During the Beacon Hill Judiciary Committee hearing July 14 on the transgender rights bill, a group of representatives of the gym and health club industry testified that such a bill would hurt their businesses by allowing people to use locker room and bathroom facilities based on their gender identity or expression, rather than on their biological sex.
They argued that women would feel uncomfortable sharing facilities with anatomical males, particularly if the women had young children with them. Yet at gyms in Boston, where a similar transgender non-discrimination ordinance has been on the books since 2002, there have been seemingly no negative repercussions to extending non-discrimination protections to transgender people. The current transgender rights bill, House Bill 1728, would rewrite the state’s hate crimes and non-discrimination laws–including around public accommodations–to make them trans-inclusive.
