The Bathroom Wars

There are individuals fighting for something as fundamental as a safe place to relieve themselves. A place without threat or harassment to do something as human as stopping to pee. These folks are being labeled extremists and threatened and attacked simply for pointing out an inequality in our society.

Unisex bathrooms and the accommodation of transgender individuals has been in the news a lot. Regulations in Washington now require universal access to bathrooms, allowing transgender individuals to use bathrooms consistent to their gender identity. The legislature has attempted to block that. Other states have gone further in their anti-equality agenda.

People are concerned with privacy and safety, and are confused about line drawing. If a line is not drawn here, then where can it be drawn? But the questions of reasonable people get drowned out by the misguided or opportunistic whose only goal is to segregate and embarrass based on gender identity. It is deeply disturbing the kind of hate and fear mongering that has surrounded this issue.

I am on the edges of the Bathroom Wars. As a stay-at-home father raising two young daughters, every day that we go out in public, I have to make a conscious decision on which bathroom is appropriate to use. It’s unusual to see a guy standing out in front of the women’s room in the middle of the day. I get to be that guy.

In many ways, we are lucky. We get to make the decision on which bathroom to visit based on cleanliness and access, but generally we make it from a position of complete safety. No one is going to mess with the crazy dad guarding his daughters’ bathroom stall. That is not afforded to many transgender as they are threatened or harassed for choosing “wrong.” This experience has given me a deep empathy for what transgender individuals experience.

Obligatory Mr. Mom poster.

I've also gotten a different perspective than many families may have. That perspective boils down to two things: First, unisex bathrooms and universal access improve life for everyone. Second, the problem is not people, it’s the facilities themselves.

The first argument in opposition to unisex bathrooms and inclusive facilities is that they present a danger to people at their most vulnerable. Let’s make one thing very clear. People who go into bathrooms to expose themselves or sexually assault others are not called “trans”. They’re called “criminals.” Don’t write laws against transgender people in an effort to stop criminal behavior.

The second argument you tend to run across is that the number of transgender people is simply not large enough to warrant a complete rethinking of all the public bathrooms. Everyone suffers for something, and this is theirs. On its face, this is a bogus argument. No one should ever be forced to make do with substandard public accommodations just because they are not part of the majority.

Additionally, it’s not just trans folks that benefit from inclusive bathrooms. Take, for example, me. Generally - as a cis-male heterosexual - my gender, gender expression, and gender identity make me the last person to care about safe spots to pee. After all, the world could be my urinal.

Ew.

However, those two smaller people I have to care for happen to be girls. Everyday we are in public places is a day when we have to struggle with the bathrooms. One daughter is old enough to go into some women’s rooms by herself, but the younger one is not. So she comes in the men’s room with me, and we negotiate if I stay in the stall or out. Occasionally, the area around the bathroom is just too busy and crowded, so I make both of them come into the men’s room, and the negotiation quadruples. (Nothing ever just doubles.) Often, the men’s room is so dank that I send them into the women’s room together and need to simply loiter outside until they reemerge. Then I have to wait to do my business at some later time. And sometimes I reject both bathrooms and we waddle our way over to Nordstrom, which are just the best bathrooms downtown. It is a huge comfort to our family when a place provides inclusive facilities.

So it’s not just about gender identity. Inclusive bathrooms are about families. Inclusive bathrooms are about caretakers. Inclusive bathrooms are about understanding that the current world does not exist as simple male/female stick figures, and there are plenty of people who shouldn’t need to simply make do.

Bathrooms at the Children's Room in the Central Branch of the Seattle Public Library.
(Note: "And Caregivers")

There is also the argument that giving people a choice in bathrooms will let everyone use the women’s room because it’s cleaner. There is a ring of honesty to that one. But it goes to illustrate the true problem does not lie with some type of person making others feel uncomfortable. The problem is with the design of bathrooms.

The truth is that all public bathrooms suck. They are an exercise in minimums. They are the minimum size necessary with the minimum faculties necessary to relieve some estimated number of users. These minimums are stuck together in a way that minimizes the attention of staff and minimizes required cleanings.

None of those minimums include things like privacy, or usability, or actual safety. Privacy at men’s urinals is an open joke. Usability is so terrible that it took a series of laws (.pdf), the Americans with Disabilities Act, to even suggest that stalls should be large enough for a wheelchair or outfitted with railings. Until then, a sizable chunk of the population could not use public restrooms. Many men’s rooms still do not have diaper changing tables. As for safety, public bathrooms are mostly unattended, windowless places located at the distant and vacant end of a building or at the end of a long hall. Bathrooms are an afterthought.

The universal symbol for "Grilling Saturn While Wearing Bulky Sweater."

So, does that mean we have to replace all the bathrooms just to accommodate some of those wacky trans people or a couple of stay-at-home dads?

Let’s think critically here for just a second. There are really three kinds of bathrooms in public places based on size. The goal in any of these places is privacy and security.

At one end, there is a single occupant bathroom where one person is in a room with a locking door. This is what’s in most restaurants and small stores. These should all be unisex. Having a boy bathroom and a girl bathroom at a coffee shop just causes backups for one or the other. They don’t do that with the line at the register, don’t do it at the bathroom. Making that change requires, at most, replacing two signs.

At the other end are stadium bathrooms with two dozen stalls or urinals lined up in a row. In this situation, the sheer capacity of the place means that every stall is pretty much its own bathroom, so there is no issue with the gender identity of the person next to you. These facilities are also large enough that they should absolutely be required to provide a cluster of family or single occupant bathrooms at regular intervals. Many already have done this.

So that leaves the middle level, bathrooms with a couple of stalls and a couple of sinks. A lot of these are in supermarkets and shopping malls, but also schools and office buildings. They’re probably not the most prevalent bathrooms by number, but they’re the ones that we encounter most because these are the places we frequently visit or stay a while.

The places that mid-size bathrooms are located also shows why they’re also the biggest issues in privacy and security. These bathrooms are trying to get economies of scale, providing a single restroom for a lot of shops rather than separate bathrooms in each office or store. They are not stadium-sized, so they put people in close proximity without anonymity. And they’re often tucked away in a distant corner of the mall, or in the case of an office building, simply not used that often throughout the day. Perhaps they were built too big for the number of people on the floor or set up for a building at maximum capacity that was never filled.

Adapting middle size bathrooms could be difficult. Except we already have plenty of examples where bathrooms of this type function for everyone. See Nordstrom’s above. What we find is that poor design must be overcome with attentiveness. In new buildings, the bathrooms cannot be an afterthought. They must be designed to be observed and secure. In existing buildings, attention means people. If that means a store has to hire extra staff to keep bathrooms secure and clean, that is the cost of doing business.

Single occupant unisex bathrooms in a local office building.
There's a third restroom out of frame.

One last argument keeps getting raised against universal access in bathrooms. It’s that this is some feely activism run amok. These social justice warriors are trying to protect the feelings of a small group at the expense of the feeling of security for most people. Why should a fight over feelings necessitate such radical change?

This is not a battle over whose feelings are more worthy. It’s about rights versus assumptions. The fight for universal access to restrooms is about the right for everyone to be safe and private at all public facilities. This is a civil right versus the assumptions that gendered bathrooms are safer, cleaner, or simply the way to do things. There has been nothing to support any of these assumptions, and absolutely nothing compelling enough to take away another person’s rights. Fighting against inclusive bathrooms are simply an appeal to comfort and familiarity thrown up as a blockade. A blockade that allows a widely misunderstood group of people to be shunned and vilified.

In the end, the real enemy in the Bathroom Wars is not some fabricated predator. It’s our own acceptance of awful design and our willingness to settle for how we think things need to be. We allow ourselves to accept minimums - minimum usability or minimum safety or minimum cleanliness - and think we should be grateful.

No. Fairness demands facilities that accommodate the entire public. That is the minimum we should start from.