The last few months, the debate over gender neutral bathrooms has been raging in the media. The proposal of transgender access to public facilities (primarily centering around Obama's directive for transgender students in public schools) has been met with shouts from both conservative and liberal voices are setting this guidance up to be "a protractive and messy legal battle."
There are many concerns being voiced over this initiative: calling for stronger legislative process, questioning if the rights of the majority outweighs the rights of the minority and how all of this affects the "sanctity" of gender. But rising above these issues is the concern of privacy and how this new-fangled gender-neutral bathroom idea infringes upon that right. I have to say, I agree: public, gender-neutral, non-single use bathrooms make me uncomfortable, if not a little bit frightened. And my response—like so many other women's and, particularly, father's—reveals a much larger issues that's at play than just who gets to pee where.
Notice that there is little to no concern about women going into the men's bathroom although that option is just as viable as the reverse. No one is concerned about the impact trans men (those are biological women that identify as or transition to be men) would have if they can use the men's restroom rather than the women's. The concern is that men (biological men, mainly) would now be able to directly invade the privacy of women—and we fully expect it to happen. The problem here is not about the life decisions trans people have made or about washing my hands next to a trans woman. It's the fact that 1 in 4 women my age will be assaulted, especially at public institutions. It's the fact that safe spaces for women to sheerly exist are getting smaller—there are times of day that my presence on a public street makes me a target for harassment. There is such outrage over the privacy of our women's bathrooms because we know that given the option, there are absolutely men (I know, I know, not all men) who will take advantage of that option.
In this situation of allowing gender neutral non-single user bathrooms in public places, there is no room to victim-blame. We cannot ask the question "well what was she wearing?" or "why was she there, shouldn't she know better?" because we collectively agree that the perpetrator shouldn't have been there in the first place. Imagine if this sort of outrage at privacy invasion was carried over into all other sexual harassment, assault and rape cases and not the hush-hush and dismissal we see now.
Funny (sarcasm thick) how the reaction to men being given to option to invade the privacy of women's bathrooms is to take that option away. Effective in an immediate sense, that's for sure, but why are we not calling for better behavior from our men? This reveals our society's ingrained idea that "boys will be boys" and that this is just an expectation that we need to guard from. At this point in time, in May of 2016, that is utterly ridiculous. Men must be help responsible for their actions.
As the battle over privacy rages on, stop and look at what's really being fought for, and fought against.
