Columnists

Adwan: Trans panic zealots are following girls into the bathroom now, I guess

A recent incident at a restaurant in southern Minnesota shows just how far the hysteria has gone.

By Noor Adwan

August 13, 2025 at 6:42PM

Natalia Garcia, of Minneapolis, listens to speakers during a rally on March 9, 2023, at the Lake Street/Midtown Transit Station in Minneapolis. A transgender woman had been brutally assaulted nearby the previous week. (Aaron Lavinsky/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

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A Minnesota nonprofit filed a discrimination charge against a Buffalo Wild Wings location in Owatonna, Minn., on Tuesday after a server allegedly followed an 18-year-old into a restroom, then proceeded to bang on the stall door demanding that the teen prove she was a girl.

According to a news release from Gender Justice, the high schooler — feeling trapped and humiliated — resorted to unzipping her hoodie to “show she had breasts” in order to make it stop.

Is this really where we’re at now?

It seems trite to say that following a person — a high schooler, no less — into the bathroom with the sole intent of harassing them for their identity is wrong. But at this point, is it? We’ve seen culture-war adherents sink so low as to suggest that doctors should examine student athletes’ “internal and external reproductive anatomy” in the event of a dispute over their gender — so this feels like par for the course.

There are no two ways about it: This mass hysteria over young adults’ body parts is perverted. If you find yourself so incensed about someone’s gender identity that you’re compelled to follow them into the bathroom and bang on the stall door, you, yourself, are the very predator that you feel you’re protecting broader society from when you rally against trans people existing in public spaces.

But beyond being creepy, what happened to the high schooler was a violation of the Minnesota Human Rights Act, Gender Justice attorney Sara Jane Baldwin said. Discrimination based on protected characteristics in public places is simply illegal.

Here’s the thing, though: Gerika Mudra, the teen on whose behalf the charge was filed, isn’t trans. But it’s no secret that this type of moral panic is simply a way of alienating and shaming those who don’t conform to societal expectations of gender expression.

“We know Gerika was targeted because of how she looks,” Shauna Otterness, Mudra’s stepmom, is quoted as saying in the news release. “She didn’t do anything wrong. She just didn’t fit what that server thought a girl should look like.”

Rigid expectations of gender, in addition to feeding transphobia, can create feelings of anxiety in anyone who might not fit the mold, even if they’re cisgender. And it can fall harder on people of color and members of the LGBTQ community. Mudra is biracial and a lesbian. It’s possible that intersecting systems of bias contributed to the moment of harassment she experienced while simply trying to dine at a restaurant.

“There are different stereotypes or expectations at that intersection of race and gender, and how Black and brown women and girls are perceived, and how their gender is interpreted,” said Gender Justice executive director Megan Peterson.

And while Mudra’s case might be extreme, her experience isn’t new. Worries about experiencing transphobic harassment can be a daily worry for trans people, for gay women who present masculine, even for cisgender, straight women who are taller than average.

“For people whose gender identities don’t fall into a very narrow, stereotypical binary, that is a regular, everyday experience that they have to navigate. And obviously that is also especially true for trans people, who then have that extra layer of anxiety,” Peterson said.

Mudra’s experience — and the transphobic microaggressions or even outright assaults others have been put through — represent years of hateful rhetoric reaching their natural conclusion. We must do better.

about the writer

Noor Adwan

Opinion Audience Editor

Adwan is Opinion Audience Editor and a member of the Minnesota Star Tribune Editorial Board. She creates and optimizes Strib Voices content for digital platforms. She graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2023, and spends her free time painting and collecting rocks.