Freedom to Pee and Poop Where We Feel Comfortable!

If Europeans can have unisex restrooms, why should we Americans put up with the right-wing fear-mongering nonsense about trans people using the “wrong” restrooms?

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Now to my latest article:

Today’s Philadelphia Inquirer is reporting some welcome if belated news.  The new progressive school board panel in Perkiomen, a rural Bucks County, PA school district that in the prior election cycle had been taken over a year or so ago by a gang of right-wing fundamentalist Christian loonies who proceeded with a campaign to purge the classrooms and libraries of “offensive” books that might contain dangerous words like “sex,” “gay” or “penis,” and to ban trans kids or other students with “unnatural” sexual preferences from using anything but their birth-sex restrooms, has reversed those reactionary restroom rules. 

Trans kids and other non-cisgendered students in Perkiomen schools can now use the restrooms  of their choice, the six new board members voted, leaving the three holdovers from the prior board to warn of disaster, ranging from rapes and assaults by trans students in the girl’s bathrooms, to dangerous “embarrassment” when a wrong-sex student enters a cisgendered bathroom and even to the arrival of “Satan.”

Reading this bit of happy Valentine’s Day news after a trying year of outrages being reported out of Perkiomen in the county adjacent to mine, I found myself thinking back to 2016 when all this “bathroom safety” nonsense began in North Carolina.  When crazed or cynical Republicans seized on the trans wedge issue as a way of stirring up the yahoo voter cohort in Red State and mostly rural America, it struck me that it was only natural for the bathroom issue to appeal to intolerant white people in North Carolina, a state that for a century or more, right into the mid-‘50s had segregated restrooms and schools. That was a time when I was old enough to notice, during our occasional drives from our home in Connecticut down to NC to visit my maternal grandparents in Greensboro, that roadside restaurants regularly had four restrooms (a pair for white men and white women, and a pair for “colored’ men and women, these latter often located in inconvenient places). And of course there were also two water fountains, one bearing a placard saying “white’ and one “colored. (As a thirsty young kid, I went — to my Greensboro-raised mother’s horror— directly to the first colored fountain I saw in a Howard Johnson’s restaurant in Virginia, because I really wanted to see and taste  what I assumed promised to be colored water.)

A year after the North Carolina bathroom battle, I traveled with my wife, as I generally do, to an early music event that she was performing at in Krakow, Poland.  As part of that festival and conference, she performed a solo harpsichord concert in an old concert hall just outside that ancient city’s northern wall.

During the intermission, needing to relieve myself, I followed a sign for the “WC” which pointed down a large marble staircase. Reaching the bottom, I saw another “WC” sign with an arrow pointing to the right where there was a single door. Pushing it open rather obliviously because of my urgent need to get to a urinal, I found myself in a typical European-style men’s room, with a row of commode stall doors on the right, and on the left, a long metal wall with a trough and about a foot out from that metal pissoir, a raised tiled platform to stand on. European men seem to feel no need for the privacy afforded by those protruding ceramic metal obstacles erected between individual urinals in American restrooms, presumably placed there to keep prying eyes from.checking out the size of one’s penis. 

I stepped up on the platform and started to empty my bladder. As I was so engaged, there was a flushing sound from one of the commode stalls. Turning my head slightly, I saw an elegantly dressed, attractive woman of perhaps 45-50 exit it. She looked at me, smiled demurely and in a friendly manner, and walked out of the restroom to return to the concert hall. My first thought when I saw her was, “Oh my god! Did I mistakenly go into the woman’s bathroom?” I wondered if in my haste I had missed a woman’s profile on the door or something. But I quickly recalleded where I was standing, peeing into a male urinal. 

It turns out that in Poland, as in the public buildings of many European countries — especially older ones — unisex bathrooms are common if not the norm, and the idea of women walking past the backs of men relieving themselves at urinals like the one I was using as they enter or leave a common unisex restroom is a commonplace thing.

Looking back at that experience, I find myself wondering how it can be that in a conservative Catholic country like Poland people of both sexes can casually share a public WC, including a rather exposed urinal, when a sex-obsessed country like the US, where fuck scenes or at least naked actresses, are almost required in films, regardless of whether they advance the story line. The producers do this to help them fill theaters. And if they don’t have those scenes, then they make sure the young actresses they hire, at some point in the film, expose a lot of skin.) And yet here in America there’s all this angst about restroom privacy and protection from the imagined prying eyes  of ‘wrong-gendered” transgressors or worse — and many of those supposedly concerned folks are the very ones who who throng to see those R-rated or X-rated films. 

All those memories of racially separate restrooms and water fountains in the South in my youth, of that experience in a Polish music hall, and of the Republican Party’s stirred-up artificial panic over transgendered students invading the “wrong” school facilities ran through my head last weekend when my wife and I drove up to Lower Manhattan to see a wonderful new play, “After the Show,” by two long-time friends and off-Broadway playwright/actors, Ellen Maddow and Paul Zimet of Talking Band, which is currently having a run at the Performing Arts Center-NYC. This beautiful new facility  built on the site of the former World Trade Center Twin Towers, has its restrooms on the third floor, one flight down from the performance hall where the play is being performed. Cautioned by an usher that the show would run for 80 minutes with no intermission, we decided to visit the restrooms ahead of taking our seats. 

The entrance to the restroom area at the PAC-NYC (photo by Dave Lindorff)

My wife went in the common entryway and turned in the direction of the arrow for “Women.”  But I stopped and stared, fascinated at all the options offered on the wall’s bold black signage (check out the photo above which I took). 

As I read all that was written there, I noticed two people looking convincingly like young men, head to the entry. Without any hesitation the lightly built fellow went right following the arrow marked “Men,” while the other, taller and more broad-shouldered, turned left towards where one arrow said “Women’ and the other said “All gender.”

As I was wondering which option the apparent “man’ who went left likely took, a woman emerged from an elevator and strode  directly to the right towards the men’s room. She was followed shortly after by another young woman who turned to the left.

My initial reaction on seeing the elaborate options and instructions on the wall was to think, ‘What a waste of construction money making so many separate bathrooms when one would do the trick like in Krakow.”  But seeing the casual way people — all of them young I must add — made their decisions, and reading the instructions on the wall saying:

We support gender diversity, Please use the restroom that feels most

comfortable for you.

and in smaller lettering:

                 Open to all, regardless of gender identity or expression.

I realized that providing all those options to users of the facilities allows each of us to make a statement, whether it’s asserting our gender or gender expression, or our solidarity with those who are confronting intolerance.

I ended up choosing the “all gender” option.