SALT LAKE CITY — Transgender activists have flooded a Utah tip line set up to alert state officials to possible violations of a new restroom law with thousands of hoax reports in an effort to protect trans residents and their allies from legitimate complaints that could jeopardize their safety.
The attack has led the state official charged by law with running the tip line, Utah Auditor John Dougall, to complain about being stuck with the cumbersome task of filtering out false complaints while also making faces adversity for enforcing a law in which he played no role.
“No auditor is going to do audits so they can be the bathroom monitors,” Dougall said Tuesday. “I think there were much better ways for the Legislature to address their concerns rather than this onerous approach.”
In the week since its launch, the online tip line has received more than 10,000 submissions, none of which appear legitimate, he said. The form asks people to report public school employees who knowingly allow someone to use a gender-designated facility in the presence of the opposite sex.
Utah residents and visitors are required by law to use bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond to their birth gender in government buildings. Since last Wednesday, schools and agencies that fail to enforce the new restrictions can be fined up to $10,000 per day for each violation.
While their efforts to block Republican lawmakers in many states from imposing transgender restrictions have failed to interfere with the often ill-conceived enforcement plans associated with those laws.
Within hours of its publication Wednesday night, trans activists and community members from across the U.S. had already widely circulated the Utah tip line on social media. Many shared the spam they submitted and encouraged others to follow suit.
Their efforts mark the latest effort by advocates to close or disable a government tip line that they say is divisive by encouraging residents to snitch on each other. Similar portals in at least five other states have also been flooded with fake reports, prompting state officials to shut down some.
In Virginia, Indiana, Arizona and Louisiana, activists flooded tip lines set up to handle complaints about teachers, librarians and school administrators who may have spoken to students about race, LGBTQ+ identity or other topics that lawmakers said were inappropriate for children. The tip line in Virginia was disbanded within a year, as was a tip line introduced in Missouri to report gender-affirming health care clinics.
Erin Reed, a prominent trans activist and legislative researcher, said there is a collective understanding within the trans community that filing these hoax reports is an effective way to protest the law and protect trans people who may be targeted.
“There will be people who are transgender and go to the bathroom who may be reported through these types of forms, and so the community takes on a protective role,” Reed said. “If 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 form responses are entered, it will be much harder for the accounting firm to sort through them all and find the one legitimate trans person who was caught using a restroom.”
The accounting firm has come across many reports that Dougall described as “complete nonsense,” and others that he said appear credible on the surface and take much longer to filter out. His staff has spent the past week going through thousands of well-crafted complaints that mentioned false names or locations.
Despite efforts to block the enforcement tool they outlined in the bill, its Republican sponsors, Rep. Kera Birkeland and Senator Dan McCay that they remain confident in the tip line and the auditor’s ability to filter out false complaints.
“It’s not surprising that activists would take the time to file false reports,” Birkeland said. “But that does not distract from the importance of the legislation and the protections it provides to these women across Utah.”
Morgan, a Republican, had presented the policy as a safeguard to protect the privacy of women and girls, without citing evidence of threats or attacks against them by transgender people.
McCay said he had not realized activists were responsible for flooding the tip line. The Salt Lake City senator said he has no plans to change how the law is enforced.
LGBTQ+ rights advocates have also warned the law and its associated tip line will give people the freedom to question a person’s gender in community spaces, which they say could even affect people who are not transgender.
Their warnings were amplified earlier this year when a Utah school board member came under fire — and later lost her reelection bid — for publicly questioning the gender of a high school basketball player she wrongly assumed was transgender used to be.