There is an ice cream shop in Williamstown, Mass., they posted this sign outside of their bathroom, which is open to the public. I looked at the sign, and then went into the bathroom, which was clean and quite private.
I felt a pang about my country, which happens from time to time, and more lately.
Is this issue really so difficult, I wondered. I’m a hopeful type, but some issues just confound me. Especially in this birthplace of freedom and democracy.
People of any gender, identity, or “expression,” can use the bathroom at any time, and this is a place with lots of young people, kids of all ages, college students, adults.Do we really have nothing better to do, nothing better to spend our money on? Can we really not just let people choose the way they wish to live their own lives, as long as they do not hurt other people and obey our laws?
No one has complained about the bathroom, no one has been assaulted or frightened there – it is right next to a room full of people – and no one has been made to feel uncomfortable because they can’t use the bathroom they choose to use. That would be an awful thing for me to experience.
I think many of the people running our country and raging on social media have different notions of freedom than I do. And we are quite far apart on this one.
I have no desire to tell people who to love, when to die, or least of all, what bathroom to use. It is hard for me to imagine the billions of dollars and countless hours of legislative and media time and anguish and heartbreak taken up with questions about who can use what bathroom, when that money could probably have sent 10,000 kids to college for free.
What is wrong with us, that we are so broken this way, that an ice cream parlor in a college town figured this out in minutes.
I have heard the testimony of young men and women struggling with powerful issues of sexual and gender identity, and I certainly hear them and respect their need to use whatever bathroom supports their identity and life.
Is it really true that I am an out-of-touch elitist for feeling this way?
I don’t remember growing up in a Newport Mansion, and never made it through college, my parents struggled with money for all of their lives, as I have struggled with money for most of mine. I have worked every day of my life since I was 17.
I grew up in a working class neighborhood of Providence, R.I., where people worked hard and until their last days. I earned every single thing that I have.
As long as people treat one another with civility and dignity, I could care less what bathroom they choose to use, or what they do while they are in there. I have better things to do with my life and energy.
I have read countless religious and spiritual volumes in my life, and I have no recollection of God telling anybody what kind of bathroom to use. I have not yet out found a single record of any instance where any child was harmed or assaulted because of this issue.
When most religions were conceived, there were no bathrooms and men and women used pots and holes in the ground outside.
There was no such thing as gender identity bathrooms, that is another modern notion of neurotic and fearful and bigoted people.
This isn’t so simple. A stall for privacy for anyone who wishes it reduces the need for raging battles and idiotic legislation and more battles. Not to mention the harm and isolation it inflicts on people who have their own strong identity, and were they go to the bathroom is important, a human rights issue in my mind.
As is obvious, I had no desire to fight with people or argue my beliefs on Facebook or Twitter. As I wrote before, I am not drawn to academic or religious solutions to social problems, but to practical ones. And this is a practical one. I seek the company online and off of honest brothers and sisters who trust one another and protect each other and the vulnerable from harm.
We affirm in one another something other than suspicion, judgment and cruelty.
Does it really have to be this hard?
A small ice cream shop in Williamstown, Mass. seems to have figured it out with no trouble at all.
Considering that a very large percentage of women grew up abused by men at one time or the other, asking for the privacy to use the toilet without a man in the room seems OK to me. Young teenage women coming into womanhood deserve to be able to have their privacy at this sensitive time – young men too for that matter. I went into a gender neutral bathroom at a pancake house and truck stops were cleaner. There was urine everywhere, which if you are a person that needs to sit when they use the bathroom, this is an issue. Separate rooms is no harder than separate stalls. The plumbing is clustered back to back. I’m sorry if someone is offended or confused but please suck it up. Us women have been sucking it up long enough about everything imaginable.
Margaret, thanks, but men don’t have any more privacy than women, or any better memories of going to the bathroom, I’m wondering why the real issue here is cleaner bathrooms with stalls for privacy….I don’t put the onus for clean bathrooms of people of different gender identity, many companies maintain clean bathrooms with stalls for privacy..I’m not sure why that can’t work.