Men's, Women's, Boys'/Girls', Transgender, Faculty, Executive … Toilets

            It was the mid-1960s, and I was finishing up my undergraduate work and preparing to move out of the Midwest to the wilds of upstate New York. "You'll have to establish credit," my father said to me. "I know you," he went on, "and I'm sure you pay cash for everything." I did pay cash, in part because my father had been in credit clothing when I was a child, and I had a very strong first impression of buying on credit: avoid it. Also, I was a War baby and not cheap but tight: I had a mild horror of waste —"Children in Europe are starving!!" — and considered it a waste of money to pay interest; unless desperate, one saved up for purchases by putting money in a bank account and received interest; you didn't pay interest and give extra money to strangers just because just wanted something now.

            Now my father used to say, "You never listen to me," which was inexact. I always listened to his advice; I just didn't always choose to do what he advised: that's the difference between "advice" and "orders." Establishing credit was good advice, so I opened an account at a local men's clothing shop in Champaign, Illinois — which I'll call "Schumacher's" — and walked in to buy something, charge it, pay off what I owed, and then repeat the process a few times to show the world I could incur modest debts and pay them.

            I entered Schumacher's wearing a cashmere V-neck sweater-vest I'd received as a present and looked around for a crew-neck long-sleeve sweater. Seeing none, I asked the clerk — a guy about my age — if they had any in stock. He looked down in my direction and said unto me, "We at Schumacher's like to think our patrons are two years ahead of fashion, not two years behind. We do not stock crewnecks …. However, I could get you a V-neck such as you're wearing." To which I replied, "You at Schumacher's do not carry goods of the quality of the sweater I am wearing," and left to charge something elsewhere.

            A few months later, of course, the Great Wheel of Fashion turned and crew-necks were again "in" —there are only so many variations on the theme of "sweater" and the essence of fashion is trivial change — and I probably went and charged a V-neck at Schumacher's.

            Anyway, I am used to being out of sync, and in matters more important than clothing fashions.

            For example, American public bathrooms were part of the desegregation battles of "the long 1950s" into the also-long 1960s, but the toilet issue (and much else) had moved into the background during the early 1970s as racial conflicts became more intense and US military adventures in Vietnam continued into our longest war until Afghanistan.

            Not for the religious right, however: bathrooms were big for them in the fight over the Equal Rights Amendment for women, or "the 'Common Toilet Law,'" as they saw it; and without my looking for this particular windmill to joust at, public toilets became important for me. In 1969-70 (or so), I fought small battles over johns at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, and similarly in the early 1970s at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

            At the U of IL, the initial battle was over the few toilets in the massive stacks of the massive main library. The single-toilet, lockable bathrooms in the stacks were gendered "MEN" or "WOMEN," with a single toilet on each level of the stacks, alternating male and female. At the time, there were considerably more male graduate students and faculty than women at the U of I, so toilet-access was more of a problem for men than for women, but finding a relatively close, unoccupied toilet was a unisex hassle that could be easily ameliorated by labeling the toilet unisex, as in "TOILET." The objection from the Lord of the Libraries was that Illini women wanted tampon dispensers in their toilet rooms, and Illini men couldn't handle the presence of tampon dispensers. (Nowadays I'd resolve the issue by having compact dispensers in all unisex TOILETs for [a] tampons and [b] condoms — but that suggestion wouldn't have gone far at ca. 1969.) In today's terms, the library johns raised issues of Gender Politics.

            Later at the University of Illinois, I wanted the remaining Faculty Only bathrooms — most persistently at the Law School it turned out — opened to the general public of women and men, or what in 2016 I'll call the two modal sexual dimorphisms: Most people are "cisgender," identifying socially and culturally with their biological sex (genetically — generally — XX folk and XY, although that can get complicated). The special faculty johns were an enforcer of something like class and definitely a preserver of status in the Great Chain of Academic Being. A U of I professor of law might bring a lawsuit to mandate Black and White together at Old Confederacy urinals, but heaven forfend he — pretty much always he back then — heaven forfend he would have to piss in the company of law students.

            At Miami University, I got into trouble with the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences ("Liberal" was conspicuously absent from the College name) for getting a motion passed at Miami's Student Affairs Council to desegregate Faculty johns, including the Executive Toilets in the Biz School building. In B-School gendering, there were MEN and WOMEN and — at some expense to build and maintain — also FACULTY MEN and FACULTY WOMEN. (I'm not sure B-school administrators urinate or defecate.) I thought the vote of Student Affairs Council relatively minor, but the debate on The Executive Toilet at the B-School made it up to the cabinet of the President of Miami U. The upshot was the signs on the B-school Executive toilets were indeed removed, but the toilets were then locked; the Chosen were issued keys; and the johns were informally re-named "the Erlichs," which I took as a compliment.

            In the building I first worked in at Miami, I later discovered, the toilets were labeled MEN, WOMEN, and, for one toilet, an asexual FACULTY, which I declined to take as a compliment.

            Toilets are serious business with more people than I had thought, and who pisses and shits where and with whom nearby seems almost as important with humans as it is with our furry (and territorial and hierarchical) friends: dogs and cats. Status and power were the crucial things in dealing with faculty johns of the "Executive Toilet" persuasion, and a crucial part of bathrooms (water fountains, swimming pools, schools, jobs, etc.) segregated by race. Something else was going on with racial segregation, however, and that "something else" is a set of fears central to the current argument over which toilets transsexuals should use.

            I'll identify the set with the title of a book by Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966).

            To paraphrase and oversimplify, and ignore Douglas's revising some of her views later in her career — The idea I'll use here is that early men in patriarchal societies had only recently gotten the world organized and categorized in their minds and felt danger in the transgressing of the boundaries of categories. So along with the Great Commandments of loving your neighbor as yourself, and foreigners as if they were neighbors (Leviticus 19.18, 19.33-34), we get the injunction in the Holiness Code, "You shall not let your cattle breed with a different kind; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed; nor shall there come upon you a garment of cloth made of two kinds of stuff" (Leviticus 19.19, RSV). To keep categories firm and, well, categorical, they must be kept pure.  

            Hence, there is a strong philosophical/psychological motivation for purity of categories, especially when it came to sex and gender issues, where male fears of undermined categories were justified: if you're enjoying male privilege in a world that wasn't all that great even for men, anything that undermines the category "man" is a threat to one's status and advantages.

            And so we get the surprisingly strong injunction in Deuteronomy, "A woman shall not wear a man’s garment, nor shall a man put on a woman’s cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD your God" (Deut. 22.5). And along with forbidding screwing the livestock, we get the prohibition, "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination" (Leviticus 18.22).

            Now prohibitions against male homosexuality make sense in terms of a set of pronatalist injunctions and prohibitions — down to forbidding male masturbation in later misreadings of the Onan story (Genesis 38.8-10) — that encourage reproduction by channeling sex into reproductive sex between people married and therefore probably in a relationship stable enough to raise kids. Still, such prohibitions will be much more effective if public policy considerations like encouraging reproduction are reinforced with a deep fear of transgression, including transgression of category boundaries.

            And before you think that such fears died out a couple centuries back with the Enlightenment, consider the various things that scare people in movies like the Alien(s) series and David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986). Part of the creepiness of the Alien in Alien(s) is his/her/its gender complexity, plus its combination of the organic and mechanical; part of the horror of The Fly is the final combination of human, fly, and machine.

            Some people are more upset than others by boundary transgression, and conservative, orthodox folk in the Abrahamic traditions — e.g., in America, fundamentalist Christians — are likely to be very upset by "trans" people whose mere existence undermines man/woman as an absolute category. Now if an anatomically male XY person enters a bathroom with women, or an anatomically female XX person enters a bathroom with men, that "trans" existence is put into action in the world and is going to be difficult to ignore. Combine that with traditional fears of "the rape of our women" and cultural-feminist prioritizing concerns with rape, and we will see a continuing argument on bathroom signage: what signs go on what toilets regulating use by sex and/or gender.

            Personally, I'd like to see some numbers in the transgender debate, and I'd like to see more common sense. "Man" and "Woman," male and female human, are not absolute types, but the "modal phenotype" for human beings is sexual dimorphic: carefully throw a paper airplane at a crowd of human adults and the people you're likely to hit will be "cisgendered" and either men or women. My guess is that there are relatively few transgendered people, and however significant they are philosophically, theologically, ideologically, politically, and symbolically, as a practical matter their legitimate needs can be met pretty easily.

            In 1979, I attended a conference on "Narrative" at the University of Chicago and stayed with my nephew in a university dorm with unisex group bathrooms of the old-fashioned non-luxury variety. There seemed to be a few simple rules including no nudity in the public areas, and "Guys: Put it away and zip up before turning around at the urinals." There also seemed to be no problems.

            I doubt most American will be able to carry off bathroom mixing of sexes and genders with quite the aplomb of U of Chicago students in 1979. Still, if men can get used to invasive music in bathrooms featuring female vocalists, we can share bathrooms with XX people who experience themselves as men — and can even have tampon dispensers for them, preferably next to ubiquitous condom machines. And if the biggest threat to American genetically female women becomes genetically male people who experience themselves as women, then we've taken a large step toward a crime-free America; anyway, if bathroom attacks by males masquerading as females become a problem, then legislators and other authorities — and the women immediately threatened (vigilante style, if necessary, on occasion) — can deal with it.

            With some sensible actions — starting with more unisex signs on washrooms and common sense and common decency — trans folk can get recognition; women can have shorter lines to get to a toilet; and men can finally get bathrooms a little cleaner and a little fancier, like women get at upscale restaurants.

            And this round of The Great Toilet Debate, those of us in faith traditions can recognize that God gave us, not absolute categories, but evolved populations with variation. Old theologians called it God's "plenitude" and celebrated the variety. We, today, can use categories when they're useful, but try more to think statistically — and accommodate variety in our abstract ideologies and in such mundane activities as "hitting the head."

            And since the Trans Movement will force us to deal with bathrooms anyway, let's pass already the ERA amendment to the US Constitution and at least guarantee on paper or parchment equal rights for women, and, in the classic formulation of the amendment, for everybody.

Abortion and Such Yet Again (January 2016)

            Once or twice a year I write on the abortion controversy, usually in a small-city newspaper or a blog post. Sometimes, I'm just pedantically correcting the question, "When does life begin?" That formulation is forgivable since common, but pretty useless: one thing the Bible and biology since the late 19^th century agree on is that life doesn't begin, but began and has been transmitted ever since. So eggs and sperm are alive, as are zygotes, embryos, and fetuses. "There is always a death in an abortion" — and death with each menstruation and miscarriage and millions of deaths (over 100 million in humans) with each ejaculation. The relevant and crucial question is "What dies?" and following from that, "Is that what to be a human person under the law?"

            My most serious agenda (which I'll follow here in a short form) is to demonstrate that the set of issues surrounding abortion is unresolvable in any philosophically respectable way and recommend a messy, intellectually incoherent, vulgarly pragmatic political compromise. E.g., we may be able to get what looked like might follow from Roe v. Wade. Building upon the feeling of many ordinary Americans that early abortions are okay while late ones are not, and that contraception is a good idea, what we could get are strict restrictions on late-term abortions while contraceptive use by women — and fertile girls and men and boys — is encouraged, along with "Plan B's" of various sorts, plus readily available, safe and legal early abortion as needed, with the goal of making the need for any abortions increasingly rare.

            Meanwhile we'll engage in cycles of unresolvable arguments stemming from radically different premises and competing but complexly-related histories. On the one side, are the history of patriarchal oppression and the control of women's bodies, and the resistance to patriarchy and control. On the other side, this:

            If "People are the riches of a nation" and a large and growing population the source of a nation's strength and prosperity, then policies of "pronatalism" (also just called "natalism") are essential, and society and State must act aggressively to encourage live births, with the kids raised to where they can be militarily and economically useful, and ready to produce another generation. One obvious way to this goal: harness sex to reproduction by striving to prevent all sex outside of the reproductive and reproductive in a stable social unit (long-term families) in which the kids can get raised. Under this approach, the sexual "abominations in Leviticus" etc. make sense as do secular-based prohibitions on contraception.

                        (Whether pronatalism is a good idea in a world of over 7 billion people facing another and particularly serious period of climate change and resource depletion — that's something we need to discuss.) 

            If the goal (finis, telos) of sex is reproduction, it is unnatural to engage in sex that is nonreproductive. If Nature is part of God's plan, such unnaturalness is sinful. If the State should get involved in prohibiting unnatural acts and/or various kinds of sin, then laws against contraception make sense (and condoms when and where I was a kid were quite properly legally "SOLD FOR THE PREVENTION OF DISEASE ONLY").

            If a human being is essentially a soul, and if that soul is of infinite value; if that soul enters a zygote at the moment of conception, then anything that destroys a zygote or embryo or fetus is a variety of murder. Worse — maybe infinitely worse — if/since the victims are unbaptized they will join the other unbaptized infants and miscarriages in damnation: perhaps in a Limbo, if that theology comes back into fashion, or in "the easiest room in hell," as in Michael Wigglesworth's teaching-poem, "The Day of Doom" (the Year of the Lord 1662 [the date for the poem, not the Apocalypse]).

            Given the US First Amendment and at least a fair amount of de facto separation of Church and State, we're not going to have much honest debate on the theology of contraception and abortion and the politics that debate implies. Nor are we going to have an open and vigorous debate on population policy and its implications for and involvement in climate change, resource allocation, immigration, who pays for old people, and tax breaks for families. (Some Americans who are all for population control in theory still want tax deductions for their children, even third and fourth and fifth kids.)

            There has been some social progress on these issues, certainly with gay rights and, maybe more relevantly here, condoms: which are now advertised, required in LA-produced up-scale professional pornography, and apparently encouraged in some areas of amateur porn upload sites — uh, or so I have heard. On the other hand, there is the logic of abortion = murder, hence large-scale abortion = mass murder, hence … well, hence bombing an abortion clinic or shooting abortion providers can be admitted as an act of terrorism but then defended as a "lesser evil." On the other side, if one just rejects the whole idea of souls and ensoulment and follows a rigorous materialism, then it becomes fairly easy to justify even a late-term abortion but more difficult to condemn killing older human organisms, especially before or after they can talk rationally or after you've been forced to admit that there may be little justification in nature to put so much value on speech or reason or consciousness that "mind" become a kind of stand-in for "soul."

            I hope Americans will say on the abortion debate and other sex issues, "Screw ideology and intellectual rigor folks! Let's cut a political deal on abortion and sex stuff and move on." As much as Americans are generally anti-intellectual, though, I expect the opposing logics of the abortion debate to continue robust and dangerous — and we'll be cycling back to the topic for the rest of my life.

Dysphemism: Sodomites and Breeders (and Gay Marriage in America)

            If "eutopia" is a good place, a dystopia is a bad one. If "euphemism" is saying things way too delicately — "fallen warrior" as opposed to "dead soldier," "collateral damage" for "killed, wounded, maimed civilians" — dysphemism is saying something overly crudely.

            So in direct language, people die; in euphemism they pass on or, frequently nowadays, just pass; and in dysphemism they might croak. In my years and decades teaching writing, I advised sticking with direct forms most of the time and (usually) to avoid both euphemism and vulgarity — and just about always to avoid derogatives for ethnicities and other human groups. I'll stick with that position, but discuss here an exception.

            As we move from gay marriage into disputing broader issues, it would be well for a few impolite folk to throw into the debate the derogatory term "sodomite" for homosexual and "breeder" for (married, reproducing) hetero. Such words will stop intelligent discussion in its figurative tracks for a bit, but in the long run getting the nasty terms out into the argument would be useful.

            It'll start some fights, but "Sodomites" and "breeders" will aid keeping the conflict clear.

            "Sodomite" comes from the story in the Biblical Book of Genesis of the destruction of the Cities of the Plain of Sodom and Gomorrah (18.17-19.29): by fire and brimstone — directly sent by the Lord — because "the outcry against" them "is great, and their sin is very grave" (18.20). Now what the sin of Sodom (and Gomorrah) is, or sins are, has long been a matter for debate and, in LitCrit terms, narrative elaboration by the early rabbis on down. Still, in moral and political Christian usage — and in old legal statutes — "sodomy" means sexual "sins against nature," excluding masturbation but capable of applying to all non-reproductive sex, but centrally sex acts of a homosexual variety.

            One probable sin of Sodom in the Biblical story is demanding a violation of the laws of courtesy to guests by demand two of them to be gang-raped by "the men of Sodom, young and old — all the people to the last man" (19.4). Now, the guests were angels, but they were gendered male and thought to be men by their host, the Hebrew Lot, and the mob of (male) Sodomites. Also, Lot offers instead his two virgin daughters as preferable to surrendering his male-gendered guests, so, especially in ages that don't rank the obligation of hospitality up there with "Honor father and mother" — and the Jewish morning prayers do so rank it — especially in later ages, the issue here was less rape than indeed, homosexuality.

            And this makes sense since Hebrew Scriptures are important in the great tradition of pronatalism — "Be fruitful and multiply" and all that — and in keeping the classifications of the world in order: emphatically including the binary oppositions (and sometimes complements) of male/female and Israelites/gentiles.

            One way to encourage fruitfulness, strongly, is to forbid all sex except the reproductive, and the Mosaic Torah pretty well does that. And, indeed, later interpreters even got around to including masturbation by tweaking a bit the story of Onan (Genesis 38.8-11), and the Roman Catholic Church came to forbid even heterosexual vaginal sex between a married couple — if they used contraception.

            Homosexual sex was among "The Abominations of Leviticus" because it undermined what were considered proper male/female roles, thereby undermining patriarchy in Israelite society — and because it was seen, with some justice, as popular among the gentiles — and because it wasn't reproductive.

            "Sex is a great mana," as Ursula K. Le Guin says in a major essay, and therefore "there is always a code" for sex in any society. An "immature society" or immature individual psyche will set "great taboos about it. The maturer culture, or psyche, can integrate these taboos or laws into an internal ethical code," with true maturity allowing "great freedom" but forbidding "the treatment of another person as an object" ("Is Gender Necessary?" Language of the Night [1979]: 166).

            Sex is controlled by strong taboos in the Mosaic Torah, and in some ways got even stronger taboos in the more puritanical of the sects that evolved from it. Throwing in a body/soul opposition that would've seemed an Egyptian hang-up to Moses, later sects got sex associated with the corruptible and corrupted mortal body as opposed to the soul: indeed, the body was the prison of the soul and temptress. Sex became something not only to be regulated by taboo but in dire need of justification and redemption.

            "Be fruitful and multiply" — okay. Sex within marriage for reproductive purposes … redeemable (if barely in some views); any other sex was either natural in the sense of brutish or an unnatural act: sodomy.

            "Breeders!" was never thrown about to the extent of "sodomites!" and never got backed up with threats of execution or jail. But if you listened carefully in the right conversations, it was a possible epithet, and, as should now be clear, a kind of complement to "sodomites."

            Gay marriage in the US is more settled as a legal issue than abortion and more settled as a cultural issue than, say, the significance of the US Civil War. The continuing fights over sexuality will be over the larger issues the gay marriage debate has raised.

            Paul the Apostle and much of Christian doctrine following him stressed Christian freedom from Torah, with Torah a word Christians consistently translated "Law." But — but there were a lot of "but's." The ancient equivalent of shrimp wrapped in bacon (Leviticus 11.7-11) coming from a pagan sacrifice, would be okay for a Christian to eat at a baptism feast for a son emphatically left uncircumcised. Or you might be offered to eat blood pudding at an Anglican Church breakfast, even though God forbids blood-eating not just to the children of Abraham but also to all the descendants of Noah — i.e., in Biblical terms, everybody. But homosexuality … maybe not. For some of Paul's long-range spiritual descendants, definitely not.

            A rigorous Calvinist nowadays can learn that homosexual orientation has a large genetic component and find that appropriate: some of the damned majority of humankind can be justly damned for homosexuality programmed into their bodily genes.

            Well, etc.

            In a world of competing tribes and nationalisms, in which "People are the riches of a nation" and numerous people are the strength of a nation, pronatalist policies can make secular, national-interest/national-security sense. In our world of competing tribes and nationalism and over seven billion people, encouraging "breeding" is some place between "problematic" and just a horrible idea — and taboos on homosexuality can be defended only as taboos, only on religious grounds.

            So the first question in the US is the First Amendment one of what extent, if at all, religious taboos are to be incorporated into American law and custom and enforced by the power of the State, and the second question is the other half of the First Amendment as to what accommodations are to be made to people's strongly-held taboos.

            The third question is, if marriage is to be open to all US adults and not centered on "breeders," what options do we want to make for marriage as a society and how much should we continue to bring in the State (and tax codes) in the process?

            Like, okay, some county clerks don't want to grant marriage licenses to sodomites (including female ones). Beyond asking "Should they be required to?" we should start asking whether marriages should be licensed by the State at all or just registered with the State, or maybe something different.

            Perhaps we should go for a situation where some Americans see gays as sodomites and state that outright — and then mind their business and let their sinning fellow citizens of all varieties quietly go to Hell in our own ways (as long as we at worst only annoy, not harm, the neighbors). And given environmental and resources issues to come, the breeders out there should be happy with their life choices but have to start defending all claims to tax breaks and other privileges.

            In those cultural battles, "sodomite!" and "breeder!" may be among the milder terms thrown around.