Transgender individuals have been using their choice of bathrooms — yes, including school bathrooms — for decades, but thanks to a U.S. District Court judge, their ability to do so has once again been compromised. Monday’s ill-timed injunction granted by Judge Reed O’Connor of Northern Texas will, at least temporarily, hold in abeyance a recent Obama administration directive advising school districts not to discriminate against transgender students or risk losing federal education aid.

But what the decision really amounts to is another shot in the “Bathroom Wars,” which have become little more than a politically-motivated and despicable attack on a relatively small group of people far more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators. Transgender individuals have long used bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity, rather than their gender at birth, but they have recently come under fire for doing so in places like North Carolina, which passed a law banning such reasonable accommodation in March.

That North Carolina and a dozen other anti-LGBT states found a sympathetic judge, a George W. Bush appointee, in Texas shouldn’t come as too great a surprise. Yet the timing could scarcely have been worse as schools open their doors for the academic year. It seeds confusion in transgender-inclusive (or at least neutral) states where bathrooms have not been allowed to become cultural battlegrounds through policies that further stigmatize transgender boys and girls — a group who already reports high levels of harassment, assault and bullying in schools.

Make no mistake, this is a legitimate civil rights issue, a point the U.S. Department of Justice along with U.S. Department of Education, made in the administration’s joint Title IX advisory in May. The reaction by certain officials in Texas — such as the ever-odious Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who described federal education aid as “30 pieces of silver” — has been nothing short of demagoguery.

It’s a crude attempt to channel the discomfort certain individuals have with the LGBT community, particularly in light of the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision of last summer, for self-serving political ends.

That’s not just unenlightened, it’s dangerous. A 2011 survey of transgender individuals across the United States found that two in five have contemplated suicide at some point in their lives — a rate 25 times the national average. The last thing the country needs is a bunch of politicians demonizing people who already find themselves discriminated against in housing, employment and even basic family acceptance.

Still, the decision should have little legal impact on states that have successfully resisted efforts to discriminate against transgender individuals.

That won’t keep the usual naysayers from talking about child molesters, stalkers and other evil-doers lying in wait in America’s public restrooms. Yet the existence of child predators has nothing to do with transgender individuals. Studies show 90 percent of such attacks are perpetrated by individuals a child knows and only rarely by strangers.

Meanwhile, anti-discrimination laws grant no special access to predators or perverts. The notion the matter should be left to states to decide who deserves access to reasonable public accommodations violates the constitutional rights of transgender individuals.

Just as same-sex marriage faced a difficult legal path, efforts to reverse North Carolina’s HB2 and other anti-transgender laws may take time as well. But there are increasing signs that Americans are sympathetic to the cause. Just last week, the National Basketball Association announced it will be moving next year’s All-Star Game to New Orleans, a move made possible by the league’s decision to withdraw from Charlotte in protest of the transgender bathroom bill. What has cost the Tarheel state so dearly will now help bring a small measure of prosperity to soggy Louisiana where recent flooding has brought such misery and pain.