“After invoking the importance of the Bill of Rights, Ted Cruz had the gall to spread vicious lies about transgender people and laws that deny us critical freedoms,” said HRC Communications Director Jay Brown. “Ted Cruz’s fear-mongering campaign about attacks in restrooms has never been documented in the decades that more than 100 local non-discrimination protections have existed. The reason we need these local laws in the first place is because Congress has yet to pass a federal law protecting LGBT people, who are at risk of being fired, evicted or denied services in a majority of states because of who they are. Ted Cruz showed us firsthand today how important it is that we elect Hillary Clinton to fight for full federal equality in November.”

Fact checkers have found “there’s no evidence of dangerous predators pretending to be transgender in American bathrooms…” while Politifact rated Ted Cruz’s ad attacking Donald Trump on this issue as “mostly false,” saying “the overall message is highly distorted to scare voters.”

Cruz’s comments this morning are part of an ongoing pattern of anti-transgender rhetoric on the campaign trail. He recently suggested transgender people should “only use restrooms at home and avoid public facilities.” In addition to his recent ad smearing transgender people, his campaign threw a transgender teenager out of a campaign event. At prior campaign events, he launched a bigoted rant against the Obama Administration's decision to support a transgender student, falsely accusing officials of forcing the school to "let a little boy take showers with junior high girls."

Elsewhere on the campaign trail, Cruz has decried efforts to lift the ban prohibiting transgender Americans from serving openly in the military, even though the American Medical Associationapproved a resolution last year that said there is "no medically valid reason to exclude transgender individuals from service in the U.S. military."

For more on Cruz’s anti-LGBT record, click here.

The Human Rights Campaign is America’s largest civil rights organization working to achieve lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality. HRC envisions a world where LGBT people are embraced as full members of society at home, at work and in every community.

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