The panic over potty politics didn’t start with the transgender issue
We’ve long been obsessed with public toilets
By Tim Townsend
No one loves public bathrooms. Their reputation isn’t great: dirty, smelly, slippery. Most of us try to avoid them, and if that’s not possible, we attempt to get in and out quickly without touching anything.
So, it’s odd that some Americans have worked so hard to defend this unpleasant bit of public real estate. But in more than a dozen states, legislatures are taking up the question of who is allowed into such sacred spaces.
This year, North Carolina became the first state to pass a law that required people to use segregated bathrooms based on the sex written on their birth certificate. The backlash began right away. PayPal canceled plans to build an operations center in the state, which would have created 400 jobs. Bruce Springsteen and Ringo Starr cancelled performances. The NBA said if the law remained intact, it would move next year’s All-Star game from Charlotte.
All over who can pee where.
“It’s a fraught environment,” Harvey Molotch, NYU professor of social and cultural analysis and editor of Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing. “People are conducting extremely private acts in a public space.”
But of course, bodily functions have very little to do with the furor in North Carolina. Like so many issues on the extreme (and loud) political fringes, this one is about fear. “The bathroom is a place where we’re all vulnerable,” Ann Friedman wrote in New York. “We are, quite literally, caught with our pants around our ankles.”
Fear, specifically fear of the “other” invading our space when we’re at our most vulnerable, is an old and well-documented emotion. Public restrooms have remained for decades at the center of battles over class, gender, race, physical disability, and sexual orientation.
Jim Crow laws allowed “Whites Only” restrooms to exist in the South until the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. And it wasn’t until 1990’s Americans with Disabilities Act that public bathrooms had to accommodate those with physical disabilities.
But bathroom battles over gender and sexuality have aroused emotions for decades.
“Restrooms are among the few remaining sex-segregated spaces in the American landscape,” write architecture professors Kathryn H. Anthony and Meghan Dufresne, “and they remain among the more tangible relics of gender discrimination.”
Rome was the first society to use public bathrooms, according to archaeologist Zena Kamash in a chapter of Toilets called, “Exploring Latrine Use in the Roman World.” Bathrooms were communal, “that is, there were no cubicles or screens that provided any privacy to the users who would all be sitting together.”
Public latrines were typically located next to bathhouses in order to use the water supply provided by aqueducts. The only clue that Roman public bathrooms were separated by gender is a painting found on one wall of one latrine in Ostia, Italy. Known as the Sette Sapiente, or seven sages, the men in the painting discuss digestion and the act of elimination. (One says, “The cunning Chilon taught us how to flatulate unnoticed.”) Otherwise, writes Kamash, the evidence is too limited to know anything about Roman privy gender separation.
Centuries later in London, no one thought to build public bathrooms for women because no one really expected women to be in public all that much. When women did venture outside the home, it was usually for a short enough time, that they were expected to just hold it. (Molotch calls this sociological phenomenon the “urinary leash.” ) But in case they couldn’t, Sheila L. Cavanagh writes in Queering Bathrooms, adventuresome London ladies of the 1700s carried around “urinettes” made of glass, leather, or ceramic — essentially portable chamber pots. Urinals for men, however, were conveniently located throughout the city.
“One way of dealing with the issue of women’s elimination was to just not acknowledge that women had a public life,” he said.
Gender scholars call this the “separate-spheres ideology.” In early 19th century America, for example, trains included one car for women — it was always the last car so that if the train crashed, they stood the best chance at survival. When public libraries opened in the mid-1800s, women had separate reading rooms. Hotel lobbies were built to include women’s resting rooms.
But the separate-spheres ideology belied the country’s economic reality. By the 1820s plenty of women were working in factories, and owners scrambled to find a way to provide women with access to toilets, said Terry S. Kogan, a law professor at the University of Utah who’s written about the public bathroom wars. They took special measures to obscure the awkwardness of what women who visited the women’s bathroom were doing in there, even creating special routes from the factory floor to the bathroom so men wouldn’t see women venturing off for a pee.
Technical plumbing manuals written for factories turn out to be precursors for eventual building codes — and later laws — about sex-segregated public bathrooms.
A 1913 manual called Factory Sanitation by sanitary engineer J.J. Cosgrove, was essentially a catalog for plumbing fixtures sold by the Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company of Pittsburgh. But much of Factory Sanitation was a guide on up-to-date factory bathroom design. The language advised factory owners “on how well-planned facilities could enhance employees’ happiness.”
“Moral decency requires that where males and females are employed, separate accommodations shall be provided which, in every sense of the word, will be private,” read the caption below a photo depicting a disgusting factory bathroom. “You would recoil with horror at the thought of your daughter being forced to avail herself of such accommodations. Treat other men’s daughters, then, as you would like them to treat yours.”
Massachusetts was the first state to mandate such public facilities by law, in 1887. An Act to Secure Proper Sanitary Provisions in Factories and Workshops required that “suitable and proper wash-rooms and water-closets shall be provided for females where employed, and the water-closets used by females shall be separate and apart from those used by males.”
By 1920, Kogan writes, 43 states had adopted similar legislation.
The conversation about public bathrooms slowly shifted from a discussion about morality to one about public health. Infrastructure and public works began to reflect the realization that sanitation was crucial to fighting disease. In 1920, Congress established the Women’s Bureau within the US Labor Department, which issued reports about the condition of women’s position in the work force.
One of those, in 1933 called “The Installation and Maintenance of Toilet Facilities in Places of Employment,” said it was necessary “to provide separate toilets for men and women,” and that “it is desirable that the two be remote from one another” — the justification being it was better for women’s bowel movements if their bathrooms were far away from men’s rooms.
As late as 1998, a Occupational Safety & Health Administration memo cited “medical studies” showing “the importance of regular urination, with women generally needing to void more frequently than men.” Failure to void at the necessary woman-rate could lead to serious infections and renal damage, according to OSHA.
Also, if women don’t pee pretty much all the time, they could put the future of the human race at risk: “UTIs during pregnancy have been associated with low birthweight babies, who are at risk for additional health problems compared to normal weight infants.”
The focus on women’s health at the beginning of the 20th century was soon adopted by architects. The plumbing section of the earliest uniform building codes, from the 1920s, stipulated that men and women in public buildings have separate bathrooms.
Most of the codes were reviewed every decade in order to update any technologies that had come along, and the most recent revision still requires that “separate toilet facilities shall be provided for each sex.”
“That’s how the sex separation requirement hid — in the building code — and perpetuated itself through the 20th century,” said Kogan.
Of course, there are no codes or guidelines for architects about how to accommodate transgender people’s public bathroom needs. And the push for regulation has mostly been to maintain the separation by sex.
Kogan believes that in the wake of Obergefell v. Hodges, last year’s Supreme Court’s gay marriage ruling that was a giant loss for the conservative movement, those forces are now arming for “an obvious battle against a group that is historically not in a strong position to defend itself.”
But just as economic forces ushered women, and eventually their bathrooms, into the workplace, commercial clout is offering a supportive hand to the transgender community. Last month, Target responded to the new North Carolina law by announcing that its transgender customers were welcome to use whichever of its bathrooms “corresponds with their gender identity.”
And of course, in a presidential election year, potty politics has to make its way to the campaign trail. Last week, just ahead of a make-or-break primary for Ted Cruz in Indiana, the Texas senator stood on stage next to his two young daughters, dressed in pink.
“Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton both agree that grown men should be allowed to use the little girls’ restroom,” he said.
The crowd, noted The New York Times, “booed heartily.”
