Straus strikes back at Texas bathroom bill

Speaker tells magazine he doesn’t want a single ‘suicide’ on his hands

Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, says in an article published Monday he didn’t want a “suicide” on his hands over a bathroom bill targeting transgender people.

AUSTIN — The Republican speaker of the Texas House of Representatives says in an article published Monday he didn’t want a “suicide” on his hands over a bathroom bill targeting transgender people that Gov. Greg Abbott wants to again try passing later this month.

The comments by Joe Straus in The New Yorker magazine appear to repeat concerns raised by LGBT rights groups that efforts to restrict which bathrooms transgender people can use could elevate the risk of suicide. The author of the story, Lawrence Wright, said Straus told him about a senator coming to his office with a proposed compromise just before the bill collapsed in May.

“I’m not a lawyer, but I am a Texan,” said Straus, according to the magazine. “I’m disgusted by all this. Tell the lieutenant governor I don’t want the suicide of a single Texan on my hands.”

Aides to Straus did not return emails Monday. A spokesman for Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who has spearheaded the push for a North Carolina-style bathroom bill in Texas, also did not return a message. According to the magazine, Patrick’s office denied sending senators to Straus’ office.

Straus is the powerful leader of the GOPcontrolled House and for months has gone against Abbott and Patrick — as well as most Texas Republican lawmakers — in his public rejection of efforts to impose bathroom restrictions on transgender people. His comments in the magazine, however, go further than his usual criticism that the bill is bad for the Texas economy.

In December, the largest survey of transgender Americans painted a grim picture of pervasive discrimination and harassment, finding that 40 percent of respondents said they had attempted suicide at some point.

The survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality assessed input received in 2015 from 27,715 respondents in all 50 states. Researchers have estimated that the overall attempted suicide rate in the U.S. is less than 5 percent.

Abbott made what he calls “privacy protection legislation” part of a lengthy special legislative session agenda that begins July 18. He said last week that Texas needs bathroom regulations for “protecting the privacy of women and children” to avoid what he described as a patchwork of conflicting regulations across the state.

In November 2015, Houston voters resoundingly defeated the city’s anti-discrimination ordinance, known as HERO, after opponents argued that it would allow men to use women’s restrooms. The campaign against the so-called bathroom ordinance, and its defeat at the ballot box garnered national attention.

Passage of HERO would have aligned Houston with other large Texas cities, including Dallas and Austin, that already have antidiscrimination ordinances extending protection in public spaces for transgender people, the supporters argued. But the opponents said the gender identity protection would allow sexual predators to use women’s bathrooms.