Unless you are a hermit, or just living under a rock, you have heard that the good people of Houston have had the wool pulled over their eyes.
A few far right, paranoid individuals mounted a smear campaign of fear. Telling the populous that to deny their god given right to discriminate would result in their wives and children being attacked....in the bathroom. They campaigned on the premise that the anti-discrimination bill was all about letting perverted men into women's bathrooms and children's locker rooms.
This is a tried and true way to manipulate the public. It's been used against women, blacks, substances, and religions just to name a few. I'm old enough to remember when blacks needed their own bathroom because, well anything else would result in....you guessed it, wives and children being attacked. Marijuana was going to cause 'madness' in anyone who tried it, again causing danger for your wives and children.
Fear drives the human race. They say that greed is a great motivator, but it pails in comparison to fear. There is nothing that the human species will not do when afraid.
What is the answer? Simple, education. the fundamental opposite to fear is knowledge.
Example: I grew up in a small neighborhood cut into several hundred acres of woods. There were all kinds of varmints, including snakes. My mother feared that I would encounter a venomous snake and get hurt, so she taught me to tell one snake from another. I could, and still can, determine if a snake can hurt me from a dozen paces. So when I encountered a snake as a child with my friends, they did not scare me. My friends would sometimes almost kill themselves trying to run away in a blind panic. For the record there are between 150 & 200 species of snakes in Texas,... 4 are venomous.
If the people of Houston were more educated on the subject of transgender, the vote would have never gone the way it did. If they were just more educated on their existing laws the results would have been in our favor. It's already illegal to attack another person, but in Houston it also illegal to do anything in a public bathroom except use the facilities. So this imagined pervert, would have had to be willing to break two existing laws, but would be stopped by the third one prohibiting them from entering a bathroom of a gender they were not assigned at birth.
This is absolutely crazy. In the 'Bat-shit crazy' category.
So what can we do? Educate. Every time you go out, show people that you are normal, sane, pleasant people. Be an ambassador for us all. Show the world that we are not the perverts that the Houston few have presented us as.