Do Gender Neutral Bathrooms Help Or Hurt?

University students are pushing for gender neutral bathrooms for transgendered students.

They say that students are often bullied when they go into either male or female bathrooms, and choosing which to use can be uncomfortable and embarrassing. The University of Western Ontario, in London, started building gender neutral bathrooms in 2008. The University of Victoria and McGill University, in Montreal, also have gender neutral bathrooms.

We do need to work out a way for transgendered people to use public bathrooms without being threatened or embarrassed (or in some cases even arrested). But this may not be the best solution.

Wouldn’t giving them a separate, marked bathroom further stigmatize transgendered people? It would make it easier for bullies to target them. The bathrooms could end up vandalized. Anyone who sees you walking into a gender neutral bathroom would know that you are transgendered, and not everybody wants that.

It could also send the message that transgendered people have to be isolated. Or that there is something wrong with them and they need to be cut off from “normal” people’s bathrooms. It’s like identification cards where the options are male, female or “other.” It just reproduces the idea that being confined to either male or female is normal and anything else is deviant.

Maybe one day we will stop focusing on everybody’s differences so we can all just pee in peace. Male, female, transgendered, who cares? We’re all in there to do the same thing.

Contact the author here: jennY@morningquickie.com