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Because anti-trans bigots claim that trans people must be kept out of women's spaces for "safety" reasons, I'd like to share some insights from a story I wrote a few years ago about the history of gender-segregated public bathrooms. Thread: https://www.buzzfeed.com/shannonkeating/gender-segregated-bathrooms-have-a-long-ugly-history
Most Americans consider bathrooms divided by gender to be a given born out of anatomical differences, rather than a specific set of decisions made by a select few and governed by (sexist and racist) cultural values. They've only been mandated in the US since the 1920s.
Per law professor Terry S. Kogan: “Policymakers were motivated to enact toilet separation laws aimed at factories as a result of deep social anxieties over women leaving their homes — their appropriate ‘separate sphere’ — to enter the workforce.”
At the same time, burgeoning evolutionary biologists were peddling the theory that women were physically and mentally inferior to men. So it was a collision of Victorian paternalism and junk science that birthed the modern gender-segregated public restroom.
As women became more active in various aspects of public life, they had to be fitted into the interstitial spaces of a world that had not been built for them. Male architects/city planners began to create special "women's spaces" so they wouldn't be fully integrated into society.
In the early 1900s there were separate spaces for women created in everything from railroad cars to department stores to post offices. Public libraries had them too, since some men were concerned that women would be “disruptive to the concentration of serious readers."
Of course, these "safe spaces" existed only for white and more well-off women. And public restrooms were segregated by race as well as gender because of racist & unfounded fears of black men assaulting white women, or black women infesting white women with venereal diseases.
Public restrooms, thanks to the civil rights movement, are no longer race-segregated (though they're still sites of racist violence, particularly for Black trans women). But gender segregation remains, even though—despite what TERFs think—this isn't helping trans OR cis women.
Some political history: As recently as 1992, female U.S. senators did not have their own restroom. There was only a men’s room, reading “Senators Only” (which assumed, of course, that senators could only ever be — and would only ever be — men).
When a restroom for female senators was finally completed in 1993, it had only had 2 stalls; 20 years later, by which time there were 20 women in the Senate, long lines were a daily nuisance. They finally received 2 additional stalls in 2013. 2013!
This isn't only an issue for powerful women. In 1979, a female carpenter’s apprentice in Tennessee worked on a three-acre site with a couple filthy portable toilets often lacking toilet paper. After holding her urine on the job and suffering from a urinary tract infection,
she occasionally used the clean, well-stocked restrooms in the powerhouse (technically off-limits to construction workers, though she said her male co-workers used it all the time) and was fired for doing so. She filed a complaint with the EEOC & won.
Even men’s and women’s restrooms that are similarly clean, similarly accessible, and equipped with the same number of stalls are not necessarily equal. "Potty parity" laws for new buildings in cities like NYC call for a 2:1 ratio of women's to men's restrooms.
(Brief digression: Hollywood’s depiction of the bathroom strongly reveals & informs our cultural anxieties around gender, bodily shame, abjection, disease, and sexual deviance. Think Pretty in Pink, Psycho, The Shining, Fame, Nightmare on Elm St, etc etc)
Just as the ERA lost footing in the '70s due to counterprotests claiming that banning gender discrimination would enable sexual predators, today's anti-trans panic is driven by insisting that gender-neutral bathrooms would give (queer/trans) aggressors free rein to prey on girls.
After a century that ended in a bunch of potty parity laws, cis women are less inconvenienced but aren't any closer to achieving a standard of public safety—to say nothing of trans/gnc people, who are smeared as aggressors even as they're often the victims of bathroom violence.
Joel Sanders, a professor of architecture at Yale University: “The more people in a bathroom, the *safer* it is. It’s a self-monitoring space ... If we’re really going to transform society, we need to create public spaces that encourage people to mix." Unisex stalls for all!
TERFs who claim that cis women today need to be "protected" from trans people are merely continuing the work of men 100+ years ago, who cordoned off white women into their own spaces because of racism & Victorian paternalism. They suck and are wrong. The end!
