Bruce Jenner: Transgender and Republican -- Is That a Contradiction?

Jenner hopes conservative leaders will be receptive to transgender issues – but recent pushes for ‘bathroom bounty laws’ show otherwise.

Within 12 hours of Bruce Jenner’s double coming out on network television Friday night – in which the former Olympian told ABC News that he identifies both as a woman and as a Republican – the hostility he is likely to face from some of his newly revealed party associates was on full display in Minnesota.

On Saturday morning, the Twittersphere was still digesting Jenner’s comments to Diane Sawyer that “for all [intents and purposes], I am a woman” and that he has always been “more on the conservative side”. But at the same moment, Republican leaders were gathering on the floor of Minnesota’s house of representatives to promote a vicious legislative attack on transgender rights.

They were pushing a new provision, HF 1546, that would ban students from using school bathrooms, showers and changing rooms other than those for the gender into which they were assigned.

Similar moves have swept Republican-held assemblies in six other US states this year – Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nevada and Texas. Opponents of the bills call them “bathroom bounty laws” because in some cases they allow individuals to sue for up to $4,000 should they find themselves sharing bathroom facilities with a transgender person.

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