In my high school in southwestern Connecticut, we had a gender neutral bathroom. I had forgotten about it completely until I sat down to write this article, because it was never a big deal. There was never any uproar or complaints about it, and a lot of people used it, including cisgender students, transgender students, and even teachers. Point is, something amazing happened over the course of the gender neutral bathroom’s career in the high school: no one died, the children were safe, and the four horsemen of the apocalypse did not come roaring down the hallways to stop whatever godforsaken unholy activities were going on in that gender neutral bathroom.
Recently I saw a comic portraying a woman and child walking past a women’s restroom, while an extremely creepy looking man with a trench coat on and a camera in hand was exiting the restroom. The man had a small speech bubble that read, “Don’t worry lady, I’m transgender.” Ah yes, the classic pedophile/rapist/voyeur posing as a transgender person in order to access his victims at their most vulnerable – in the bathroom. How can we be safe from such a creep if he now has access to our restrooms? I understand this argument completely, however let’s keep in mind that pedophilia, rape, and voyeurism are already rampant problems for a multitude of reasons that have never included toilets.
There has been an ongoing debate about North Carolina’s bathroom law, which states that transgender persons must use the bathroom of their birth gender. Let’s apply logic here for a moment. Now, consider the fact that most transgender people prefer to look like the gender they identify with. As in, if you were born a man but identify as a woman, chances are you will not be wearing men’s clothing or growing a beard. So if you are a transgender woman and appear to be the gender you identify with, who exactly is checking whether or not you are a "born and bred" girl? Is there a gender police? Do they guard the doors of bathrooms and lift up skirts and pull down pants to make sure everything is as it was at birth? And what about those who have gotten sex change operations? How can we tell who is a real woman? We can't. So laws that force people to use the bathroom assigned to their birth gender are not only ridiculous, but are ineffective as well.
But oh, what’s this? What if under the North Carolina bathroom law, a pedophile/rapist/voyeur walked into a woman’s restroom and this time he said, “Don’t worry lady, I’m just using the bathroom of my birth gender.” See? Not so cut and dry, is it?
I think it’s due time we pay less attention to who pees where and more time talking about the bigger issues at stake not only in our country, but around the world, as we keep in mind an absolutely earth shattering idea – trans people have been using the bathroom of their preferred gender since the invention of the toilet.
