Consider this: a regular looking, clean cut sort of person with, say, a trim beard, perhaps wearing shorts revealing muscular hairy legs, and a t-shirt covering a well proportioned torso with just a little chest hair coming out of the top -- I'm sorry, what were we talking about? I kind of got caught up in an attractive image ... Anyway, he finds himself in need of a rest room. If anyone were to look at his birth certificate, which no one does by the way, they would see that he happens to have been recorded as female in his first minutes of life. But as a result of years of struggle to reconcile a gender he believes himself to be, to one assigned to him by society because of the genitals he was born with - a struggle that is frankly none of our business to judge or comment upon, by the way - he now appears to be and functions as the gender he most closely identifies with. According to new laws in North Carolina and Mississippi and probably many other places (I've lost track), no matter how he sees himself, and no matter how much personal progress he has been able to make, this man is required by law to use the women's restroom.
In fact, if this guy walked into a men's room to privately relieve himself, no one would notice and nothing unusual would happen. But can you imagine the reaction if this hairy beast walked into a crowded women's room in Mississippi? Any proper southern lady would be mighty scandalized.
But I'd like to take a step back and ask something I've always wondered. Why can't we all just share the same restrooms? What is each half of the population hiding from the other, exactly? Is it that women's rooms are so much nicer than men's? I've heard that's the case. That they have like, nice furniture and stuff. Is it true?
We all know what happens in restrooms, whether men's or women's. Generally speaking, people go in there to void their bladders and bowels. These are necessary bodily functions required by every human being on Earth. There is really no difference between the waste produced by males and the waste produced by females. It looks and smells about the same. These are not particularly nice smells, and most of us go out of our way NOT to encounter them, regardless of the gender of the person who produced them.
For that matter, we also don't tend to watch what other people are doing in the restroom. It would be considered bad manners. And just to avoid accidental lookage, there are generally private stalls or dividers between receptacles.
According to the logic of the wacko reactionaries trying to reinforce segregation of the restrooms, I, as a gay man, should not be allowed to use public men's rooms lest I succumb to my animal nature and leer at other facility users. Just to be clear, having used men's rooms for many decades, I can assure you that the only animal instinct I have in there is to GO. I usually just do my business, wash my hands, and get out as quickly as possible. For the record, I'm much more likely to check out other guys on the street than in the loo.
Back in the 80s when I was doing time with the Presbyterian Church, I was lucky enough to live in student housing at New York's very progressive Union Theological Seminary. I lived in a dorm with mostly seminary students. That community welcomed me, a non-student, into their poetry readings, anti-apartheid awareness raising, and drunken late night theological discussions. There was one large bathroom on our floor in Hastings Hall. It was shared by everyone, men and women.
That's right. A co-ed bathroom. I took showers (private showers mind you) adjacent to women and men. I often shaved chatting with a woman who blow dried in the mirror next to mine (many of us had mullet hair in those days). I regularly peed in a stall next to one of the resident lesbians. Though we could hear each other's noises, we never "saw" anything except each other's shoes. It was only strange the first day. After that we never thought about it.
For the past 30 years I've wondered why there weren't more places with desegregated restrooms.
We have to get over our hangups about the human body. What, really, is there to be afraid of? Can we just grow up? This hysteria about encountering someone of a different gender in the restroom is a massive waste of energy. There are real things out there to worry about, folks. I'd be much more alarmed at running into a Republican presidential candidate in the men's room than a man who used to be a woman.
