Child Sex Predator Paul Ray Witherspoon, ticketed for using female restroom uses “Gender Identity” defense

From NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth: “A transgender woman who was ticketed for using the women’s restroom at a Dallas hospital says her status as a convicted sex offender should not play a role in the citation.”

Last Wednesday, 56 year old Paul Ray Witherspoon frightened a female hospital patient while using the women and girl’s restroom at Dallas Parkland Hospital while wearing a bulky ankle tracking device used for high risk parolees. The woman notified the police, who arrived at the scene and questioned the parolee, who offered that he is a serial child sexual predator now on monitored GPS tracking for his parole.

More from NBC 5:  “Witherspoon said on Wednesday that her criminal past is no secret.

“It happened over 22 years ago, and I’m human,” she said. “I made a mistake.”

According to the Texas Public Sex Offender Registry, Witherspoon was convicted in 1990 for sexual assault of a child and indecency with a child involving sexual contact. Both victims were teenage girls.

“It’s a tragic mistake, I admit, but I’m getting therapy for it and trying to go on with my life,” Witherspoon said.

“I have to register as a sex offender the rest of my life, and I have to live with that,” she said.“

But according to the Texas Attorney General website, Witherspoon was arrested again in 2011 for for a parole violation for sending nude pictures of himself through the Internet.

Witherspoon’s 2011 Arrest

Last Wednesday, when the officer asked Witherspoon, whose driver’s license records him as male, why he was using the female restroom Witherspoon informed the officer that he had recently become transgendered, and was therefore permitted to access private women and girls facilities due to his internal feeling of “gender identity”. The officer cited him for disorderly conduct, a class C misdemeanor. The woman who reported him to police has not yet released more information about the incident, citing the fact that she is “afraid“.

Paul Ray Witherspoon, calling himself “Paula”, claimed he was at the hospital accompanying his “husband” Billy Lorentz to an appointment. However since Texas resident Witherspoon is legally male as is his partner, and Texas does not recognize same-sex marriage that claim is called into question. Lorentz is listed as Witherspoon’s employer on his TX sex offender record.

The DallasVoice reports that Witherspoon said he offered to show the investigating officer a “carry letter” from his psychiatrist stating that he is transgender, and that the officer declined. A photo of the letter is reprinted here.  But as you can see, the letter was written two days AFTER Witherspoon was cited.

TX sex offender registry

Lambda Legal representative Ken Upton claims that pedophilic male serial sex offenders should be allowed to access private women and girls facilties regardless of legal gender status as long as the men are “using the bathroom in a way that is consistent with the gender that they live in day in and day out”. Upton did not qualify what objective measure would record the internal feelings or behaviors of convicted predators or what would indicate that predators “live in a gender” day in and day out.

Lambda Legal’s Upton went on to suggest that males who groom or wear clothing in ways that may be seen as nontraditionally masculine may actually be considered “disruptive” or even qualify as “disorderly conduct” for using male facilities designed for their actual sex :

““If you want to talk about disorderly conduct, you have to wonder which would cause more of a disruption — her going into the women’s restroom and using it with other women or going into the men’s restroom dressed the way she was, whether that would have been any better,” he said.”

As a butch lesbian, I find it shocking and inappropriate that an LGBT advocacy group like Lambda Legal suggests that legally male serially convicted child sexual predators should be given free reign to enter private, protected spaces for women and girls on the basis of those male’s subjective claims of feeling an internal “gender identity”. Further, the assertion by Lambda Legal that males who do not adhere to cultural standards of masculinity would be considered “disruptive” in ANY male setting whatsoever is a claim that every gay and lesbian person should find deeply offensive.

Reporter Janet St James at Channel 4 KMOV St. Louis  spoke to the female complaintant who called the cops on Witherspoon (she  has thus far declined to issue a public statement) and states the woman is ‘still very upset about it”.