phone-bank as hard as I can for whoever is running against Debbie Riddle. Only 10,000 people actually voted in the 2014 contest that elected Debbie Riddle. And a little truth goes a long way.
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