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In the modern anti-transgender panic, several states have passed laws banning transgender people from restrooms consistent with their gender identity. Early bills focused primarily on K-12 schools, but the scope quickly expanded. Some states extended bans to even private colleges and universities. Others adopted sweeping “government building” prohibitions, barring transgender people from restrooms in all publicly owned facilities — a far broader category than it sounds, encompassing airports, rest stops, and other everyday spaces. A few states went further still, adding punitive enforcement mechanisms; Florida, for example, attached criminal penalties to its ban. Yet one category remained largely untouched: private business bathrooms. That exception is now collapsing. Multiple states are advancing a new generation of bathroom bills that would extend these bans into private businesses for the first time.

The first clear sign that private business bathrooms could be targeted came this year in Kansas. At the end of January, the state passed SB 244 and HB2426 through a rushed “gut-and-go” process designed to bypass portions of public hearings. The legislation drew attention for several reasons, including provisions revoking the driver’s licenses of transgender people and forcing them to obtain new ones reflecting their assigned sex at birth. But another provision — first identified by Erin In The Morning and later confirmed by legal and advocacy organizations in Kansas and nationally — was even more alarming. The bill appeared to create a mechanism allowing so-called bathroom bounty hunters to sue transgender people encountered in any restroom, whether in a........

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