Saturday was a beautiful day for an outdoor dance performance. The venue was a high-brow dance and cultural center that sits at the bucolic edge of a college town. It’s an area known for weekenders and second-home-owners from New York City.
Before the show, inside the center’s main building, a different sort of dance was taking place. If you went looking for the restrooms, you found yourself in a hallway facing two blank doors. Or rather, doors from which indicators had been removed — each had a small rectangular area of paler wood where (presumably) “Men” and “Women” signs had once been posted. Which to choose?
A white-haired lady in flowing linen and a chunky necklace was standing near me and similarly hesitant. “Well, let’s try one,” she said. She pushed open one of the doors, and I followed — only to see a stall and a urinal. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t want to come out of the stall and see a man doing his business.” I seconded that, and we turned around and went over to the other door.
Inside, we found only women, and only stalls. My new partner in crime said something to the effect of, “Phew, this is better.” One of the other women, who had clearly had a similar adventure, said to us, “I just feel more comfortable going to the bathroom only with women.”
As I exited the shadow ladies’ room, one of the ladies said to me, with a gentle eye roll, “I guess we’re all the same.” I replied, “Whatever happened to ‘Celebrate difference’?”
Just then a trim middle-aged man was approaching the mystery doors and looked at us questioningly. “They don’t want us to know,” I told him. He said, with a touch of weariness, “Oh, they want us to be progressive.” I pointed him to the proper door.
Now, I’d bet my last dollar that this gentleman was a progressive. Just like the ladies I’d spoken to, and probably 98 percent of the audience that afternoon. These little passing encounters at the restrooms left me with a startled sense of things: People don’t like this bathroom business — even people who are surely left of center and more likely to buy into fashionable wokeness.
By now we’ve all been to restaurants with a pair of single-use bathrooms, with twee signs saying “Both” or “Either” or “M/W” with the letters designed to emphasize that one is the other upside down. Fine — it’s one at a time. But where it’s not single use, what if you have, say, a ten-year-old daughter, a girl old enough to go to the restroom on her own, so you send her off, only to find out she’d picked a door and stumbled upon a man, a stranger, at a urinal? The safety issues aren’t nothing. Protecting innocence is not nothing.
Having just observed people sorting themselves into the formerly men-only or women-only spaces — arrangements that used to be innocuous, commonsense, and obvious — I felt a glimmer of hope that maybe not everyone’s gone mad, that gender ideology may not, in the end, reorder the mundane necessities of daily life.
And I’m happy to say the actual dancing was marvelous.