FROM : Bathroom Bills and the Policing of Gender: Challenging the Discourse of Exclusion

Response to reviewer-1

We thoroughly reviewed the manuscript and revised and removed statements that could be interpreted as opinion.

Some examples of where we removed some statements include the following: Original: “This paper aims to analyze the irrationality of these “bathroom bills” and underscores their potential to exacerbate the mental health disparities in the transgender population.” Changed to: “This paper aims to analyze “bathroom bills” and underscores their potential to exacerbate the mental health disparities in the transgender population.” We removed “Controversial policy proposals by legislators make headlines and contribute to the visibility of campaigns for legislators with short election cycles.

However, this ultimately affects legislators' ability to create thoughtful, data-informed policies. The Human Rights Campaign (2023), a major advocacy organization for sexual and gender minorities, contends that anti-LGBTQ legislation is political theater that takes away from elected officials’ ability to focus on and address real problems.” from the manuscript to align with a more informational tone.

We grounded several statements to the NASW Code of Ethics. For example, we included “ The NASW (2021) Code of Ethics requires social workers to “respect and promote the right of clients to self-determination and assist clients in their efforts to identify and clarify their goals” (Section 1.02).” and “ These advocacy efforts are aligned with fulfilling social workers’ ethical duties under Section Six in the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) Code of Ethics (NASW, 2021).”

We identified any grammatical discrepancies with the aid of an unbiased knowledgeable third party with expertise in editing. Additionally, we rewrote the headers to include neutral language. For example, we added a new section of “New Federal Policies.”

We removed the table and wrote out definitions using bullet points.

Response to reviewer-2

In the discussion section, we included the intention of the bathroom bills in relation to supporting accurate data gathering: “Some supporters of bathroom bans claim that there is a right to privacy and believe that allowing people to choose their restroom based on their gender identity could increase the risk of predatory behavior (Samar, 2016; Chatfield, 2024). Accurate data collection regarding safety is needed to dispel myths about bathroom bans.”