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.
