The purpose of a system is what it does.

The pretext for the UK’s new transphobic bathroom bill is ‘women’s safety’.

That is not what it does.

This is the actual, real-as-in-actually-happening-right-now impact of bathroom bills:

Transgender people are being forced to out themselves or risk breaking the law. Either way, they are robbed of basic dignity and privacy.

Cisgender women and girls are being harassed and threatened for not looking ‘female enough’. Including butch lesbians and women with PCOS.

After years of concern-trolling, there has been an enormous increase in harassment and abuse of transgender and gender-non-conforming people in this country.

Transgender men and women are now afraid to use any public bathrooms, which means they’re soft-blocked from all public spaces.

Transgender people are now treated, collectively, as potential sexual predators- just like lesbians and gay men were in the 1980s, when the conversation was all about whether you’d want a lesbian in a changing room with your child.

And lastly, transphobes feel like they’ve won a cultural victory around the definition of ‘woman’.

That’s what the new law does. There’s not going to be any actual impact on women’s safety, because transgender people are not a threat to women or children. Transgender women have been using the women’s bathrooms for literal generations without endangering anyone.

These things are not just unfortunate side effects.

The purpose of a system is what it does.