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| Luca Strobel |
GLAAD award-winning substacker Erin Reed is exactly who I am talking about when I say that our community need to support independent LGBTQ journalists.
As a gay black man, I am doubly aware of how this country's mainstream media ignores our communities while pandering to what they call "the mainstream America." They won't ever admit it, but most often than not, their definition of "mainstream America" are white heterosexuals.
As such, incidents like the one below get ignored. Luca Strobel, a 25-year-old trans man in South Carolina, was using the bathroom based upon his assigned at birth gender (which some states have laws demanding that trans people do) in Charleston, SC. He ended up being accosted and detained because of his appearance as a man.
“They're looking over the top of the stall at me without my clothes on,” Strobel said in the video. “They can fully see me naked other than me having my shirt on, and they just start screaming that there's ‘a man’ in here.”
He said the owner and employee ejected him and his friend from the bar—grabbing and pushing them out as they reportedly called Strobel anti-trans slurs. The police were waiting at the door, Strobel said. The officer cuffed him “so tight that I can't even feel my fingers,” Strobel said. “I still have a bruise on my knuckle.”
Meanwhile, his arresting officer allegedly kept calling him a “little girl.” “We didn't get booked, but we did get cuffed, and when we got to the station, we were asking a bunch of questions that they refused to answer,” Strobel said. “They just kept saying, ‘Take it up in court, take it up in court, take it up in court.’”
. . . There is no state law in South Carolina preventing a trans man (or any man) from using the women’s room in public accommodations, such as a bar. However, there has been an avalanche of anti-trans bills nationwide seeking such mandates, including in South Carolina, where lawmakers enacted a version of this policy targeting schools in 2024, and re-introduced it in 2025.
In other words, Strobel was using the bathroom that many conservative lawmakers and anti-trans pundits want to force him to use—and he got arrested anyway, seemingly because of the panic surrounding gendered bathrooms. This kind of harassment is no stranger to trans and gender nonconforming people—in April, a trans girl in Florida was arrested for using the women’s bathroom in an act of protest against that state’s anti-trans bathroom bill. She washed her hands in the sink before being escorted out by police.
In February, cisgender lesbian in Arizona made headlines after documenting her own experience having police interrogate her gender while she was using a women’s restroom.
Go to Erin Reed's substack, Erin in the Morning, for the full story and information on how you can support her work.
When these bathroom bills were passed while hysteria about trans people using public bathrooms spread, there were warnings that an added consequence would be people getting verbally and physically accosted simply because they don't fit physical stereotypes of what men and women are supposed to look like.
And now here we are.
