Let’s let a four-year-old remind us why we must stop the recent assaults on transgender and gender nonconforming people’s bathroom access.
The four-year-old’s story was in fact told by writer and performer Ivan Coyote in a TEDx talk given in Vancouver last year. Coyote (who uses “they” pronouns) shares some of their own experience, “first when I was just a little baby tomboy and then later as a masculine-appearing, predominantly estrogen-based organism” and today “as a trans person.” The most touching part of their talk to me, however, is the story Coyote tells of the four-year-old daughter of a friend of theirs. The child is a self-identified tomboy, who was harassed for trying to use the girls’ bathroom, but also told to stay out of the boys’.
It’s a story that should get you, like the child, “mad and sad.” This is a preschooler, already being gender policed. Coyote also shows, however, why single-person, gender-neutral bathrooms would be helpful for a wide variety of people who are not necessarily gender nonconforming or transgender—which is useful to remember in the whole wider discussion of the topic.
Coyote makes some good points about why this type of bathroom is important—but I’ve also seen other solutions, like that of Wayland High School in Massachusetts, which is replacing the current gender-specific bathrooms in the English wing with gender-neutral ones. An article in the Wayland Student Press does not say whether these are single-person or not, but I’m guessing not, if they serve a whole wing. The bathrooms in the other three wings of the academic building will remain gender-specific. That’s not to say these are better than single-person bathrooms—just that there are a variety of solutions based upon location and population served, and I would hope that as a human race we’re creative enough to find them.
