Transgender Restroom Laws

April 23, 2016. Transgender Restroom Laws or Private Stalls?

Public rest rooms have become the latest battleground in our culture war, and it seems to focus on how laws enabling transgender people to choose their restroom open the doors to perverts, or how laws requiring traditional restroom usage discriminate. Most of what I’m hearing from both sides is nonsensical political posturing and emotionalism. I’ve attempted to look at this issue from an objective, but very personal, perspective.

Now I’m not opposed to accommodating people with certain psychological challenges such as transgender, but it should be done in such a way that’s acceptable to others. So I thought about how transgender restroom choice might affect me personally.

Most men’s rooms have urinals that aren’t very private. The idea of a woman dressing up as a man to get a peek at me while I use a urinal is a little creepy, but I’m really not worried about that. Perhaps it’s already happened in public restrooms full of strangers and I didn’t even know it. I’m not losing any sleep over that, and I don’t want the government passing a bunch of ludicrous laws to try and protect me from such a violation. I don’t think such laws will make a significant difference.

Most transgender people have been anonymously using the restrooms of their choice for years without people noticing. New laws won’t make any difference for them either. The only situation where laws or policies related to transgender restroom usage matter is when people using the restroom know each other. And this is where I start to care.

I’m a substitute teacher. I use the men’s rooms at school that are most convenient. Schools have staff restrooms, but they are sometimes locked or too far from the classroom to use on a short break between classes. More importantly, when school staff members use the same restrooms that students use it deters bullying. (Some of the nastiest bullying imaginable takes place in restrooms and locker rooms.)

Now when I think about myself standing at a urinal in a public restroom, be it at school or at the mall, and a little girl that I know comes in because she’s struggling with her identity and she thinks she wants to be a boy, that doesn’t seem right to me. Or if a high school girl (even one so firmly committed to becoming a boy that she’s changed her name and started hormone therapy) walks into the men’s room while I’m using it, that doesn’t set well with me either. I could use the staff restrooms at school, but most male students in the school would feel similarly uncomfortable. It’s not right to tell them they just have to deal with it because the female student wants to be a boy.

The only way I see to please both sides of this issue is to redesign our public restrooms so that everyone has enough privacy that it doesn’t matter who goes where. I’ve been in restrooms overseas that are gender neutral. Men and women, boys and girls all use the same facility. Each stall is private with walls going from floor to ceiling and only a narrow gap under the doors.

Personally, I don’t want the government to require such restrooms for all public places, but if a business, school board, church, or any other public institution wants to remove all discrimination from transgender individuals, private stalls is the way to go. Requiring everyone to accept shared restrooms and locker rooms that aren’t private, with people who identify to a gender that doesn’t match their body—that’s unfair and unreasonable.

My conclusion? Let public concern for LGBT individuals lead to greater use of gender-neutral restrooms with private toilet stalls. Wherever gender specific restrooms exist, our laws should be flexible enough that transgender individuals can anonymously choose the restroom that matches their physical appearance without becoming covert criminals. Settle conflicts (such as a known transgender student at school) at the lowest, most local level possible.

Like most political issues, this one has a solution that doesn’t require everyone to agree. We don’t have to take one side and demand that all transgender people use restrooms to match their genetic or biological gender. Nor do we need to go the other extreme and demand that all people welcome transgender individuals into the restroom of their choice. We can have enough private stalls to accommodate choice and live with our diversity. Instead of always fighting to get what we want, if we look for ways to get along peacefully it’s not too difficult.