Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing

9. The Restroom Revolution: Unisex Toilets and Campus Politics

191 9 The Restroom Revolution Unisex Toilets and Campus Politics Olga Gershenson T H E H I STO RY O F the modern restroom has been a history of successive social groups proposing a right to access and a mode of toilet configuration fitting to their needs and desires. First were the women: we owe the term potty politics to the Ladies’ Sanitary Association and similar women’s organizations that put up a fight for the room of their own. Establishing the first women’s lavatory in Victorian London took the persistence of the lone female member of the government and the advocacy of a famous vestryman, George Bernard Shaw, to overcome the resistance of the residents and the vestry. It was not until 1905, after five years of stalling, that the decision to build a women’s bathroom was finally made.1 A similar pattern, explained in part by Terry Kogan in chapter 7 in this volume, took place in the United States and other parts of the world. In the U.S. case, racial minorities were next in line to take up the challenge. In the era of racial segregation in the United States, blacks and whites couldn’t drink from the same fountain, let alone urinate into the same bowl, certainly across the South but to a degree in other parts of the country as well. Up until the 1950s and even the 1960s, locker rooms and bathrooms were still not integrated. For instance , when the Western Electric Company in Baltimore adopted a policy against segregation of public facilities, the union, consisting of white members, went on strike.2 This was during World War II, and the strike had military consequences, leading the War Department to briefly take over the plant. Rather than continue the arrangement, 192 Olga Gershenson after three months and further negotiation, resegregation was imposed .3 As late as the 1970s, court battles over segregation of public facilities continued (e.g., James v. Stockham, 1977). In line behind women and blacks were people with disabilities, who waged their own fight for full public participation via architectural modification of bathrooms, entryways, and more (see Serlin, chapter 8, in this volume). Their movement resulted in legislation that changed building codes and made the provision of an inclusive toilet a legal requirement. Transgender and other gender-variant people have now joined the civil rights toilet queue, straining—with a mix of fear and indignation (and conciliation)—for admission to the public bathroom. Traditional sex-segregated public restrooms bring them routine risk of being insulted , mocked, attacked, and even arrested. As interim remedy, they hunt for bathrooms in which they feel stigma free and physically safe, timing their visits to avoid potentially conflict-ridden overlap with other users. The possible policy solutions to their problem vary from unisex or single-stall bathrooms to education campaigns that might, for example, cause others to be more open to the gender-nonconforming people in their midst. Whatever the best ultimate remedy, the demand for transgender toilet provision stirs public controversy, even among those sympathetic to the campaigns for civil rights of those who have come before. Because transgender people do not conform to societal expectations of “male” and “female,” their mere presence in a sex-segregated place raises anxieties about gender and sexuality.4 Ever since psychoanalytic theory linked toilet training with sexuality, bathrooms and sex have been intrinsically connected in both public imagination and scholarly analysis. Patricia Cooper and Ruth Oldenziel, in their brilliant analysis of the cultural meanings of bathroom space, comment, The very creation of bathroom spaces, which are routinely separated by sex, reflect cultural beliefs about privacy and sexuality. Separating women’s and men’s toilet facilities prevents either sex from viewing, accidentally or otherwise, genitals of the other. The bathroom is a place where genitals may be touched but not primarily for the purpose of sexual stimulation. Western social norms also The Restroom Revolution 193 dictate that sexual relations are not permitted here. The separation ignores same-sex sexuality. . . . So women’s and men’s bathrooms assume heterosexuality and the existence of only two sexes, permit genital touching, and reject overt sexual expression.5 These cultural meanings define the “discipline” (in Foucauldian terms) of the bathroom space, and hence its political meanings, reflecting “an unintentional cultural strategy for preserving existing social categories, the ‘cherished classifications’”6 —with the two-sex model key among them...