Utah's Anti-Trans Bathroom Snitch Line Got 12,000 Tips. None Could Be Verified.

Samantha Riedel
·3 min read
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Six weeks after Utah Republicans opened a public “snitch form” to report transgender people using the bathroom in government facilities, the state auditor’s office has received more than 12,000 reports — but couldn’t verify a single one.

The form was created earlier this year after HB 257, sponsored by second-term GOP Rep. Kera Birkeland, passed into law, mandating that all government bathrooms and locker rooms be delineated based on a person’s assigned sex at birth. The law also requires that all government institutions establish their own “privacy compliance plan” to conform with the law. Violations of the law are now classified as criminal trespass offenses, a class A misdemeanor in Utah. But shortly after the form went live in early May, thousands of people flooded it with spam, including a smorgasbord of memes and at least one picture of bull testicles.

Since its launch, the form has received more than 12,000 submissions, Utah Auditor John Dougall confirmed to the Salt Lake Tribune this week. Just five of those were deemed “plausible,” Dougall said, all of which his office was “unable to substantiate.” That’s right: it’s a big ol’ goose egg, gang!

The closest Dougall reportedly came to finding a case to pursue was from a report against the state Department of Corrections, but it did not come through the online form. According to the Tribune, Dougall’s office received a letter earlier this month that read, “[t]he Office received an allegation that an employee in the Administrative offices allows an individual to use a sex-designated restroom facility that does not align with their sex.” Dougall confirmed he was unable to substantiate the letter writer’s complaint.

Dougall also noted that he has instructed state agencies to adopt “privacy compliance plans,” but that there has been significant confusion in how to do so. As Dougall’s office told the Tribune in a statement, “there is a lack of clarity regarding which entity has the duty to adopt a privacy compliance plan in situations when multiple entities either share use or control of facilities for which a plan is required.” In other words, because of the way government facilities often overlap, officials are still trying to figure out who has the proper jurisdiction to establish those policies in the first place, to say nothing of who should oversee them across departments.

In sum, Utah Republicans have presumably spent hundreds of work hours and untold thousands of tax dollars on a tip line that, in a month and a half, has only been used to troll them specifically. Few have been as critical of this whole debacle as Dougall himself, who has released multiple videos on social media lampooning his new status as a government “bathroom monitor” and criticizing Birkeland and other legislators for making HB 257 law.

“It looks like this piece of the bill was really more about show than substance,” Dougall said in one video, filmed in a public bathroom and released in mid-May. “But it wouldn’t be the first time the legislature did something like that, would it?”

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