17 thoughts on “Gender-Free Bathrooms”

  1. I can’t imagine this influencing very many students to the point where they would reject a school.

    Back when I was in college, there were only regular unisex communal bathrooms, and unisex dorms. But you’d hardly know that: when I was living in the dorms, every weekend night (and many weekday nights too), female students would stay over in guy’s rooms, and use the communal bathrooms. You’d be in the stall, taking a poop, and you’d look down, and see painted toenails in the stall next to yours. So, I went to college, and I learned that girls fart. It was a shock, but I got over it.

  2. We tell them this will cause trouble, both with people who want to look at persons of the opposite gender in the bathroom, and people who object to persons of the opposite physical gender sharing a restroom. They accuse us of being bigots. I expect they won’t be happy until “normal” gender identity and sexual orientation are commonly regarded as perversions.

    1. I think the answer going forward is architecture. Just make private stalls, problem solved. Retrofitting old bathrooms is more expensive, but not impossible.

      The college bathrooms(*) I mentioned above had a communal shower room with a row of shower heads along a wall. Unlike the toilets, female students didn’t venture there, but because there was no privacy, the guys made lots of jokes about dropping the soap, and there were pranks, and it was just one more thing to put up with. Now that my friends’ kids are going to the same school, they tell me the rows of showerheads are gone, and the students have private stalls (or even private bathrooms.)

      (*) I said “unisex” in my previous comment, but I guess that means the opposite of what I meant: traditional mens’ rooms and womens’ rooms.

      1. I think the answer going forward is architecture.

        Of course it is. Because once you’ve solved the problem of trans-phobia at the college level, by, you know, just putting walls in the right places, you now have the template for solving it all the way down to the grade school level. Yeah, eight-year-olds can be a little persnickety about “germs” and all, but the important thing is to get these troglodytic parents out of the equation. Bobby and Sally can be introduced to the wonderful vibrancy of tomorrowland properly.

        1. It comes down to this: do you like communal institutional bathrooms? I don’t. Do you like stalls that don’t really give privacy, just partial privacy? Does anyone? (Well, other than pervs?)

          We teach kids that doing bathroom stuff is private, and then we send them out in world where doing bathroom stuff is only semi-private, and most people just put up with it, but don’t really like it much. I know women like to go to the bathroom in groups, but I think that’s just for the sink portion, not for the rest. So lets just make bathrooms with more privacy. What’s so radial about that?

          Once bathroom users have privacy, a minor side effect is that gender is no longer an issue.

          1. Well, other than pervs?

            Are you really prepared to define what you mean by “perv”? What would you say to a transgendered individual, with the simple desire to identify as they choose, if they regard your response to their existence (a desire to add walls to all public restrooms) to be demeaning? Why can’t you accept them as they are without engaging in an expensive process of building a bunch of completely unnecessary walls?

            Would you be willing to apologize to them?

            Would you be willing to consider sensitivity training?

          2. Ha ha. But lets face it, some people have wide stances, and I’m not the perv if I don’t want to see their big feet, so to speak.

          3. What would you say to a transgendered individual

            I’d tell them to get professional psychiatric help, if I was going to say anything at all about their condition.

  3. Bob Hope said it best [paraphrasing] “I don’t mind alternate lifestyles. I just don’t want it to be mandatory.”

  4. They’re putting in a gender-confused bathroom in my kid’s elementary school. We’ll have them everywhere soon.

      1. Rand, most parents simply don’t know; I make a point of talking with my children, but most parents are too busy or just don’t bother to ask what’s going on at school. And some support it. The whole administration there, most of the faculty, and at least half the parents have their meters reading “off-scale left.”

    2. Gender-confused is a good term. Which denies their conceit of being more “enlightened”. And of course if you don’t share their “enlightened” viewpoint you must be a throwback bigot, to be coerced into compliance with their world view by whatever means.

      1. What world-view is this? If you don’t live alone, do you close the door when you go to the bathroom in your home? I think most people do, and this conforms to your world-view, right? If every bathroom had stalls with walls that went from floor to ceiling, the stalls would be like bathrooms in people’s homes, and they would conform to your world-view.

          1. That’s right! Why are you weirdos trying to force men to urinate and defecate together in the same room?

Comments are closed.