A controversial TV commercial this fall featured a teenage girl, undressing in a ladies locker room, while a hooded cisgender man leers at her from within a stall. As she unbuttons her top, the creepy guy reveals himself, and the message of this horrifying ad becomes clear: allowing trans people to use bathrooms matching their gender identity gives male sexual predators permission to prey upon women and children.
As it turns out, transphobic messaging like this — which links access to public bathrooms and locker rooms to the threat posed by sexual offenders — was “concocted,” according to a Massachusetts-based “pro-family activism” organization Mass Resistance. Its president, Brian Camenker, is believed to be the author of the group’s November 9th “Election Analysis” post, in which the organization (which is designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center) admitted its scary campaign to repeal a statewide Massachusetts nondiscrimination law was a lie.
“Our side concocted the ‘bathroom safety’ male predator argument as a way to avoid an uncomfortable battle over LGBT ideology, and still fire up people’s emotions. It worked in Houston a few years ago,” reads the post.
“But the LGBT lobby has now figured out how to beat it,” the Mass Resistance post continues. “Their lopsided victory in Massachusetts will likely be repeated everywhere else unless the establishment pro-family groups (and their wealthy donors) are willing to change their tactics.”
The blatant confession was also published on the conservative and anti-LGBTQ platform LifeSite on November 20th.
The post summed up conservatives’ sour feelings after November’s bitterly fought campaign to maintain non-discrimination protections for transgender people in Massachusetts resulted in a landslide victory for the trans community. But it also made it clear that the anti-trans ‘bathroom predator’ myth was created because conservatives knew that simply being discriminatory wouldn’t fly.
The post also links the current anti-trans movement to earlier fights against same-sex marriage.
“Over a decade ago when [the] LGBT movement took the ‘gay marriage’ battles into the state legislatures, and later into the federal courts, the major pro-family groups tried a similar strategy…they refused to argue that homosexuality was immoral…Instead, they concocted less offensive arguments such as, ‘Every child needs a father and a mother’ and ‘the word “marriage” is special’ – and used them almost exclusively. It actually worked for a little while,” reads the post.
Perhaps it’s that track record that has Mass Resisitance president Brian Camenker concerned. GLAAD notes that Camenker has compared gays to Nazis and claims anti-LGBTQ Christians are suffering like the Jews did during the Holocaust. As SPLC describes him, he “continually links homosexuality to pedophilia, violence and disease.” In a video his group posted to YouTube in April 2017, Camenker declared many parents joined MassResistance after their children were “not only indoctrinated but molested and propagandized on horrible things in their public schools.”
His group is so heinous even the Conservative Political Action Convention (CPAC) booted him from this year’s annual convention. He’s also denied that LGBTQ students are bullied in school. “When they started the gay clubs in schools, they got a lot of reluctance from the schools to do it,” Camenker told the Washington Times. “They found that if they tied it into safety, they could claim that all these kids were being harassed, and they could get it in faster,” he said. “There are no legitimate surveys done because it’s a phony problem.”
Those lines about “tying it into safety” and “a phony problem” now appear prophetic regarding his favorite target, trans women, and his false claim connecting them to sexual predators.
