Students at the University of Texas San Antonio (UTSA) are being forced out of their current dorm rooms and made to relocate because of a new bathroom ban. While the ban is intended to target trans people, any students sharing a bathroom between their rooms with someone of a different gender assigned at birth are being forcibly rehoused to comply with the new law.

“It’s just creating a dangerous environment,” Katarina Rendon, a UTSA sophomore lives in a mixed-gender dorm, told KSAT. “Like, you could have a transgender individual who rooms with their friend, and then all of a sudden, they’re moved with someone who has violent tendencies towards people like that.”

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Bathroom bans are about forcing trans people out of public life, like they did to women in the past

Marketed as “The Texas Women’s Privacy Act,” Texas Senate Bill 8 has become better known as the “bathroom bill,” and is set to go into effect on December 4. The enactment marks the culmination of 10 years of Texas Republicans trying to pass a bathroom ban without previous success, and represents the consistent push against trans rights in the U.S. under Trump.

Under the bill, access to restrooms and other facilities in taxpayer funded buildings is required to be limited based on people’s gender-assigned at birth. That applies to county and city buildings, state agency buildings, airports managed by the city, public schools, and public universities (including UTSA).

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With the bill’s imminent enforcement, Texas will become the 20^th state to introduce restrictions on bathroom access for trans and non-binary people.

At UTSA, mixed-gender dorms include pairs of rooms that are separated by a shared bathroom in between; often, those rooms might be occupied by people of different genders. Rendon, who identifies as LGBTQ+ but is not trans, emphasized that the system worked and was not endangering anyone: “I have never felt unsafe, my roommate does not feel unsafe.”

Rendon, like others, had chosen to live in a mixed-gender dorm as she felt it was a way to live with people who thought more like she did. That choice is now being taken away by the “Bathroom Bill,” as the university is now rehousing students without giving them an option of who their new dorm-mates might be to comply with the whims of Texas politicians.

“I don’t understand how you can police this to fully consenting adults,” Rendon said. “They’re separating brothers and sisters. They’re separating couples. You choose to live with who you want to live with, and they’re taking that choice away.” Rendon says that she and her mother were given only one day to relocate her room to a different wing.

This policy targeting trans people will do real harm to the LGBTQ+ community, but is also allowing Texan Republicans to push more puritanical views to avoid mixed-gender housing in universities. In a statement given to KSAT, the UTSA campus claimed that “30 students are reorganizing their housing arrangements impacted by multi-occupancy restrooms, and the university is working with each of them individually to ensure a smooth transition.”

LGBTQ Nation reached out to UTSA for comment on whether this was impacting any trans students, but did not receive a response.

Student discussions on Reddit suggest that UTSA has historically been a safe place to be openly trans, with one user writing, “I had a really hard time being openly trans/non-binary in high school. But I’m much happier and safer here at UTSA. The vibe is overall very accepting.” The university also has active LGBTQ+ organizations, with the largest being UTSA Prism.

It is worth noting that Texas’ “Bathroom Bill” does not apply to private businesses such as restaurants, bars, or gyms.

The law does not allow for an individual to be punished or fined by the state, but rather fines the institution that allowed an infraction of the bill for $25,000, plus another $125,000 a day for additional violations. However, that’s likely to mean violent over-policing by those institutions that will affect both trans and cis people who don’t fit strict gender norms.

As Brian Klosterboer, senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Texas, said, “We’re still very worried that it’s gonna lead to a lot of harassment against trans people in particular, but also against any person who maybe looks too masculine or too feminine, or someone just wants to report them to the police or to a local entity.”

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