SETH MEYERS (HOST): So as you may have heard, the states of Mississippi and North Carolina recently passed discriminatory laws designed among other things to prevent trans people from using the restroom of the gender with which they identify. And those laws have already hurt tourism and businesses in those states.
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But it's not just celebrities, even foreign countries are warning about traveling to Mississippi and North Carolina.
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Now there are any number of problems with these laws, and aside from the fact that they're hateful and discriminatory, they're also unenforceable. When asked how they would enforce North Carolina law, spokesman for one local police department said, “So that means people have to go to the bathroom with birth certificates? Yeah, that was curious to me.” And another said, “We don't have police officers sitting at public bathrooms all day long.”
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But the most absurd impact of these kind of bathroom bills is you're actually forcing transgender woman, who are women, and transgender men, who are men, to use the wrong bathroom. As this transgender activist explains.
[BEGIN VIDEO]
LOU WEAVER: I was born female. They told my mom and dad that I was a girl. I haven't been allowed in a female restroom in 20 years because people would look at me and think, “oh my gosh, why is he in here?”
[END VIDEO]
MEYERS: That's how absurd these anti-trans laws are.
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More importantly, there's no evidence for the claim that non-discrimination policies like Target's endanger public safety. But that didn't stop Fox News from repeating the myth.
[BEGIN VIDEO]
AINSLEY EARHARDT: The only concern for me is what this could lead to. Could a grown adult man dress up as a woman who wants to get into the little girls' bathrooms?
FOX HOST: They have a point about creepy men that could jump up into the bathroom.
KEITH ABLOW: If we allow people culturally to dictate terms in our culture, then we also, by extension, may be in a position where we allow people to say that they're 65 when they're 45 and get Medicare.
[END VIDEO]
MEYERS: Or we may be in a position where a pundit is allowed to say that he's a pundit when he's really Mr. Clean. To be clear, that's not how gender identity works. It's not just a whim, it's a person's innermost concept of self. It's their identity, it's who they are.
