The Little ______ Room

The mainstream national discourse on Queer rights is still shaped primarily by the marriage equality movement. There is, however, another issue which has found itself more frequently in the press as of late. It is the issue of fair access to bathroom facilities for transgender and gender nonconforming people. An almost exclusively local question in the past, it may just be a new battleground for LGBT activists seeking to shed light on inequities faced by some members of their community.

Improving the ability of all people to safely use the bathrooms of their choice has been a struggle in itself. The solution that many activists have embraced is to move away from the idea of gendered bathrooms altogether and to rethink the way we conceptualize public restrooms altogether. It is an idea first actively promoted decades ago by writers such as Leslie Feinberg, who foresaw gender neutral, single-stall, lockable washrooms as essential to creating a safer environment for those vulnerable to attacks or harassment in either male or female bathrooms, or those uncomfortable with using either due to their identity not fitting into either of the two gender categories.

The level of progress made in the past on this issue is debatable, but that may be changing andIthacais one of the places where this is the case. The near-unanimous passage of a Cornell Student Assembly resolution to convert all single-stall bathrooms on campus to be gender neutral and to mandate the inclusion of a gender neutral bathroom in all future campus buildings came as a surprise to many. The Cornell Daily Sun article about the resolution drew a fair amount of contentious debate, both on the article’s web page and offline.

The resolution begins to look a lot less surprising in the context ofIthaca,New York, Cornell’s hometown. The city has been key for this new wave of bathroom-focused activism. A particularly notable example of this is Pee in Peace, an iPhone app launched early this year by Out for Health, which is a subset program of the Planned Parenthood of the Southern Finger Lakes, located in Ithaca. The Pee in Peace website describes it as an app “designed to help transgender and gender non-conforming people easily locate single-stall or gender-neutral bathrooms inIthaca,New York.” It remains to be seen when similar services will be developed for other towns and states, but the app’s mobile nature and its flexibility are revolutionary. And if Pee in Peace’s approach is any indication of what is to be expected in the future, it may completely upend the debate.

Even though the gender neutral bathrooms in question at Cornell are single stall ones, the national debate extends further, to the topic of un-gendering facilities in general.  This has tapped into a fundamental discomfort and received a fair bit of backlash, with opponents viewing it as unnecessary at best or as invasive at worst.UniversityofPittsburghrecently came under attack from its faculty and students as well as outside activists in the past month for refusing to buck on its strict bathroom policy. As it stands now, the university does not allow anybody to use their restroom of choice unless they are able to provide a birth certificate with a sex matching that of the sign on the door. This has been decried by many activists as irresponsible and putting transgender, especially trans-feminine, faculty and students at risk of humiliation, harassment and assault.

It is not yet clear how widespread the effects of this debate will be. One cannot know whether it will affect a few campuses and towns or whether in time it may come to completely change the way we think of public restrooms, or of gender divisions themselves. As tempting as it is for activists to embrace the symbolic value of gender neutral bathrooms and dub them the final frontier for LGBT rights, however, it would be a mistake to lose track of the many other causes embraced by the movement, including prison reform, changing the culture of bullying, and addressing health care and homelessness amongst LGBT youth.