A long-simmering moral panic over the presence of transgender people in sex-segregated public toilets has reached an acute state since the spring of 2015, as an unprecedented wave of mass culture visibility for trans* issues has intersected with recent court decisions guaranteeing trans* people access to gender-appropriate toilets. When we drafted this article in March 2016, only one state, South Dakota, had passed (but subsequently vetoed) a bill attempting to restrict gender-appropriate public toilet access for transgender people, although more than two dozen such bills had been introduced nationwide (Madhani 2016). Since then, North Carolina passed HB2, its notorious "bathroom bill"; the Obama administration issued new directives on genderappropriate access to toilets and locker rooms in public schools nationwide; twenty-one states have sued the federal government to block implementation of those directives, and the seemingly obscure issue of transgender public toilet access seems headed to the Supreme Court (Bidgood 2016). The current backlash against trans* people using public toilets that match their gender identity reflects a longer history of public toilets, which themselves date to early eighteenth-century Paris (Cavanagh 2010: 28), and registers social anxieties triggered by the threat of various marginalized groups entering into normative society. Previous debates were sparked by the introduction of the women's room to accommodate female participation in the paid workforce, the fight to abolish "colored" bathrooms by the civil rights movement, the furor over "unisex" toilets that helped derail passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, the fear of contamination posed by gay men using public lavatories during the AIDS crisis, and pressure to make bathrooms accessible to the disabled. In each instance, the public restroom stages the

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