Mike Johnson once said his pals would have abused pro-trans laws to spy on girls in high school. (Getty)
Mike Johnson once argued against trans-inclusive laws by claiming that his friends would have abused them so they could spy on naked girls.
Contradictory to his insisting that he simply couldn’t be a hateful person because he’s a Christian, after all, an ever-growing pile of evidence of the newly-elected House Speaker’s past transphobic and homophobic rhetoric begs to differ.
The latest is an unearthed interview with Louisiana news station 710 Keel from 2016, in which Johnson says his friends would have lied about their gender identity so they could peep on naked girls in locker rooms and bathrooms.
Seemingly in an attempt to deter people from siding with transgender rights and accommodations, Mike Johnson said in the radio interview that, if high schools had been more inclusive of trans students when he was a teenager, his “crew” would have taken advantage and falsely claimed to be transgender to spy on teen girls.
In the interview, he says: “Gender identity, no one knows what that means, and even an effort to define it is going, it can cause problems.”
Gender identity is quite simply defined as a person’s innate and innermost sense of self and gender.
Johnson continues: “So, yeah, look Robert. I went to Captain Shreve High School. I graduated in 1990.
“My crew, my boys, I mean look. I can tell you they would have said, ‘Hey next Thursday is gender identity day, man. You know, we’re going to self-identify as girls and we’re going to be in the other locker room.’ It opens it up to hijinks and all sorts of problems.”
Johnson’s comment quite transparently takes from the popular far-right belief that allowing trans people to use spaces that align with their gender identity would result in an increase of sexual assault cases, despite there being no evidence in support of this.
In fact, a 2018 study from the Williams Institute in UCLA found that there was no proof that allowing trans people to use the public facility of their choice would increase violations of privacy and crime.
Researchers analysed data for a minimum two years before the 2016 bill was introduced, as well as for a period after it passed, comparing crime rates between locations in Massachusetts that enforced trans-inclusive policies versus those that did not.
The study looked into public records concerning criminal incident reports related to assault, sex crimes and voyeurism in public restrooms, locker rooms and dressing rooms to measure safety and privacy violations in these spaces. Findings indicated that reports actually decreased after the bill was passed..
Similarly, in 2016, a study from Dr Rebecca Stones determined that cisgender men were 1.5 times more likely than cisgender women to have concerns on trans women using women’s bathrooms.
It’s just the latest in a number of deeply harmful anti-LGBTQ+ comments Johnson has made in the build-up to his election as House Speaker.
Johnson has also blamed the fall of the Roman Empire on homosexuality, campaigned for gay sex to be outlawed, supported anti-trans activists on his and his wife’s podcast, and accused LGBTQ+ youth of making America’s culture “dark and depraved.”