Everyone wants to feel safe as they do their business in public restrooms. Everyone. This includes both cisgender people (people who identify with the gender they were assigned to at birth) and transgender people (people who don’t identify with the gender they were assigned at birth).
Right now, the majority of public restrooms only cater to one of those groups’ safety: cisgender folks. The main argument for this is that people don’t feel safe with transgender people in bathrooms. But why does the safety of transgender people not matter?
Everyone has to use the bathroom, including trans people. But imagine when the bathroom is something that brings you fear every time you enter it. Imagine never knowing whether it will be safer to use the women’s restroom or the men’s. Every time you need to use the bathroom in public, it becomes a question of your identity and presentation, not just a trip to relieve yourself.
The bathroom is often the last place transgender people feel relief. Instead, it brings anxiety. You constantly check and watch to see who entered the bathroom, wondering if it’s safe. As a cisgender, gender-conforming person, you have probably never second-guessed using a public bathroom, except maybe to question its cleanliness.
Even if you encountered a transgender or gender-nonconforming person in the bathroom, you probably wouldn’t feel unsafe. Maybe startled. Maybe confused. But you probably wouldn’t fear physical, verbal or sexual violence.
What makes me mad is that the most common argument against gender-neutral bathrooms is safety. But why are we so concerned about the safety issues in bathrooms when we only just started to worry about safety issues on college campuses? Why do we have this obsession with keeping our bathrooms “safe” (for cisgender, gender-conforming people from gender minorities), but we’re not too concerned about domestic violence, sexual assault or any of the other tragedies that take place in the safety of our own homes?
Because it’s not really about safety. It’s about excluding trans people. Making them feel “othered” and denying the fact that they are also real men and women. It’s about playing along with society’s norms about how one must look or act in order to qualify as a person whose safety is valued.
I say this because it’s not just trans people who have had bad bathroom encounters. Gender-nonconforming people also have similar problems. Anyone who doesn’t present in the typical manner of their assigned gender, no matter what their identity, can find public bathrooms unsafe.
If the concern is really making public bathrooms a safe space, then they should be a safe space for everyone. I can offer a few solutions to going about this, all including gender-neutral bathrooms. Gender-neutral bathrooms are either single stall family-style bathrooms or just bathrooms that allow all genders.
The first is making every bathroom gender neutral. This helps eliminate the expectations people have when they enter a bathroom, making it safer for everyone. Although this would be the cheapest option for most public spaces, it would probably be the most difficult to get people to agree to.
Making all bathrooms gender-neutral means that not only are you allowing trans and cis people to use the same bathroom, but also women and men. For some reason, this is incredibly taboo and doesn’t fit into our binary world of separating things by genders.
Another option is to convert half the bathrooms in every establishment to be gender neutral, while leaving the other half traditional male and female. This seems like it would be more appealing to everyone. If people feel safe using a gender-neutral bathroom, they have access to it, but if they want to stick to traditional bathrooms, they have the choice to.
However, this is one step away from denying gender minorities access to the traditional bathrooms. They would receive even more hostility for using them because they have their own.
I can easily see how an establishment might place their gender-neutral bathrooms in an uninhabited basement or inaccessible area. The whole separate but equal thing has been shown not to work, because the people in privilege benefit and the minority group doesn’t actually get what is equal.
The third option is to just add new gender-neutral bathrooms or stalls to every public accommodation. While this is probably the most expensive option, it is also probably the easiest to get people to buy into, because cisgender people don’t have to change or give up their space. The problem with this is that it “others” gender minorities. They have to have their own special space to use the restroom.
A benefit, though, is that it would be much safer. And if that’s the step we need to take, we should take it. We need to make bathrooms safer for everyone, because it’s not fair for bathrooms to be a source of stress. Gender minorities are warriors in many parts of their lives, but that doesn’t mean the bathroom should be a warzone.
