We are seeing a huge push for transgender rights lately. North Carolina has recently gotten a lot of flack for their law that requires people to use gender-specific rooms (eg bathrooms) that correlate to the person's gender that they were born with. In fact, Great Britain has issued a travel advisory to their citizens warning them about traveling to NC in light of this new law. However those in favor of the law argue that opening bathrooms to transgender people may lead to sexual predators abusing the laws to gain entrance to gender-specific rooms to further their deviant sexual desires.
A case in point... In February, a man in Washington state walked into a Seattle Parks & Rec. pool, going into the women's shower-room to change (see
this article from the Washington Times). When confronted by other women who were changing there as well as pool staff asking him to leave or to use their family changing room, he replied that it was his right to change in that room. This is because in December of 2015, a state board had issued a ruling that transgender identifying people were allowed to freely use any public, gender-specific rooms that they wished to use. Furthermore, as this was seen as the transgender's civil right, anyone that felt embarrassed by having a transgendered person change with them, it was that person's responsibility (not the transgender person) to find alternate accommodations. After the man finished swimming, he went back to the women's room to change where there was now a youth swim team having practice. Thus the man was now easily able to view underaged girls in various states of undress. Since the man eventually left and because no sexual assault actually took place, the police never were contacted.
Proponents of gender-neutral bathrooms and change-rooms say that unisex bathrooms have shown no increase in sexual-related crimes. “There have been no sex offenders that have been posing as transgender people to get into bathrooms,” Democratic state Sen. Pramila Jayapal said during floor debate, according to The Seattle Times. However as this case points out, not all situations lead to the police being contacted nor anyone being charged with criminal activity. Thus “If you were to look into this incident, because police weren’t called, there’s no paper trail that the average person could discover indicating this issue happened. The only reason we’re aware of the incident is due to a KIRO Radio listener who spoke up. So it’s problematic for activists to claim these incidents don’t happen if police aren’t always being called.” as a Seattle-local radio host illustrated.
Additionally, Joseph Backholm, executive director of the Family Policy Institute of Washington pointed out “On what basis could law enforcement or a judge say, ‘You were not identifying as a woman?’ Because it’s a self-identifying standard. How do you disprove that somebody is not actually identifying as a woman? The answer is, you can’t.” This also means that other sex offenses that don't amount to assault, such as "Peeping Tom" laws, couldn't be used either for the same reason.