Meaningless side note: I wanted to be clever and call this a “shitty essay” but I don’t really intend to be that crass, so it is a title that would overhype the content. It very well could be shitty for many other reasons than talking about bodily functions but now you have a good sense of the kind of conversation that might be headed your way.
It might seem like any visibly able-bodied, cis, white dude would have minimal stakes in the political conversation around the gendering of bathrooms, and would thus be a voice that might be best ignored. I think that is a perfectly fair position to take and if you read nothing more I have to say, let me at least go out saying: denying anyone the use of a restroom in which they can comfortably do the things required of being a human is to deny that person the right to exist in public space. That is my thesis and the rest of this is just explaining how and why I know this. So if you are still reading this essay, let me try to explain why hearing about schools/institutions/governments trying to police bathroom usage feels incredibly personal to me, even beyond the fact that many people I love and care about are directly coming under attack just for existing.
You see, I have a relatively invisible disability/health issue. It is something that might have been an issue for decades, but is becoming more and more difficult for me to ignore, and something I need to stop feeling shame and disgust over. Whether it is allergies, or a food sensitivity, or something else (I am still having difficulty figuring it out exactly), there are foods that I love and want to eat that cause me a great deal of gastrointestinal distress.
For a very long time in my life, it was not something that took up much of my mental space, until I went on a camping trip where I did something to cause a anal skin abrasion, which led to an abscess, which led to a fistula, which led to colorectal surgery, that led to a very real possibility of incontinence at some points in my future/present. I really just cannot physically hold it in like I could before the surgery. As a result, not really understanding what causes me gastrointestinal distress creates very many stressful situations in my life. If there is not reliable access to a restroom within a few minutes walk of wherever I am, where I can comfortably take a shit without making my asshole the center of whatever social situation I am trying to be a part of, I do not feel welcome in that space. I pretty much have to divulge this information when attending any events, conferences, or even in just general social outings. In my daily life, I not only have to try to be very cognizant of what I am eating to a level that is nearly impossible to observe completely, but I also have to carefully pay attention to where restrooms are that can accommodate my needs, which can really complicate things like riding the bus/light rail, taking my dog for a walk, and you know, just existing in public. Preparing to become a parent, and knowing that I am going to have to be responsible for taking care of the needs of another human being while also having restrictions on what I can do myself is a source of fear and anxiety, and made this an issue that I can’t just try to hold inside any longer.
This changing sense of identity, from “independent white guy” to “disabled future father,” has really crystallized my understanding that public restrooms in the United States are sites of class, race, gender, and ability conflict. Yes, this is me being slow to the conversation, as bathrooms always have been the site of this conflict, because one of the easiest ways of segregating spaces is to just make someone feel uncomfortable existing in that space. Completely ignoring the long history of racism and ableism and sexism and class war that has happened over restrooms, you can see this in contemporary news articles all the time. Cities like Seattle are in a constant battle between businesses, city governments, and city residents to provide restroom services that make a space inviting to the people that different interests want occupying that space. Many cities during the pandemic cut off access to public restrooms, if they even had public restrooms in many parts of their cities, and pretty much expected local businesses to pick up the slack. Most local businesses will have a “customers only” policy, if they provide a restroom at all, as many will use “homelessness and drug use” in the area as justification for shutting down their restrooms as often as possible. And honestly, I understand why. Cleaning restrooms when you are getting paid minimum wage sucks. Cleaning restrooms when you have multiple retail responsibilities at the same time is nearly impossible because, to clean restrooms safely and effectively, it takes time and attention. When public restrooms become one of the only accessible spaces for private activities, they become sites of conflict between all the stakeholders that need or desire private space in public.
This is why gendering bathrooms along a restrictive and uncompromising gender binary is very close to the same problem as segregating bathrooms along racial binaries. Because human beings require bathrooms to exist, and because controlling who feels welcome and comfortable walking into a space and using the restroom controls who is welcome to be in that space. When the idea of someone else using the same restroom as you are using makes you feel uncomfortable, whether that is because of the person’s, racial, gender, ability, or class position in relationship to your own, it makes you question whether you feel like you can belong in a space.
The really fucked up part of this whole situation of “bathrooms as sites of social conflict” are an entirely manufactured infrastructural issue. We build bathrooms in public spaces intentionally to act as gates to limit physical and social access to those spaces. Very few people who design commercial or institutional spaces prioritize making restrooms that feel comfortable and safe to anyone who might use them. Anyone who has even temporarily experienced a disability that affects bathroom usage can tell you this from experience. Restrooms that are designed to make their users feel comfortable and safe are luxuries to be economically exploited and not an inherent protection of human dignity. If we actually treated using the restroom as a fundamental right of human existence, then the situations that lead to anyone feeling uncomfortable in a restroom could easily be fixed at an architectural design level. I say easily, but that might be a little misleading, given the extent to which governments, businesses, and institutions generally have relied on architecture, and especially the architecture of the restroom, to gatekeep who uses built spaces and for what purposes. Even building better bathrooms doesn’t do anything if those bathrooms are not adequately maintained and thus there are not necessarily one time investitures that could fix all the ways that bathrooms are used to exclude those whom society wants to erase, but the foundational problem is literally structural in nature. If bathrooms were actually seen as public spaces for the basic protection of human dignity then they could be constructed to provide everyone enough privacy where it would not matter who was doing what in that space when you were not occupying it. But because bathrooms are not those spaces, but rather spaces of social and economic control, provided in as minimal a function as possible to prevent large scale public health crises, they will continue to be battle zones over the right of basic existence.