CRW: No, I Mean Yes, Unisex Bathrooms

The City Paper had a little article last week that is generally forgettable but there is a twist down in the text. It's about the fact that people ignore the signs on public restrooms, and that in DC you aren't supposed to have signs anyway for single-stall restrooms. As any adult has noted, typically there is a line down the hallway for the ladies room even while the men's room is empty, and it is not unusual for a lady to use a stall in the men's room. Sometimes it's the other way, guys have a way of destroying the plumbing I guess, and you'll see the men's room out of order, so a man will use the ladies room. There is a certain traditional modesty involved in all this but it doesn't go very deep -- there are lots of places in Europe where men pee right along the sidewalk, there is actually nothing very lurid about it. We separate the sexes for eliminative functions out of modesty but if the situation is urgent most people don't get too freaked out if somebody uses the other room.

More relevant for our ongoing discussions, not everyone neatly fits into a gender category. Intersex individuals may have physical characteristics of both sexes, there are numerous states that a transitioning transgender person could be in, and it is often said that masculine-looking lesbians meet the most resistance of all when they try to use the ladies room. As noted, it's not any big deal if somebody uses the unexpected restroom, but if you were to force the issue you would find enough questionable cases to make unambiguous assignment impossible.

So this article describes a DC nightclub that has a blue human-sized exclamation mark on one door and a pink one on the other.

Human beings, however, do not always fit the color scheme. That raises something of a grammatical problem for [club owner] Miskinyar: Policy’s subtly gendered punctuation may be inconsistent with a little-known provision of D.C. human rights law.

Since 2006, the D.C. Human Rights Act has protected transgender men and women from discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations—including restrooms. Since public bathrooms are traditionally gender-specific, gender nonconforming clientele have faced harassment, attack, and even arrest for picking the “wrong” gendered stall. Restaurants with multi-stall bathrooms segregated by gender can work to eliminate discrimination by ensuring that even when rooms are marked for ladies or gentlemen, they’re free of harassment for the spot’s gender-variant pissers.

Miskinyar says he would be happy to open his pink and blue doors to a unisex flow. “We’re in a predominantly gay neighborhood, so why not?” he says. “When it gets busy, the restrooms are effectively unisex anyway—everyone just goes straight to the first open stall.” But restaurants equipped with single-stall restrooms, like Policy, are required to go a bit further in ending discrimination—they must eliminate the gendered bathroom sign entirely. According to the regulations, “All entities covered under the Act with single-occupancy restroom facilities shall use gender-neutral signage for those facilities (for example, by replacing signs that indicate ‘Men’ and ‘Women’ with signs that say ‘Restroom’).” D.C. Bathroom Signs: Ignored By Many, Hated By Some, Expensive, and Possibly Illegal

It gets a little interesting here, as the City Paper at least seems to think that transgender people and anti-transgender people agree on this.

While local business owners and the OHR may disagree over forced redecoration, the unisex single stall is a welcome fixture for two groups that have clashed over toilet turf: transgender activists, and the people who refuse to share a restroom with them.

Last month, the D.C. Trans Coalition launched its “Pee in Peace” campaign to raise awareness about the three-year-old restroom requirements in local accommodations. For the DCTC, “Peeing in Peace” means navigating the bathroom line “without having to worry whether someone is going to assault or arrest us for using the ‘wrong’ one.”

Really, it is such a silly thing, isn't it? It's hard to imagine that the shower-nuts have actually made this an issue, whether transgender people should pee in the bathroom corresponding to the sex assigned them at birth or the one they have transitioned to.

We will remember not so long ago when the Citizens for Responsible Whatever in our county campaigned against unisex bathrooms. Here's a fuzzy picture of John Garza, one of the group's leaders, speaking in front of their famous yellow signs. The one on the left says, "NO UNISEX BATHROOMS."



But now the City Paper interviewed CRW president Ruth Jacobs, who had this to say on the subject:

Last year, the Maryland Citizens for Responsible Government launched its own awareness campaign over transgender bathroom use: the “Not My Shower” initiative. Ruth Jacobs, the group’s president, says the campaign is meant to publicize the flip-side of transgender rights—privacy infringement for “normal people.” “If somebody with an opposite body part is allowed in to a ladies’ restroom—a guy who has a penis, who could put his penis inside my vagina—what am I to do?” says Jacobs. “We need to be able to retain the right to speak up about men in our bathrooms without being labeled bigots.” Jacobs does, however, approve of the gender-neutral single-stall. “That sounds like a reasonable compromise that doesn’t cause any problems for anybody, and that’s a fine thing to do,” she says.

Please go back and read that paragraph over again, see if you can absorb the implications of it. Pause over this sentence: “If somebody with an opposite body part is allowed in to a ladies’ restroom—a guy who has a penis, who could put his penis inside my vagina—what am I to do?” says Jacobs. I'm sorry but I can't not think of something funny to say when I read that. I will stifle myself, just this one time.

It is fascinating that the Citizens for Responsible Whatever are now in favor of unisex bathrooms. Apparently it doesn't really matter if a guy who has a penis uses the same restroom as a lady with a vagina unless the door has a sign stating that the room is for women only.