03/10/2025
“A cisgender woman in Arizona is speaking out after she says she was harassed by cops in the women’s restroom of a Tucson Walmart late last month.
Kalaya Morton, 19, of Phoenix, says she and her ex-girlfriend were using adjacent stalls in the store’s women’s restroom when two male sheriff’s deputies entered.
“They were flashing lights on our feet and saying, ‘You have to get out of here. You have to come out. We need to talk to you,’” Morton told Advocate.
Morton, who identifies as a stud — q***r slang for a masculine-presenting le***an — says she believes a store employee who had been eyeing her earlier reported her to the cops believing she was a man. As the Advocate notes, Arizona law does not dictate that people use public restrooms that correspond with the s*x they were assigned at birth.
In social media videos and in her interview with the outlet, Morton said that when she exited the bathroom stall, she lifted her shirt to prove to the deputies that she was a woman. But, she said, one of the deputies continued to insist she “looked like a man.”
On February 19, Morton posted a brief video of the encounter, showing the two deputies in the women’s bathroom. “They came in here in the girls’ restroom because I’m a girl and they didn’t think I was a girl, so they tried to come take me away,” Morton can be heard saying off camera.
“The only men in the women’s restroom were the cops,” she said.
The incident comes amid growing hostility toward transgender Americans on the political right. Republicans, including the president, have framed laws restricting transgender women’s and girls’ access to public facilities like bathrooms and locker rooms as efforts to protect cisgender women and girls. But critics have long argued that such restrictions will, in fact, inevitably lead to greater policing of all women’s gender presentation and invasive, potentially dangerous confrontations like the one Morton says she endured.
The Pima County Sheriff’s Department told the outlet that authorities are aware of Morton’s social media video and have launched an internal investigation into the incident. A Walmart representative said that the company is cooperating with the investigation
In a March 1 TikTok video, Morton said she intends to sue.
“If someone mistakes me for a guy, I usually just correct them or let it go,” she said. “But this was different. This wasn’t just someone calling me ‘sir’ — this was law enforcement trying to remove me from a bathroom where I had every right to be.”
She said the confrontation left her afraid. “It’s already enough being Black and facing discrimination,” Morton said. “Now I have to worry about being harassed just for needing to pee?”
“This isn’t just about me,” she added. “It’s about making sure this doesn’t happen to the next person who just wants to use the restroom without being harassed.”
