Every person in their life has felt the discomfort and pain of needing to use the bathroom badly and not having a place to relieve his or herself. Gender identity, sexuality, age, or race have no effect on a person’s need to use a public restroom, so why is it that gender identity can be something that keeps a person from being able to use a public restroom? Aside from any legal statements about whether a public area or school restroom is to be used based on sex versus based on gender, often times transgender people are so concerned about how poorly they will be treated or received in a gender specific bathroom that they feel forced to use a single stall family/handicap restroom, or even hold it until they are able to make it back to their home to relieve themselves in peace. The issue of transgender bathroom usage sprung from school-age students feeling as though they cannot use the bathroom while they are at school because of the lack of facilities available to them.

It is unfair, not to mention unhealthy to hold in excrement for extended periods of time, for people to feel that they cannot use the restroom of the gender with which they identify, even in the most desperate of bathroom times. Public restrooms should be allowed to be used by those individuals that identify with the gender specified on the sign on the door. There has been extensive public disagreement on this issue, especially between left-wing and right-wing members of the communities around the country. Because this issue has stemmed from the LGBTQ+ community’s fight towards equality, there are many arguments from The Right that have brought into question the validity of transgenderism and also the moral and ethical issues that could arise from opening up public women’s restroom facilities to use by transgender women and vise versa with male restrooms and transgender men. The results of many research studies and scientific studies that have been conducted on this issue have been in corroboration with The Left’s argument that not only is there validity in transgenderism, there is also little to no new danger that would arise from the opening up of public restrooms to transgender people. There is an overwhelming stack of evidence in support of allowing transgender people to use whichever public restroom they feel is suited for them, but the voice of the opposition is made louder because the generation that is more likely to be voicing the anti-LGBTQ+ viewpoint is the same generation that holds a high percentage of the political power in our country. 

There are many topics in today’s public sphere of debate that have made it onto the list of family dinner party discussions, but recently one took over the table: transgender bathroom rights. At its beginning, the topic was easily discernable between republicans and democrats, but as this debate has grown and more research has been published, there has become a disconnect in political affiliation and what side of this argument a person sides with. From personal testimonies that have come to the public eye, to scientific research studies that have been conducted to show the validity of the transgender mindset and their desire for bathroom rights in public facilities, even republicans, like myself, have come to strongly support the position that transgender people should be able to use the public bathroom that correlates with the gender with which they associate. I argue that public bathroom facilities, such as school restrooms, should be open for transgender people to choose the bathroom that they feel most comfortable using. In today’s world the argument needs to be split open beyond what conservative/liberal stereotypes bring to the table and use different research studies to argue that passing a law that school bathrooms should be open for transgender students to use based on their preference.  

It seems as though the issue of having transgender friendly bathrooms in public areas and schools just popped into the public light in the past year, but in reality this has been a rising issue in the United States since around 2012. The start of the need for gender-neutral bathrooms happened in 2012 on the campuses of 150 universities and many high schools around the country installed gender-neutral bathrooms. Even earlier than this country-wide endorsement of the gender-neutral bathroom installations was the movement for gender-inclusive bathrooms in public facilities throughout Vermont in 2009. 

When I was in high school, my school became the first in the state of Georgia to have an openly transgender young woman, Sage, as a voted member on our Homecoming court. Our school became a topic of conversation among the county, and even throughout the state. As a public school, we were required to follow the rules and regulations of the school district as provided by the county. In our school we had many bathrooms for males and females, but only one handicap/family single stall bathroom and even then it was almost always locked because teenagers would often go into it for purposes other relieving themselves. It became a bit of an issue of which bathroom Sage would use, especially once it became very public knowledge to parents and school board members that there was an openly and newly transgender woman attending my high school. Many people are still coming to terms with the idea of transgenderism, and had a hard time deciding what should be done about it. Sage would use the single stall family bathroom whenever it was unlocked, but would otherwise use the women’s bathroom. It was more of an inconvenience for Sage than to any of the other students at our school because none of us really found her to be any sort of threat to our safety, as many nervous parents feel about letting a genetically male person share a bathroom with females, and so Sage would use the women’s bathroom to avoid any anti-trans sentiment or awkwardness that may have been found in the men’s bathrooms. I think that on paper the school was meant to enforce that bathrooms were used according to sex and not gender, but unless anyone raised any specific issue transgender students were able to use the bathroom they felt most comfortable in. There was lots of talk about what would be done about the bathroom situation at my high school, but by the time that Sage and the rest of our class walked across the stage at graduation, still nothing had been done about the school’s wavering bathroom policy.

Although difficult to pinpoint a specific date and time when people started talking about the need for gender neutral bathrooms being an available option in public facilities around the country, it can be given an answer the question of “where” it came from. Young adults on college and university campuses across the United States make up a large portion of the liberal population determined to increase the social justices in the country in any way that they can. This politically active group of people across the nation are the answer to where this issue has come from. The younger generations are more likely to be accepting of and fight on the pro-LGBTQ+ side of the civil rights and equalities, and that number of supporters is only growing. However, there are still many people who do not see the need for gender-neutral or transgender choice bathroom options in public facilities. Several states introduced bathroom rights bills that would require transgender people to use bathrooms that match their birth gender. Even though Texas was one of these states requiring bathroom usage according to birth sex, the city of Austin had already approved a law that required gender-neutral signage on all single-occupancy bathrooms. Many cities across the country also approved laws at that time that required gender-neutral signage on all single-occupancy bathrooms, a step in the right direction. 

Moving into 2015 brought the Washington State decision that their existing bathroom laws allowed transgender people access to the bathroom that matched their gender identity, the Justice Department’s siding with a Virginia high school student that he should be allowed to use school bathrooms that match his gender identity, and President Obama opened the first gender-neutral bathroom in the White House. In March of 2016, the state of North Carolina’s legislature passed a law requiring bathrooms to be used according to the sex of the person at birth. This legislation was passed in response to the city of Charlotte passing a law that said the opposite; it stated that transgender people can use bathrooms that match their gender identity. Important terms and definitions for this topic are ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ and what each encompasses. According to faculty member Amy Blackstone of the Sociology School at the University of Maine, ‘gender’ refers to the meanings, values, and characteristics that peoples ascribe to different sexes. ‘Sex’ is a biological concept that is determined by an individual’s primary sex characteristics. The difference in the two terms may seem minimal, but this entire debate is dependent on the sex versus gender discussion point of bathroom usage. The transgender bathroom issue may have started as a stepping stone in the path toward full civil liberties and equalities of members of the LGBTQ+ community but it has sprouted into a large cause on its own.

In his TEDx talk, Ivan Coyote, uses his experience as a transgender male to explain how there should be the moral argument thrown amongst the scientific and political ones. He explains how hard it is to be a transgender, and how difficult it can be in his day-to-day life to find a public bathroom that he feels he is allowed to use. On the one hand there is the men’s room, where he can go and use the bathroom with the people who act and dress and look as he does to the outside world, or there is the women’s restroom where he can use the bathroom with the people that simply share the same sex organs as he does. Coyote also uses the story of a young ‘tomboy’ dealing with the failure of an elementary school to provide a comfortable bathroom experience for her. The young girl is left to feel completely alone and embarrassed about using the bathroom at school, and often waits until she simply cannot hold it any longer before asking to use the bathroom, or waiting until she gets home. Coyote brings to light recognition that the opposition houses the belief of many trans-phobic people by bringing up the option for single stall gender-neutral bathrooms. For the same kind of bathrooms that are marked “family”, and are an option in just about every fast food establishment and interstate rest area in the country, there is not a difference in “gender neutral” ones except for the change from “family” to “gender neutral”. And while having single occupancy public restrooms is a step in the right direction, there are many places that do not have the space to add an extra bathroom like that. This is why it is a more practical and realistic goal to enact laws that allow transgender men and women full rights to use the bathrooms that correspond with their identifying gender. 

In her book, Transgender Rights, Paisley Currah writes about the social aspects that go along with this transgender bathroom debate. The “transgender panic” is often used by the opposition in attempt to keep trans equality at bay. This panic is usually when romantic advances or some form of a threat has happened to a woman in a bathroom. Shows like Law and Order: Special Victims Unit that throw misogynistic rape culture into our faces every time it airs do not help to quell the nerves of people who are afraid of having transgender people use the bathroom of their identifying gender, but then we must remind ourselves that it is a tv show that only encompasses SVU crimes like that. Currah goes on to show how many research studies have been conducted to show the extent to which the LGBTQ+ is using this platform as a stepping stone for gaining more equalities in the world. 

In her book, The ‘Seductive Allure’ of Neuroscience, psychologist Cordelia Fine argues that the inclusion of neuroscientific terms in an explanation of anything makes the reader or audience more likely to take that explanation as valid fact in the matter. Fine explains how even though an argument has neuroscientific terms it can still be ‘circular’. By using information gathered in the most recent findings in neuroscience research, Fine ‘debunks’ the school of thought that each male brain is hardwired the same as the last and each female brain is just as identical to the next. She writes about the variations in brains’ hardwiring across the board. Each brain is woven with a myriad of personality traits that make us the persons we are. Because there is no distinct “male brain” and “female brain” and there is not a clear gender differentiation line it is safe to make the call that gender identity is personal choice that should be able to occur without having to feel ostracized. Although the relationship of this research is not directly shown with the issue of transgender bathroom use, it can be connected to support having school bathrooms-by-gender because a person’s gender identity is simply a difference in the hardwiring of one’s brain just as much as being athletic or musically inclined or organized and it should be looked at as a welcomed part of our evolving society. 

Senior editor at Forbes, Daniel Fisher, writes an article that brings up more of the thornier topics of this debate. The issues of when, where, and to what extent the need for gender identification modifications in the public sphere are discussed within the article. Fisher writes about how the passing of Title IX in 1972 had a ripple effect in how it affected the lives of each person as it became a tense subject between the supporters of Title IX and those opposed to it. Such polarizing topics as this one are often hard to openly debate because of the desire of a politician to not seem uncouth while also representing the beliefs of their constituents is so strong but can be difficult to even bring an issue like this one to the foreground of the debate. Transgender advocates use these arguments to their advantage by appealing to the morals of the people by bringing the discrimination and embarrassment that having to use bathrooms based on sex can cause a transgender person. Williams Distinguished scholar, Gary Gates, published his article in which he draws from multiple national and state-level population-based surveys in the United States. The study showed that there are about 700,000 transgender people. The high number of people in the LGBTQ+ community should be reason enough for more people to be more invested in this situation. With seeing how there is such a high number of transgender people in the world, the conscience of the public is more inclined to sympathize with the desire to end the discrimination and embarrassment that could be spared by having bathrooms-by-gender.

In her article for Science In the News for Harvard University’s Graduate school of Arts and Sciences, Katherine Lu uses twin studies, as well as information about laws that have been passed and discussed regarding this issue, to show the importance of learning about the transgender mind. In the twin studies Lu discussed in her article there was sufficient evidence in the correlation of number of shared genes and likelihood to identify in the same manner, i.e. identical genetically male twins both identifying as females. The text consists of information about the brains of transgender people and how researchers can see how a person is likely to identify by their brain and the way they use it. Through her research she shows support for bathrooms being used based on gender identity.

In this article, Dr. Vliet uses her expertise as a medical professional and member of the Johns Hopkins Sexual Medical Consultation team to show why having bathrooms by gender identity, versus bathrooms by sex, is a dangerous idea. The arguments she presents are based in scientific and medical research and show how sexuality and human hormones and actions cannot be truly trusted and are too inconsistent to make a firm legal decision to allow a person's supposed gender identity to be how bathroom usage is decided.

In so many aspects of our lives, we are taught that education is the key. We spend our childhood and adolescence getting educated, and educating ourselves. We sit in classrooms for hours on end day after day. Then once we graduate from our structured education system, and enter our adult lives we stop. Education is no longer a priority the priority is working and making money. It is as if we, as a society, stay frozen in our mindset and in our ways after we are no longer being ‘taught’. This is often why viewpoints differ generation by generation. Parents were taught a certain to believe certain things, and so was the younger generation the difference being were learned to believe different things. In our society, it is often that we take after our parent’s viewpoints and political stances as we grow up. Although there is some straying from that parental voice during those ‘rebellious’ teenage and college years people often return to the same school of thought as their parents, because of how influential our childhood is on our mentality. Then other times we grow up to have completely different viewpoints because of what is cool at the time. In the matter of who takes what side in the transgender bathroom usage debate it does fall greatly onto one’s education of the subject. 

Generally speaking, the politicians who hold political and social power in our country were not formally taught about the different sexes in a way that separated gender from sex. Even now the subject is such a controversial topic among our society that it is often brushed over in the school system. One of main reasons people who believe that people should use the bathroom that corresponds to their sex, even if that sex does not correlate to the identifying gender, is that people think of this strictly as a religious reason. People believe that God made you the way they are and that is why transgender people and homosexuals get so much judgment from society. While transgender people feel the exact opposite and only desire love and respect from their peers. If more people understood and took the time to learn from a transgender and why they feel they way they feel the bathroom debate wouldn’t seem that controversial. Knowledge is the best thing our society can have. People make judgments and form opinions before fully knowing all the information. Gaining information and knowledge all starts in schools. With information gained the society can slowly start changing bathrooms to unisex. The more people who are informed the more backing there is for the issue of unisex bathrooms. The more backing the more the government will become aware of the issue. The more awareness causes things to be changed.  

I believe that as we educate people beyond their fears of something, we can create a culture of acceptance. And truly this issue is one rooted in a lack of acceptance. The lack of acceptance of a transgender person being a normal person. One that should be able to use a bathroom without thinking twice about. I believe that as college students, as the future of our society, we hold the power to educate ourselves as well as those around us and create the kind of acceptance in our culture that will make transgender people feel comfortable using the bathroom they feel most comfortable in. There will always be people who disagree on this issue, just as there are people who disagree on every issue that floats to the surface in today’s world, but hopefully we are becoming a country that believes more in listening to the points of both sides of the argument before we jump to one side of the debate and plugging our ears from the everything else we could listen to.
