By Hannah Schoenbaum | Associated Press
SALT LAKE CITY — Transgender activists have flooded a Utah tip line created to alert state officials about possible violations of a new bathroom law with thousands of prank reports in an effort to protect trans residents and their allies from any legitimate complaints that could threaten their safety.
That attack led the state official charged by law with running the tip line, Utah Auditor John Dougall, to lament being stuck with the onerous task of filtering out false complaints while making facing backlash for enforcing a law in which he played no role.
“No auditor goes into auditing so they can monitor toilets,” Dougall said Tuesday. “I think there were much better ways for Parliament to address their concerns, rather than this clumsy approach. »
In the week since its launch, the online tip line has already received more than 10,000 submissions, none of which appear legitimate, he said. The form asks people to report public school employees who knowingly allow someone to use a gender-designated facility in the presence of the opposite sex.
Utah residents and visitors are required by law to use restrooms and locker rooms in government-owned buildings that correspond to their birth gender. As of Wednesday, schools and agencies that violate the new restrictions can be fined up to $10,000 per day for each violation.
Although their advocacy efforts failed to stop Republican lawmakers in many states from passing restrictions for trans people, the community was successful in interfering with the often ill-conceived enforcement plans attached to these laws.
Within hours of its release Wednesday evening, trans activists and community members across the United States had already widely shared the Utah tipline on social media. Many shared the spam they had sent and encouraged others to follow suit.
Their efforts mark the latest attempt by advocates to shut down or render inoperable a government tip line that they say sows division by encouraging residents to report each other. Similar portals in at least five other states have also been flooded with hoax reports, leading state officials to shut down some.
In Virginia, Indiana, Arizona and Louisiana, activists flooded tip lines created to respond to complaints about teachers, librarians and school administrators who may have talked to students about race, identities LGBTQ+ or other topics that lawmakers considered inappropriate for children. Virginia’s tip line was removed in less than a year, as was a tip line introduced in Missouri to report gender-affirming health care clinics.
Erin Reed, a prominent trans activist and legislative researcher, said there is a collective understanding within the trans community that submitting these hoax reports is an effective way to protest the law and protect trans people who might be targeted.
“There will be trans people who enter the restrooms and potentially get flagged by these kinds of forms, and so the community takes on a protective role,” Reed said. “If there are 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 responses to the form, it will be much more difficult for the auditor’s office to sift through each one and find the one legitimate trans person who has been caught using the toilet.”
The auditor’s office has encountered numerous reports that Dougall called “utter nonsense,” and others that he said appear credible on the surface and take much longer to filter through. His team spent the last week sorting through thousands of well-written complaints citing false names or locations.
Despite efforts to block the enforcement tool they outlined in the bill, Republican sponsors Rep. Kera Birkeland and Sen. Dan McCay said they remained confident in the whistleblower line and in the auditor’s ability to filter out false complaints.
“It’s not surprising that activists would take the time to send false reports,” Birkeland said. “But that doesn’t distract from the importance of the legislation and the protection it provides to Utah women.”
Republican Morgan had presented the policy as a security measure to protect the privacy of women and girls, without citing evidence of threats or attacks against them by trans people.
McCay said he didn’t realize activists were responsible for flooding the tip line. The Salt Lake City senator said he has no plans to change how the law is enforced.
LGBTQ+ rights advocates have also warned that the law and its accompanying tipline allow people to question anyone’s gender in community spaces, which they say could even affect people who don’t are not trans.
Their warnings were amplified earlier this year when a Utah school board member was criticized – and subsequently lost his re-election bid – for publicly questioning the gender of a basketball player from high school who she mistakenly thought was transgender.
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