After being active for a month, a Utah tip line used to snitch on trans government workers using their preferred bathroom has received over 12,000 submissions, but almost all of them have been trolls. Although intended as another way for Utah to regulate the lives of trans folk, the overwhelming flood of spam has rendered the form practically useless, culminating in a waste of taxpayer money.
The snitch line’s creation was a result of HB 257 being passed, which mandated that government bathrooms and locker rooms were to have restricted access to the sex assigned at birth. Violating this law would be considered criminal trespassing. To aid in policing this law, a form was made so that staff could report their trans coworkers for using the “incorrect” facility. However, the form was accessible to the public, instead of solely Utah’s government.
In a matter of weeks, the form received over 12,000 submissions, but only five of them were actual reports. The rest were from individuals trolling the tip line, sending in nonsensical spam-like memes and even a picture of a bull’s testicles. Of the five genuine reports, none provided substantial evidence to warrant deeper investigation. Situations like this have happened before in which a public snitch form was bombarded by unserious reports to throw off the efficacy of a hateful initiative used to make things harder for private citizens just trying to live their lives.
Another aspect of HB 257 is that Utah government agencies must create privacy compliance plans to serve the policing of bathrooms. However, as so many different agencies and departments overlap in the same buildings and use the same bathrooms and locker rooms, it was unclear whose jurisdiction it was to carry out that law’s enforcement to the fullest. These failures and obstacles did not come cheap to Utah. It’s estimated that hundreds of hours and substantial tax dollars went into this initiative, with almost nothing to show.
Utah Auditor John Dougall was critical of the form’s implementation and mocked his role in monitoring the form on social media. “It looks like this piece of the bill was really more about show than substance,” Dougall states, adding, “But it wouldn’t be the first time the legislature did something like that, would it?”
HB 257 has many flaws in its design, execution, and results, but above all, the biggest misstep was overestimating people’s willingness to rat out their coworkers. Many conservatives (and Americans) don’t ascribe to The GOP narrative that trans people are perverts and pedophiles. Before the form was flooded with spam by people mostly outside the Utah government, there was no guarantee that it would have been effective anyway. Most people don’t mind how others live their lives, and thinking that working-class people would casually snitch on coworkers is just another example of how the “party of small government” is out of touch.
