The Line Georgia Has Yet to Draw
Do women have a right to single-sex public spaces—or don’t they?
Georgia’s legislative session began yesterday, and like many women paying attention, I’m entering this session with a mix of realism and resolve.
Last year, I wrote about Southeastern lawmakers advancing reality-based policy—particularly around girls’ sports and the legal recognition of biological sex. Some progress was made. Some lines were held. And a small number of lawmakers showed real courage by refusing to abandon women and girls when ideology demanded it.
But one issue regarding sex-based rights has remained conspicuously untouched: public accommodations. That omission stands out as Georgia’s 2026 legislative session begins the same week the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments in cases testing whether sex-based protections for girls still have legal meaning. While those cases arise in the context of sports, the underlying question is broader: whether “sex” remains a coherent legal category, or whether it can be overridden by self-identification across public life.
Courts can only respond to disputes placed before them. Legislatures, by contrast, exist to provide clarity before conflict turns into litigation—or worse, harm—and other states have already shown that such clarity is possible. When it comes to public accommodations, waiting for the judiciary to resolve what lawmakers refuse to address is not prudence but abdication.
Georgia has shown in recent sessions that lawmakers can draw clear lines grounded in biological reality. What remains conspicuously absent is any willingness to extend that clarity to women’s public spaces.
The Tucker Library Incident Wasn’t an Aberration
It was a warning.
In October, a police officer at the Tucker–Reid H. Cofer Library asked a trans-identified male to leave the women’s restroom, citing safety concerns for women and young girls. That officer is now under internal investigation. Not because anyone was harmed. But because—outside of schools—Georgia has no statewide public-accommodations policy that affirms sex-based spaces.
What we have instead is a patchwork: local nondiscrimination ordinances layered over federal civil-rights interpretations that increasingly collapse sex into identity. In places like DeKalb County and Tucker, gender identity protections are explicit. Sex-based protections are not.
So when conflicts arise—as they inevitably will—the system defaults not to women’s safety, but to institutional risk management. Police departments investigate their own officers. Libraries apologize. Advocacy groups demand “liaisons.” And the underlying question goes unanswered:
Do women have a right to single-sex public spaces in Georgia—or don’t they?
This dynamic is not theoretical. I’ve experienced it firsthand.
Years ago, when I still considered myself a trans rights activist, I stopped at a Walmart on my way home from work because I urgently needed to use the restroom. Normally, I used the restroom at the back of the store, but time was tight, so I went to the one near the front, where there were more people around.
I made it into a stall just in time. As I was finishing, I heard a man’s voice calling out a woman’s name from the entrance of the women’s restroom. At first, I assumed he was looking for someone who he thought had come in. Then I heard his voice again—this time from inside the restroom.
I froze.
The voice moved closer. He called the name again. Then again—now directly in front of my stall.
In that moment, every abstraction disappeared. I wasn’t thinking about politics or policy. I was thinking about the fact that I was alone, confined, and physically vulnerable—pants down, door locked, nowhere to go. I started running through scenarios I had never considered before: What if he wasn’t looking for the woman he was calling out for? What if he was testing whether I was alone? What if he didn’t leave?
He did leave. Nothing happened.
But the question stayed with me: What if he hadn’t?
After that day, I stopped using isolated restrooms altogether. My only sense of safety came from proximity—being where someone might hear me if something went wrong. That calculation had nothing to do with ideology. It had everything to do with being female.
This is the kind of vulnerability policy debates erase—and the kind legislators invite when they refuse to draw clear lines.
Patchwork Is Policy Avoidance
And avoidance has consequences.
I’ve been told—candidly—that a statewide public-accommodations bill is unlikely this session. The political appetite isn’t there. Leadership fears backlash. And until litigation risk becomes unavoidable or a truly serious incident occurs, lawmakers are content to leave this to local governments.
That should alarm every woman.
Because what that means, in practice, is that women’s boundaries are only defended after something goes wrong. After a lawsuit. After a headline. After harm. That, again, is abdication—not leadership.
What makes this avoidance harder to justify is that it is not unprecedented. Other states have enacted legislation defining sex-based access to public facilities, particularly in restrooms and changing areas, often with careful drafting that distinguishes sex from identity while allowing reasonable accommodations where appropriate. These laws vary in scope, but they share a common premise: that legislatures have both the authority and the responsibility to provide clarity rather than leaving women, institutions, and courts to navigate conflict on their own.
The Cost of Losing the Few Who Stood Firm
This avoidance becomes clearer when the few lawmakers willing to say so plainly are no longer in the room. This legislative session began with the resignation of Representative Lynn Heffner—one of the few Democrats who broke ranks to vote to protect women and girls when it mattered.
Her departure matters. Not just symbolically, but practically.
It leaves fewer voices willing to say what most Georgians already believe: that sex matters, that children deserve protection, and that public policy should reflect reality rather than ideology.
Courage in the minority is still courage—and it shouldn’t be this rare.
My Hope Is Simple
I’m not naïve about the political climate. But I do have one clear hope:
That Georgia lawmakers stop waiting for women to be harmed before acting.
Public accommodations cannot remain the elephant in the room. Women should not have to rely on local ordinances, sympathetic officers, or institutional apologies to maintain basic dignity and safety in public life.
If the law cannot yet say plainly what most people know to be true, then at the very least, lawmakers should stop pretending the problem doesn’t exist.
We deserve better than silence.
We deserve better than patchwork.
And we deserve leaders who act before something goes wrong—not after.
The session has begun.
Georgia women are watching.
For a deeper legal analysis of the Supreme Court cases referenced here, see Kara Dansky’s, “Are Women and Girls Female?”.