ABSTRACT
This chapter explores controversy around the movement to enact bathroom laws in cities and states around the United States. With increasing visibility and attention to transgender individuals and accommodation to them in public spaces and institutions, progressives and conservatives alike view this population as challenging conventions of gender. The chapter argues the conflict also reinscribes popular and historical understandings of threatening public masculinity and menacing homosexuals, social ways of thinking that inscribe the literacy by which men understand their gender identity and performativity. As a consequence, legal and public policy initiatives reify binary notions of gender without taking up the need to challenge either toxic masculinity or the safety and accommodation of transgender people or women in shared social space.
