The Trans Bathroom Issue and Trans Locker Room Issue are Two Different Issues

A frank discussion about having your junk out in public

I’ve noticed that politicians often refer to transgender people in bathrooms and transgender people in locker rooms as a single issue. I think that’s because not many political campaigns want to dwell on the fine-grained mechanics of how one takes a dump; honestly, I can only think of one such campaign — Larry Craig’s, and Craig didn’t set out to make the specifics of his loaf-pinching process the centerpiece of his campaign. It’s obviously uncouth to discuss when one’s trouser weasel or lady biscuit might be exposed, why it’s exposed, and how the weasel/biscuit’s presence might be received by polite society. Phrased another way: We’re squicked out by this stuff. And I think that two similar-but-not-identical issues are being fused together largely because no-one wants to say “Wait…whose ballsack was where, specifically?”

So, let’s talk about the ethics of have your naughty bits out in front of God and everybody. Being in a bathroom and being in a locker room are not the same; in one context, I (a man) do not expect to see any dicks, while in the other context, I expect to see more dicks than Freddie Mercury saw in the ‘70s. The situations are different, and I think that the policy prescriptions should be different, too.

First, bathrooms. I hope we can all agree that the goal should be to provide an uneventful bathroom experience for all involved. A memorable bathroom experience is ipso facto a bad one; any story that begins “I was in the bathroom…” ends badly — the punchline is never “and the clog tuned out to be an emerald!” America’s founding documents don’t explicitly say that a hassle-free bathroom experience is a human right, but what does “the pursuit of happiness” mean if not “the right to shit without it being a whole big goddamned thing”?