Transport yourself back to the beginning of the year, an innocent time when boys were boys and girls were girls and the weather was warm enough for t-shirts. I was standing in the men’s bathroom in the library, waiting for the stall to open up so I could pee. The seconds passed; I fell to musing. Why had they removed the urinals? Maybe they’d broken over the summer, or maybe they were upgrading us to super ergonomic urinals, just like they upgraded all the grass and shrubbery around campus, and also that room in the back of the Pub which used to have erotic Memory video games but now looks like the inside of a giant peach.
I mused, and I pondered, and as I pondered a big, well-shaped woman of a woman came out from the stall. Now, I am not one to judge, nor am I frightened by tremendous women who were once men (I did grow up in Greenwich Village, after all), but this person, this overwhelmingly female being, did not offer me the slightest hint that she had any pretensions to being transgender. She belonged in a men’s bathroom like Jesus belongs in Hell.
Well, it turned out I was wrong; she belonged in the bathroom just as much as I did, because it was, and remains, a gender-neutral bathroom. They put a lock on it, so it’s just a private bathroom with two sinks; the other bathroom is the best place to go if you want to hear people peeing in toilets. That is one reason, by the way, I support urinals. They receive pee as noiselessly as baby cows sucking on their momma’s teats.
The gender-neutral bathrooms in the library are probably the most controversial policy the school has enacted so far this year. Not that it’s really such a big deal, and I’m sure everybody’s basically used to them by now, but I’ve heard a lot of people talking about them, mostly in derogatory terms. The rationale for gender-free toilets is clear, of course. Transgender people are often made to feel uncomfortable, or worse, in single-sex bathrooms. But this line of reasoning is slightly less obvious at Sarah Lawrence, a place where people are generally quite understanding of gender issues. I hope that this new policy was created in response to real, documented cases of bathroom awkwardness—I assume nothing worse—and not just to make a point.
If the benefits of the new policy are real, the downsides are concrete. Less places to pee means more time wasted waiting for stalls, and loss of urinals means water wasted. The gender issues advocacy movement is big on this campus, but so is that of the environmentalists. Perhaps a bigger issue is the essential grossness of boys. I searched for ‘gender-neutral bathrooms’ on Google, and the fifth search result was a blog entry by none other than a Sarah Lawrence student. She writes:
“I don’t want boys … in my bathroom. Do you hear me? I DON’T WANT BOYS IN MY BATHROOM. I mean, at least until they figure out how to not piss on EVERYTHING BUT THE TOILET, for God’s sake.”
Very well put, although I would add that I firmly believe it is girls and the obscene amount of toilet paper they use who cause 90% of toilet clogs. Finally, if we are going to take the discomfort of transgender people into account, I think it is only fair to remember the discomfort of those people who are not eager to share bathrooms with members of the other sex. Last year, a student group declared all the bathrooms in the new dorms gender-neutral, even those on single-sex halls; the administration quickly put a nix on that. Why have they changed their minds on the issue now?