Bathroom Panic Syndrome

[mcjulie]

When I was a kid, Phyllis Schlafly used bathroom panic to help defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have made sexual equality a constitutionally protected value. The claim was that the ERA would strip women of the “right to privacy based on sex” in “public restrooms and other public facilities.” Basically, unisex, gender-neutral bathrooms

Comments

[trepkos]

They have a really neat new set of toilets in our town. There are about 6 cubicles arranged around a semi-circle which is open to the street at both ends, so you can't get trapped in there by a single person, and the sinks are in the cubicles. Plenty room inside as well. I have to confess, I do know one of my friends already had an assignation, with someone he contacted on Grindr, in one of them ...

... and yes, of course it's all ideological nonsense.

[mcjulie]

Grindr. Hmm....

[trepkos]

Hmmm?

[mcjulie]

Oh, I was hmm-ing because I realized that maybe more bathroom hookups than I suppose happen.

[songblaze]

Honestly, the only thing I see as at all problematic about moving to unisex bathrooms is that in the U.S., bathroom stalls often gap and in some public bathrooms (in parks and the like), I have encountered bathrooms that have no doors. It's not terribly uncommon to see bathrooms where the top of the stall is low enough for a man to see over. There is the occasional creeper or teenage boy who just can't resist peeking, which is, well, creepy. No more harmful than being creepy, but that is still unpleasant. If we fix up the average bathroom a bit, I can't see any reasonable reason to object.

Granted, the peeping creep is FAR less awful than the possible violence that trans people face when using bathrooms, especially if they don't pass well (by ability or by choice to not be confined to stereotypes around gender), so honestly I'm quite willing to swallow my discomfort if it will make them safer. It's just nowhere near equivalent risks.

[mcjulie]

I could be wrong, but I tend to think that truly unisex bathrooms would discourage that kind of creeping -- it wouldn't be "ha-ha we're getting into the women's room," because that would just be the bathroom.

But either way, it has nothing to do with trans women.