I have watched the disastrously hateful rhetoric about transwomen unfold in the news, in conversation, and on social media since the passing of North Carolina's HB2.

This is the bill that forces transmen and women to use the bathroom of their "assigned/birth sex." Before you close out this letter and ignore my plea, know that this is not entirely about the trans community. This is about the women and children about whom you are concerned.

One of the biggest arguments I have seen for bathroom bills like HB2 is that they are protecting the women and children of America from sexual predators who may dress like a woman to enter a women's bathroom under the guise of a transwoman. I am writing in hopes that you will stop. Stop pretending like you care about my safety. In almost every situation, for almost every individual that argues this point, you do not.

You do not care about women and girls' safety from sexual predators if you have not talked to your son about consent. If you don't teach your son that women are people that have rights and that affirmative consent is an important part of sex—without it, it's rape. You don't care.

For me, the conversation about consent didn't start until I came to college and in accordance with Title IX, my school went to great lengths to educate everyone on assault, consent, and every where in between. If boys are learning about consent in college, it's too late.

You do not care about women and girls' safety if you make rape jokes, victim blame, or teach women that they are completely responsible for not being raped. As a woman, I feel confident in saying that we are all raised to have a fear of being raped. Every woman can tell you countless ways she knows to prevent becoming a victim of sexual violence.

This is for good reason: 1 in 4 women will be the victim of sexual assault while in college. If you are a man (or woman) who jokes about rape or sexual violence, or questions the importance of affirmative consent with disgusting sayings, you are a part of the rape culture that women have to fight against every day, and you do not care about our safety.

If you question a woman's sexual history, her clothing, how much she had drank, or if she was being flirtatious when she was assaulted, you are victim blaming, and invalidating her life shattering testimony, and you do not care about our safety.

If you vote for the legislators who voted against the Violence Against Women Act (House) (Senate), and other legislation protecting women and children, you do not care about my safety.

If you have actively done nothing to protect women and children against sexual violence until now, you do not care about my safety.

If you sympathize with rapists and abusers, and celebrate when star athletes like Jameis Winston get away with horrendous crimes, you do not care about my safety. If you are one of the individuals who claim that women in those positions accused these men of rape for, "the attention," you do not care about our safety.

If you aren't enraged about this 16-year-old girl who was too drunk to consent and had a man force her to preform oral sex on him in exchange for a car ride home, and the Oklahoma court's decision that it wasn't rape because she was drunk, YOU DO NOT CARE ABOUT OUR SAFETY.

I think is the problem you have with transwomen coming in our bathroom is simply that you don't see them as women, and you don't understand them. You are transphobic. You don't acknowledge that they are murdered often, and are possibly the most abused of us all. And you want to use my safety (something you've never cared about before) as an excuse to hate them, and put them in danger. I am writing you to simply say:

Pease spare me your concern, and your sympathy, and shove your bigotry and misogyny where the sun don't shine.

Sincerely yours,

Women whom you've never before cared about