An Outdoor Toilet as 'Accommodation' for Trans Kids
The semantic violence of the new bathroom law in South Carolina
The plastic box will arrive on a flatbed. Bright blue, vented at the top, with a swing door that latches from inside, and a hand-sanitizer dispenser that the school will not refill. It will be set on a square of compacted gravel just past the gym’s outside wall, since that is where the building’s plumbing already runs and since nobody wanted it visible from the front lobby. The custodian will be told it counts. The principal will be told it counts. By August 2026, in roughly half of South Carolina’s K-12 districts, it will count.
This is what the word “accommodation” means now.
Governor Henry McMaster signed House Bill 4756, the South Carolina Student Physical Privacy Act, on May 15, 2026. The House had passed it 96–19, the Senate 33–2, and the House had concurred 77–31 on the Senate’s amendments. One of those amendments lets a district satisfy its single-occupancy bathroom obligation to transgender students with a temporary outdoor facility. The ACLU of South Carolina read the amendment in plain English in its April 13 statehouse dispatch: “the Senate introduced an amendment that would allow schools to install a temporary outdoor facility, in other words, a porta-potty.”
Districts that fail to comply lose twenty-five percent of state operating funds. Any student or employee who shares a school with a transgender peer can sue the district for declaratory relief plus attorney fees. The state board moves the money before any court rules; the district contests later. The procurement question writes itself. A porta-potty is cheap. A wall is not.
Representative Nancy Mace, the gubernatorial candidate who introduced the federal version of this fight in 2024 when she targeted Representative Sarah McBride on her first day in Congress, praised the South Carolina law by saying, “Men do not belong in women’s bathrooms. Men do not belong in women’s locker rooms. South Carolina got this right.” Attorney General Alan Wilson, another gubernatorial candidate, said the state’s women and girls deserve “the assurance that they are safe from any potential harm.” Governor McMaster, who has signed three anti-trans laws in three years, said almost nothing at the signing. He did not need to. The plastic box was already on the order form.
The word “accommodation” used to mean something.
It used to mean a wheelchair ramp at the side door of a building that had stairs at the front. It used to mean a sign-language interpreter on the day of the assembly. It used to mean an extended-time letter, an enlarged-text textbook, a quiet room for a kid with sensory processing issues, a service dog with its vest on. It used to mean the institution moving toward the person. That is what the Americans with Disabilities Act said in 1990, and what every IEP coordinator has said since: an accommodation is a modification the institution makes so that a person who is already inside the building can stay inside the building.
South Carolina has now moved the word. An accommodation, under H. 4756, is a plastic box on a gravel pad in the parking lot, accessed by a child who has to walk out of fourth period, past the football team’s practice, into November rain. The institution does not move toward the person. The institution moves the person to the curb. The word has been hollowed out and refilled with its opposite.
This is what I mean by semantic violence. The law did not invent a new policy and call it something honest. It took an existing word, one with thirty-five years of disability-rights jurisprudence and pediatric IEP practice behind it, and used the word’s reputation as cover. A porta-potty is not an accommodation. A porta-potty is an enclosure with a door. South Carolina’s General Assembly knows the difference. The bill’s drafters at Alliance Defending Freedom, who authored and distributed the model “Student Physical Privacy Act” to school districts and state legislatures, know the difference. The 33 senators who voted yes know the difference. The point of the language is to make the difference unspeakable.
Consider what the language does to the child who has to use the box.
She is fourteen. She has been on hormone blockers since she was twelve, or she has not. She passes most days, or she does not. She has friends in the building, or she has one friend, or none. She has held her bladder for three hours through algebra, lunch, and PE; she did not want to be the kid the football team watches walk to the parking lot. By the fifth period, her stomach hurts. She asks the teacher for a pass. The teacher knows where the pass goes. Everyone in the room knows where the pass goes. By the time she comes back, her hair is wet on one side; the wind off the practice field caught the door as she closed it. The teacher does not say anything. Neither does she.
This is the empirical record. It is not contested. Murchison et al. (2019), in the journal Pediatrics, found that 36 percent of transgender and nonbinary adolescents in schools with restroom or locker-room restrictions reported sexual assault in the prior year, with adjusted risk ratios of 1.26 for transgender boys, 2.49 for transgender girls, and 1.42 for nonbinary youth assigned female at birth. Wernick et al. (2017) in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence found that feeling safe in school bathrooms predicted self-esteem, grades, and overall school safety for transgender students. Russell et al. (2018) in the Journal of Adolescent Health found that being able to use a chosen name in school, home, work, and friendship contexts was associated with 71 percent fewer symptoms of severe depression, a 34 percent decrease in reported suicidal thoughts, and a 65 percent decrease in suicide attempts. The Trevor Project’s 2024 National Survey reported that transgender and nonbinary youth had lower rates of suicide attempts when they had access to a gender-neutral bathroom at school. GLSEN’s 2024 National School Climate Survey, released in April 2026 under the organization’s new name Glisten, found that 86 percent of transgender students avoid certain school spaces out of safety concerns, that 64 percent avoid school bathrooms altogether, and that 41 percent have been stopped or punished for using a bathroom aligned with their gender.
None of this is buried. The studies are in peer-reviewed journals. The numbers replicate. The effect sizes are large.
No comparable literature shows a benefit to cisgender students from excluding their transgender peers. The “transgender predator” hypothesis cited in conservative court briefs, including the Adams v. St. Johns County concurrences in the Eleventh Circuit, is unsupported by evidence in any of the surveys above. There are no incidents on the public record of a transgender student assaulting a cisgender peer in a school bathroom that they were lawfully using. There are many incidents of the reverse.
The South Carolina legislature has the same access to Pediatrics and the Journal of Adolescent Health that I do. The legislature voted anyway.
