The Left should relieve itself of some absurd notions about an organic social convention.
It may be one of the great non sequiturs of all time: “Bathrooms are where we feel most vulnerable. No wonder Republicans are obsessed.”
That was the headline that graced New York Times opinion writer Lydia Polgreen’s latest op-ed on Friday morning before the Times thought better of it. That headline was quickly replaced with a modestly more specific but equally tendentious claim: “Ron DeSantis Knows That the Best Place to Humiliate People Is in the Bathroom.”
Polgreen’s argument is predicated on a reading of a series of “draconian” trans-related laws that Governor DeSantis signed this week, one of which requires individuals in government-run buildings to use the bathroom associated with their biological gender. The initiative is, in Polgreen’s estimation, “cruel and absurd” — a “pitiless onslaught against trans bodies that gathers speed with each passing day.” But Polgreen ascends from the nitty-gritty of present-day political fights to prosecute at a philosophical level the case against the GOP’s fixation with where you go to relieve yourself.
Bathrooms have long been porcelain crucibles for our deepest fears and anxieties. One hardly needs to crack open the collected works of Sigmund Freud to understand why they have been the sites of repression and humiliation in service of enforcing hierarchies.
We are exposed and vulnerable in the restroom, Polgreen writes. That’s why reactionaries since time immemorial have used such facilities as tools of “repression and humiliation” — from the civil-rights era to today. Indeed, Polgreen relates her own harrowing experience of being confused for a man in a woman’s restroom in France, in which one of its female users was shocked by the author’s admittedly tomboyish appearance. Polgreen confesses that it was an embarrassing and hurtful event. But the anecdote also undermines the author’s contention that the conventions some Republican lawmakers are seeking to preserve via legislation are engineered from the top down. What she encountered, according to her own estimation of one woman’s reaction to her presence, was an organic social convention and a visceral, emotional response to its (ostensible) violation.
The author Emily Bazelon chronicled something similar in the Times in 2015. She erroneously locates the origins of sex-distinct bathrooms in the Victorian-era invention of the water closet, but sex-segregated spaces have been a convention since men and women occupied separate baths and cubicula in ancient Rome, and probably earlier. But Bazelon also identifies the extent to which women — even self-confessed “bleeding-heart liberal” women — feel vulnerable amid the presence of biological males in settings in which they expose themselves.
The Times has further chronicled why women’s biological needs compel them to have distinct — indeed, better equipped and more expansive — facilities than men. The Times blotter sheets are packed over the years with tales of menacing episodes in women-only spaces and even rare incidents in which women acted violently toward transgender individuals in sex-segregated restrooms.
In Bazelon’s estimation, it’s incumbent on women in these spaces to validate the unrealized desire of transgender women to enjoy the company of other women in sex-segregated spaces. Like Polgreen, she also likens the reaction of women who decline to participate in this exercise to expressions of racial prejudice in the Jim Crow era. But both Bazelon and Polgreen confess in their work that something more elemental and instinctual is at work. It’s worth dwelling on that before we go accusing Republicans of harboring a unique and unrequited obsession with who is occupying the stall next door.