This Might Make a Pretty Good Case!
Hello. Today, a special Gene Pool report based on recent news.
The woman above is Marcy Rheintgen. She is 20 years old, a college student from Illinois who was assigned a male identity at birth. She is transgender. On a visit to her grandparents in Florida in March, Ms. Rheintgen went to the State Capitol building in Tallahassee with an intent to break the law. The law is a recent one, criminalizing the use of a bathroom in a government building by someone whose birth certificate does not match the sign on the door. Five states have bathroom laws, but Florida is one of only two — the other is Utah — to have attached criminal penalties.
Marcy wrote letters in advance to the Florida governor and dozens of other government authorities, warning them she was going to do this. She gave them a place and time, and indicated which bathroom she would use. She sent them photographs of herself, so they would know how to identify her. (She felt, she noted dryly, that otherwise they might not guess who this particular potential violator was.) In her letters she asked the authorities not to arrest her.
When she entered the designated ladies’ room at the designated time, and went to the sinks to wash her hands, agents entered, put her under arrest, and led her away. She’d been in there one minute. She spent the night in jail. (Technically, she was charged with “trespass,” not violation of the bathroom law — but in this case they seem inextricably legally paired, because violating the second prohibition creates the first crime.)
Okay.
Please do not be alarmed or offended: I am going to say “Rosa Parks” now.
I know to some this might sound like an inapt or insensitive comparison, but I am going to supply the aptness and sensitivity soon.
The magnitude of the significance of this meek crime of civil disobedience does not compare with what Ms. Parks did on December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Ala. It will not lead to the lifting of an intolerable humiliating historic injustice perpetrated against millions of people. In this case, the number is likely in the thousands at most. And toilets have less gravitas, and greater potential for belittlement, than buses.
But Rheintgen’s act on March 19, 2025, in Tallahassee, Fla., seems inseparable from Parks’s in one significant way: Like Parks, she may well be the perfect Defendant One.
When, in 1955, the NAACP was looking for a case that they could take as far as the U.S. Supreme Court, the group bypassed other women who had done exactly what Rosa Parks had done, for very specific strategic reasons: Ms. Parks — a civil rights activist — was a mature, responsible person, not a reckless, callow, trouble-seeking youth. She had a squeaky-clean record. She had lived her life responsibly. She was strong-willed but soft-spoken, resolute but polite. The NAACP knew that those who would legally defend segregated seating in public transportation in 1955 would never be able to impugn her character, a tactic often used by those in the wrong when the salient legal facts and the moral imperatives are unsurmountable.
That’s what iconic cases often come down to and pivot on: Can you derail the real but unstated institutionalized bigotries that can be misused for demonizing misdirection?
It would appear Ms. Rheintgen intends to take her case higher, and I suspect she will find extraordinary legal assistance free of charge. This case will likely not wind up being about her character … but it might likely pivot on something else that’s also legally immaterial but, absurdly, also important. It’s not being said out loud yet. I’m happy to.
Ms. Rheintgen is really, really conventionally pretty.
I hope if there is a national test case, this one will be it. Why?
Because bigotry tends to be knee-jerk. It desperately clings to ignorance and stereotype and shallow, easy assumptions. And so I’d look forward to seeing how the lawyers on the dreadfully wrong side of this case will contort themselves to get around the one screamingly obvious, irrelevant, sexist fact that will be, for them, very inconvenient.
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It all reminds me of a routine by Lenny Bruce from about 1960.
“You are a white. The Imperial Wizard. Now, if you don't think this is logic you can burn me on the fiery cross. This is the logic: You have the choice of spending fifteen years married to a woman, a black woman or a white woman. Fifteen years kissing and hugging and sleeping real close on hot nights. With a black, black woman or a white, white woman. The white woman is Kate Smith. And the black woman is Lena Horne. So now you’re not concerned with black or white anymore, are you? You are concerned with how cute or how pretty. Then let’s really get basic and persecute ugly people!”
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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:
Good. Questions and Observations here, please:
Do you know why they call it “panhandling”? Because beggars used to hold out a pan so passersby wouldn’t be disgusted at having to touch their hands. Isn’t it awful that people were reduced to feeling that way? Well, consider this orange button a pan:
As a cis woman I have ZERO problem sharing a bathroom with a trans woman. This whole thing is so ridiculous. Republicans for my ENTIRE LIFE have been concerned with what is in other people's pants or what other people are doing in their bedrooms, and it is none of their damn business. Everything is projection with them, bunch of pervs.
Another good case would be a heavily bearded trans man going into the women's restroom, preferably right in front of some of the women who have been agitating in favor of restrictive bills.