Abstract
For a long time, the non-binary people have been marginalized among other minority groups. This has been linked to the large proportion of people having a sketchy understanding of gender beyond the conventional binary designation.
The gender-neutral toilets are often viewed as an accommodation for the transgender people and other gender non-transforming people. This paper shows that gender-inclusive bathrooms are beneficial to all people in the similar way they are of advantage to non-binary people.
The paper takes the stand that it is necessary for public toilets to be gender neutral for various reasons such as enhancing safety of the non-binary people, reducing waiting times, benefitting women with younger children and carers of the disabled, and ensuring the trans people and other gender-nonconforming people among other benefits. The paper further explores the criticisms aimed at opposing the gender-neutral bathrooms while offering counterarguments.
Even though society has taken strides to enhance the equality of LGBTQ, there are still many things that have not been taken into consideration to improve the daily lives of these individuals (Porta et al. 2017).
The issue of gender non-binaries continues to elicit a heated debate with most concerns having no definite solution. This has been associated with a large proportion of people having a sketchy understanding of gender beyond the conventional binary designation.
In the United States, gender separation is a widespread norm for public bathrooms (Crissman et al. 2020). Every day, most people are likely to use semi-public and public bathrooms in schools, workplaces, and the myriad other places individuals pass through or occupy outside their homes.
It is becoming common for millions of non-gender conforming and transgender people to be bullied, harassed, denied access to public bathrooms, and even beaten up based on the gender printed on the doors (Davis, 2018). To date, transgender and gender-nonconforming people are finding it challenging to access and use public bathrooms. It is because of the disadvantage posed to the transgender people that this article intends to explain why it is beneficial to create gender-neutral bathroom spaces while and how this is of greater benefit to society.
Historically, transgender people have been expected to be conventional to their anatomical sex when it comes to the use of public restrooms (Blumell et al. 2019). In the year 2016, House Bill 2 (HB2) was passed by the republican majority of North Carolina and it was signed into law by Pat McCrory (Bovens & Marcoci, 2020).
This was the first bill in America that addressed what is required of the transgender people when accessing public toilets. According to HB2, all individuals in the United States were required to use the bathroom that corresponded with the sex that is listed in their birth certificates when in various public buildings such as schools (Chaney & Sanchez, 2018). This bill was controversial and discriminatory to the trans people by prompting them to use bathrooms corresponding to their gender identity and not biological sex.
The bill attracted much attention from activists and it was until 30th March 2017 that the newly elected governor of North Carolina signed House 142 into law, and this bill repealed HB2 hence allowing transgender people to use restrooms based on their biological sex and not the sex indicated in their birth certificate (Bovens & Marcoci, 2020).
Nevertheless, this law did not solve the problem of the violence and discrimination that transgender people experience when using sex-segregated restrooms.
Transgender people report frequent discrimination and harassment particularly related to public bathroom use.
“According to the largest survey of the experiences of trans people in the USA to date 59% of respondents sometimes refrained from using a bathroom outside of their home in the previous year” (Bovens & Marcoci, 2020). In a Transgender survey conducted in 2015, “59% of the participants avoided using public toilets in the past year because of the fear of confrontations and other problems they could experience and 32% of the respondents were forced to limit what they ate and drank to avoid the urge of using public restrooms” (James et al. 2016).
This explains why transgender people should be provided with gender-neutral bathrooms to allow them individual acceptance and equality like other people.
Like all people, transgender individuals have fundamental rights to equality, liberty, life, privacy, health, and expression (Eckes, 2017).
