Required Bathroom Reading

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Sex-segregated bathrooms are intimidating to transgender people, and according to some feminist-scholars, such as Ohio State University professor Louise Antony, they're not that great for women, either. Antony has long argued that sex-segregated bathrooms do not 'secure the safety of women in a sexist world' but rather, are 'arguably more dangerous than unisex facilities would be, since a would-be assailant has a reasonable expectation that he will find potential victims, and only potential victims, in a ladies' room.' For example, most of the stalls in the women's bathrooms at New York University have emergency buttons, though the men's stalls lack such a feature.

The case for gender-neutral bathrooms is made all the more interesting by a non-political nursing home health agency in Idaho called Caring Hands Inc. Since 1997, Caring Hands' Director Denise Decker, has offered women information about the time-tested practice of urination while standing. Decker, who is also a registered nurse, argues that historically women peed standing up by simply placing pressure on each side of the urethra and releasing. As evidence she points to the fact that dresses in the 19th century often featured front plackets that could be opened or closed just like the fly on a pair of jeans. In addition to the fact that sit-down urination takes longer than standing, women who hover over the toilet seat generally only empty about a third of their bladders each session -- which means they have to go more often. As an aside, Decker's site also includes a lengthy article about designing Muslim-friendly bathrooms -- just another piece of evidence that the public commode has the potential to be more, not less, controversial.

(Louise Antony's quote was taken from an article titled 'Back to Androgeny: What Bathrooms Can Teach Us About Equality,' by Louise Antony, printed in the Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues, Spring, 1998.)

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