SALT LAKE CITY (LifeSiteNews) — The Utah House voted 58-16 on Friday to give final approval to legislation that would keep most biological males out of opposite-sex restrooms in public buildings, though whether Republican Gov. Spencer Cox will sign it into law remains to be seen.
HB 257 states that to “preserve the individual privacy of male and female students in the public education system, a student may only access an operational sex-designated privacy space within a public school that is designated for student use if the student’s sex corresponds with the sex designation of the privacy space.”
For “operational sex-designated changing room[s] in a government entity’s facility that is open to the general public,” the proposed rules are less stringent in that an individual must either be the corresponding sex or have both “legally amended the individual’s birth certificate to correspond with the sex designation of the changing room” and “undergone a primary sex characteristic surgical procedure.”
The bill also establishes as a matter of nondiscrimination law that “equal” does “not mean, with respect to biological sex” a “characteristic of being the same or identical” or a “requirement that biological sexes be ignored or co-mingled in every circumstance.”
Yet it remains to be seen if the legislation will receive a signature from Cox, who has a weak record on LGBT issues and would not yet confirm his intentions regarding HB 257, according to Axios.
In 2022, the legislature had to override his veto of legislation to ban males from girls’ athletic programs, and the following year he signed a ban on surgically and chemically transitioning minors. Cox has also indulged the leftist practice of “preferred gender pronouns” and called pro-LGBT posturing “critical to the survival of the [Republican] party” because of its appeal to young people.
Critics argue that forcing girls to share intimate facilities such as bathrooms, showers, or changing areas with members of the opposite sex violates their privacy rights, subjects them to needless emotional stress, and gives potential male predators a viable pretext to enter female bathrooms or lockers by simply claiming transgender status.
In Virginia, the issue was dramatically illustrated with Loudoun County School District’s cover-up of the rape of a female student by a “transgender” classmate in a girls’ bathroom due to its damaging implications for the LGBT movement.