“As a trans man, I have the immense privilege of blending in. But these laws force me to choose between safety and obeying the law.”
“As a trans man, I have the immense privilege of blending in. But these laws force me to choose between safety and obeying the law.”
As I understand it, it’s generally any form of compliance. Typically, it’s abusing technicalities, but what makes it “malicious” is that it subverts the intention behind the rule or order.
This law was designed to harass women. The transphobia is the vehicle used to deliver that intent, but for all its bigotry, it clearly isn’t the ultimate point. All the discourse is about “protecting (cis-)women”, about transfem athletes, and so on. Frankly, I’m not sure the type of politician to push this type of politics even remembers that transmascs exist. Even if they do, it’s not like they could do anything about it that wouldn’t risk collateral damage among cis-men.
Imagine how it would to if you tried to apply the “bathroom genital check” to the gender that invented etiquette about not standing too close to others when pissing. The geriatiric shrimpbearers in power would have a meltdown over the idea of someone manhandling their dick to make sure it’s real.
(Nothing wrong with a small dick, just with making your insecurity about it someone else’s problem.)
Now, unlike the transphobia, they can’t make the misogyny explicit in the law (or at least they aren’t sure they’d get away with it yet, so why risk it?). The law as written technically also applies to transmascs, even though they weren’t the target and it realistically would never be enforced against them.
Thus, the malicious compliance is that the transmascs carry out the letter of the law rather than its spirit, fully expecting the predictable result and provoking the authorities into tipping their hand.
For the lawmakers it has an added bonus of being a double bind for transmascs. Passing for cis isn’t binary or consistent, every trans guy has to guess what the likelihood is that any time he uses the men’s room someone will think he looks trans and call the cops. There is no safe answer for him (trans women have a similar situation). For both trans men and trans women the less likely to get the cops called answer will tend towards men’s rooms, but that’s only because men are less likely to call the cops on a woman in the men’s room.