Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton — moving on from his victory in the runoff for the GOP nomination for U.S. and looking ahead to rile up voters with his lies about transgender people for his general election race against Democrat James Talarico for that seat in D.C. — has sued the city of Denton and city officials “to prevent the creation of multiple-occupancy ‘gender-neutral’ changing rooms at a publicly owned, child-friendly swimming pool,” according to a press release from Paxton’s office.
The lawsuit targets Big Gay Swim Day, set for June 7 organized by two nonprofit groups — PRIDENTON and OUTreach Denton — at the Quakertown Civic Center, and Paxton asks the court to stop “the unlawful event from proceeding as planned on June 7 and requests temporary and permanent injunctive relief barring the city of Denton from permitting future violations of the Texas Women’s Privacy Act at its facilities.”
PriDenton and OUTreach Denton issued a joint statement noting that this year’s event is their fourth annual Pride Month swim day, and calling Paxton’s lawsuit a “frivolous waste of taxpayers’ time and money.”
The center is owned and controlled by the city of Denton, and it includes a public-access swimming pool and sex-specific multiple-occupancy changing rooms.
That pool is, Paxton’s press release notes, “designed and advertised as a child-friendly facility. But, Paxton warns melodramatically, “Event organizers have publicly advertised that ‘gender-neutral changing rooms’ — which would allow men to use the same changing rooms as women and kids — will be available on-site during the event. This is in clear violation of Texas law.”
The ridiculously misnamed Texas Women’s Privacy Act, aka Senate Bill 8, “mandates that publicly owned ‘private spaces’ be designated on the basis of biological sex. The law further requires political subdivisions, including municipalities, to take ‘every reasonable step’ to ensure that individuals of the opposite sex do not enter spaces designated for the other sex. A gender-neutral changing room accommodating multiple occupants at once is expressly prohibited under the law,” Paxton says.
He accuses the city of Denton for “fail[ing] to take any corrective action or provide assurances that the center’s changing rooms would be used in accordance with their lawful sex-specific designations.”
Despite receiving written notice of the planned violation on May 19, 2026, the City of Denton failed to take any corrective action or provide assurances that the Center’s changing rooms would be used in accordance with their lawful sex-specific designations.
“Cities cannot disregard Texas law by allowing men to change with young kids in spaces designated for women,” Paxton blustered. “The city of Denton had an opportunity to prevent this violation and chose to do nothing. That dereliction of duty will not stand, and I will ensure that Texas cities follow our state’s laws to protect women and children from men invading their spaces.”
While the event was advertised as being open to all ages, organizers require attendees to register in advance due to limited space, and the RSVP registration link has not been publicly shared, according to The Denton Chronicle.
Meanwhile, guns are the leading cause of death in Texas, and since Paxton was sworn in as attorney general on Jan. 1, 2015, an average of 492 children between the ages of 0 and 17 have been killed by firearms in Texas, according to EveryStat.org.
That includes the 19 elementary school slaughtered in their classroom May 24, 2022, at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary, the eight children and teenagers (including a 1-year-old and an unborn child) shot to death at Sutherland Springs Church in November 2017, and more.
So much for actually protecting the children of Texas.
As for protecting women, as SB 8 is purported to do — more than 1,700 women have been killed by male intimate partners in Texas since 2015.
And there is no record of any of the folks who have murdered children or women in this state having been trans — just so you know. In fact, Studies from the National Crime Victimization Survey indicate that transgender people are between 2.5 to 4 times more likely to experience violent crimes than cisgender people.
— Tammye Nash