Fox News contributor and Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen peddled the widely debunked myth that nondiscrimination protections for transgender people are “an open invitation to sex predators” in public restrooms.

In a May 16 Washington Post opinion piece, Fox News contributor Marc Thiessen repeated the debunked myth that nondiscrimination protections for transgender people will cause male predators to pretend to be transgender in order to sneak into women’s bathrooms and commit sexual assault. Thiessen is a former speechwriter for George W. Bush who authored an error-ridden 2010 book defending the use of torture that The New Yorker called “better at conveying fear than at relaying the facts.”

Thiessen’s fearmongering contradicts the expert testimony of over 300 national, state, and local anti-sexual-assault and domestic violence organizations. It also contradicts the experience of states, cities, and school districts across the country that have had trans-inclusive nondiscrimination policies for years without incident.

From the May 16 column:

Allowing biological men to use women’s restrooms and changing rooms — what could possibly go wrong?

Plenty.

As a compassionate society, we believe that transgendered people should be protected from discrimination. We also believe that women and children should be protected from sexual exploitation and assault. Creating a new “right” for biological men to use women-only facilities is an open invitation to sex predators pretending to be transgender in order to get access to vitcims (sic) at their most vulnerable.

[…]

By all means, schools should be required to provide access to bathrooms and changing areas where transgender people can feel safe. And there is a simple solution. As one transgender young man put it in The Post this weekend, “Imagine a room with a toilet, a sink and a door with a lock. Suddenly everyone’s problems go away.” But that is not good enough for the Obama administration, which insists that biological males who identify as women have a fundamental right to access to women’s facilities. That is a recipe for disaster.

Sex predators are devious; they will use any excuse to gain access to their victims. Government should not be opening the bathroom door for them. Yes, we should find ways to protect transgender people — but we must do so without endangering everyone else.