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.

PoMo Theories Coming Home to Roost OR, Apologies Due from the Academic Left (28 June 2014)

The aide [Karl Rove] said that guys like me [reporter Ron Suskind] were "in what we call 

the reality-based community," which he defined as people 

 who "believe that solutions emerge 

from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and 

murmured something about enlightenment  principles and empiricism. 

 He cut me off. "That's not the way  the world really works anymore."

 He continued "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. 

And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, 

creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things w

ill sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, w

ill be left to just study what we do." 

(Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush)

All politicians operate within an Orwellian nimbus where words 

don't mean what they normally mean, but Rovism posits that

there is no objective, verifiable reality at all. 

Reality is what you say it is …. 

— Neal Gabler, Los Angeles Times; October 25, 2004

            While we await apologies from Donald Rumsfeld and the Neoconservatives for the increasing mess in Iraq and environs; while we're bemoaning radically skewed unfair income distribution and impossibly-high college costs and an impoverished American public sphere — some time during the next several years, I want to hear an apology or two from some of the "more-Left-than-thou" academics who pushed way too hard on postmodernist themes and identity politics in the latter parts of the 20^th century.

            Identity politics are far more forgivable because, in moderation, they are necessary and need no apology — especially when one's identity group has been consistently fucked over for the last half millennium or so (American Indians, Blacks) or for pretty much all of recorded history (women). Identity politics are inevitable and necessary politics, but effective politics are almost always coalitional, and the practice of effective politics requires never losing sight of that essence of politics, the question Who’s getting what, and from whom?

            Radical cultural feminists changed the focus from the Liberal project of getting an Equal Rights Amendment to issues of rape and cultural/social oppression of women by men. Fair enough, except when the logic of such social/cultural analysis precluded alliances of men and women — it being problematic to be literally or figuratively sleeping with the enemy — and undercut feminist solidarity between White and African-American women, or at least African-American women who remembered when charges of rape, and lynchings for rape, were used to keep in line African-American men.

            The mantra was "Class, Gender, Race" and soon enough "Class, Gender, Race, and Sexual Orientation": except that class issues, nitty-gritty money issues tended to get lost among hot-button cultural issues.

            Side-bar, sort of: I recently attended WisCon, the feminist science fiction conference and found myself in a conference room in Madison, WI, around the corner from the Wisconsin Capitol building where union activists and their allies demonstrated against the attempted and partially successful roll-back of New Deal/Progressive Era protections for workers. And at the WisCon session we were discussing a matter I'd written on: gendering pronouns in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. Pronoun usage has its political importance, as do other technical matters of how we speak and write: those constantly-repeated little things underlie our approach to the world. Still, this was a reminder that while a fair number on the academic Left were debating such issues of gender and race and all, ageing Young Americans for Freedom and rich Right-wing donors were working on winning school board elections and raising up a generation of political candidates and policy wonks. We on the Left were dealing with division of house work and sports team nicknames and such — worthy efforts in themselves — while the Right was quietly working on school curriculums, regulatory law, and the various state and federal tax codes.

            For the feminist projects — where much of the action was on the Left in the late 20^th century — the switch of emphasis from politics, rights, and money to social and cultural issues allowed too much opportunity for the Right, opportunities they took.

            So today we are getting gay marriage, which is a good thing, and will make a number of nice people happy. But as Andrew Sullivan kept reminding readers, gay marriage is basically a conservative issue. In pushing gay marriage (etc.) much of the Left lost sight of looking at marriage and family encouragement in the tax code period, and from there looking at that larger issue of how taxes were being quietly manipulated to reward some and punish others — primarily determined by who can afford lobbyists to write tax law.

            More abstractly, we get to the issue indicated in my headnote quotations.

            Significant portions of the attack on empiricism and scientific method — indeed, the entire belief in facts — has come from the Left. The totalitarian state of Oceania in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is most directly a reflection of Stalinist Russia and the "Orwellian" Party in 1984 is a perversion of tendencies on the Left, including at least twice now, Leftist attacks on the idea of reality external to the human mind. Orwell's O'Brien tells Winston Smith a central "fact" for Winston's re-education, that there are no facts:

"You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. [….]" (3.2.51, O’Brien)

And damn, if some of my colleagues didn't go over to the O'Brien position, not just attacking the idea of objective facts, totally independent data — "The observer is part of the system," that is indeed always and necessarily a fact — but attacking the whole idea of facts in any sense. Moreover, placing this attack in a larger radical critique of Science and scientific method.

            Indeed, there have been some real problems with the world of the post-Enlightenment, and "scientism," and the worship of "hard facts" vs. feelings — especially compassion — is a very bad idea.

            Still, the world is a better place because of the Enlightenment and the various sciences and technology, and wholesale attack on reason and facts and science and the post-Enlightenment worldview paved the way for attacks on Reason from the Right.

            Indeed, recycling the O'Brien philosophy paved the way for Karl Rove and the dismissal of "the reality-based community."

            America and the world are owed a bit of an apology from the Left, but I'll expect it to come about the same time the mea culpa arrives from the Right.

Solidarity For-ev-er! (repeat 2x): E.R.A.! E.R.A.! NOW! (9 Oct. 2014)

            I've recently sent in a contribution for HIV/AIDS research, and, when contacted, I contribute to the local group that helps poor women get breast cancer screenings; and once a year or so I contribute to research on prostate cancer. These are all worthy causes, but aside from using the return-address labels for GMHC and their "Essential Survives to Men, Women, and Families Living with HIV/AIDS" — and aside from what I just wrote (and purchasing [sic] a life-membership in the National Organization for Women) — I haven't done anything more for those causes.

            No ribbons or marches or contacting friends, and when I write, as now, it is to point out that for women in the United States, death by cancer of any sort is less likely than death by heart disease and stroke. Indeed, for White and Black women, heart disease alone — not counting strokes — is the leading cause of death. In 2008, 24.6% of deaths among White women were from heart disease, 21.6% from cancer. In 2008, 24.9% of deaths among Black women were from heart disease, 21.6% from cancer.
            And "HIV Disease" was number 14 out of 15 as cause of death in the US in 2008, ranking behind homicide and tied with congenital malformations.
            Rankings on "Morbidity and Mortality" are more reliable and significant than, say, Newsweek's ranking of colleges and universities, but such grim statistics are only suggestive; and they need to be analyzed in detail. It is significant, for example, that congenital malformations ordinarily kill children and young people 1-24, that homicide is a significant risk primarily for the young and relatively young, and that AIDS kills in the socio-economic prime of life: ages 25-44.
            What I try to stress in my writing and politics are the cold numbers of Morbidity and Mortality tables. And I stress them for the important reason that the sex-related and journalistically "sexy" diseases of breast cancer, prostate cancer, and AIDS are less of a threat than diseases with less powerful political connections like heart disease and "Cerebrovascular Diseases (Stroke)."
            "So attention must be paid" to diseases specific to women and to men gay and straight, and, to American men who are gay: very few men will get breast cancer; no women will get prostate cancer (though there may be something similar); and in the USA — as opposed to Africa — HIV/AIDS has been most importantly a disease among young gay males. And at various times that attention must be drawn by agitation, propaganda, protest, and even disruption: the standard ways political things get done by people not running a country.
            But attention must also be paid to unnewsworthy, "background" threats like heart disease and stroke, and diseases that threaten pretty much everybody: diseases that should inspire causes that can bring together working coalitions of men and women, gay and straight, incandescent White or of color of various sorts.
            Similarly, to get around to my title topic, "for everything there is a time, and a season," as Koheleth saith (Eccl. 3.1), and I think it now a time that my friends (and unfriends) on the Left return to an emphasis on coalitions, and coalitions built around the decorous uniting theme of equality.
            Greater equality of income and, more important, wealth, for a primarily goal, but that will be a tough fight: people with a lot of money are more into Pride than Greed among the deadly sins, and being better off than other people and a whole lot better off — radical inequality — is precisely the point. With a long-term fight over wealth distribution in the background, however, it is time to get to a more immediate, achievable, and too-long-put-off goal: ratification of an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, with the process reinvigorated by a campaign in the 113^thor 114^th Congress.
            Look, if the old hard-radical feminist critique is correct, there is a monolithic structure of (White, European) male privilege of ancient and awesome power, and therefore not much hope for change. For sure, there'd be no reason beyond altruism for any XY and/or male-gendered human beings to do much for women or anyone else below them in the food chain. But there was never "The Man," and men are far from a monolithic group; and a lot of actually-existing guys have a fair sense of fairness and some vague idea that we are far from the top of the food chain and would be better off in a more equal world.
            And greater equality can begin logically and sensibly with the biggest inequality around: patriarchal/sexist exploitation of women. So:

Section 1: Women shall have equal rights in the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
Section 2: Congress and the several States shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
Section 3: This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

            Rape, sexual assault against women, and domestic abuse will remain issues in the United States, but those are crimes and need to be effectively handled as crimes. The cultural contexts in which such crimes are enabled are bigger and more complex problems; I'll note, though, that "The Law is the great teacher" — schoolmaster? — "of the commonwealth" (as someone said), and a fine teacher of the basics is specific expansion of the US Bill of Rights with an ERA for women. If "The Man" still exists in some sense and has problems with the ERA, then he can be shouted down and out-voted by the gals and guys. If some women worry that the second sentence of section 1 might make women susceptible to conscription, and if war-loving men worry that a country that drafts women would be reluctant to go to war …. Well, it may be my privileged off-White, politically straight, and XY-male privilege speaking — or just my souvenir 1-A draft card (Available for [Immediate] Military Service) — but screw 'em. If there's a literal "existential threat" against the USA, then every American from age 18 to 80 should have our names, health status, and brief résumés in the computer, and if we've got needed skills, off we go to defend the Motherland: with one Member of Congress drafted by lottery each week for the duration, and one Senator a month (I'll insist strongly on that last part: drafting members of the Congress).
            Solidarity forever folks; let's return to some old political priorities NOW, if perhaps just for now.