Bathroom Bills, Memes, and a Biopolitics of Trans Disposability

Abstract

Responding to so-called “bathroom bills,” legislation that requires people to use public restrooms that match the sex listed on their birth certificate, a number of online activists have produced a range of memes (images with clever message text) that either resist or support such laws. While some memes espouse overt transphobia, others directly resist transphobic legislation, and still others purport to disagree with transphobic legislation, but draw on the same logic that underlies transphobic state statutes. Both the laws and some memes that ostensibly resist them participate in a biopolitics of trans disposability, marking only certain (trans) bodies as acceptable in public spaces.

Keywords:

• Biopolitics
• Gender Identity
• Memes
• Public Bathrooms
• Transgender

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Melody Lehn, Jamie Capuzza, Sean O’Rourke, Luke Christie, Terry Papillon, editor Robin Rowland, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Inspired by Christopher M. Duerringer’s article analyzing the “Republican Jesus” meme, I followed the method Duerringer describes to develop an archive (see 10–11, endnote 8). I searched web sites including Google Images, Reddit, MemeBase, and KnowYourMeme for memes related to transphobic bathroom legislation (and relatedly, companies’ trans-inclusive bathroom policies). I searched for combinations of terms such as “transgender” and “bathroom” and “transgender” and “restroom.” From dozens of results, particularly the most duplicated images across the sites, I identified the three categories analyzed here and selected a few exemplars of each to read closely in this essay.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Committee on Faculty Research, Miami University.