Essay Example: Use of Public Restrooms By Transgender People
📌Category: | LGBTQ+, Social Issues |
📌Words: | 601 |
📌Pages: | 3 |
📌Published: | 03 April 2022 |
According to the largest survey of the experiences of trans people in the USA, 59% of trans people sometimes refrained from using a bathroom outside of their home in the previous year, 32% said they purposefully avoided eating and drinking sometimes so that they wouldn’t have to use public bathrooms, and 8% said they had a urinary tract infection (UTI), kidney infection, or another kidney-related problem in the past year as a result of avoiding restrooms. The separation of people with differences to the “normal human” has been an issue for hundreds of years and while things like racial segregation in bathrooms and separation of bathrooms for people with disabilities are things not seen anymore, gender-separated bathrooms are still extremely prevalent. By being informed about what gender identity is, we can all get to a place of more acceptance and inclusion of people with a gender outside of the binary and be more open-minded about gender-neutral or single-stall bathrooms.
First, people can have a lot of confusion about what the difference is between sex and gender and that can be detrimental to accepting the idea of genderless bathrooms. Planned parenthood describes sex as “a label — male or female — that you’re assigned by a doctor at birth based on the genitals you’re born with and the chromosomes you have.” It then describes gender as “a social and legal status, and set of expectations from society, about behaviors, characteristics, and thoughts.”
Counterclaim: It could be dangerous to cisgender women for trans mtf to use gender-separated spaces like public restrooms because of sexual assault. “We are not some sort of predator. We just want to be able to use the bathroom without getting tardy,” says a 9th-grade student in Saint Paul Public Schools in Massachusetts. Non-cisgender people just want to use the bathroom and if people think a ninth grader should be considered a predator, something is wrong. Personally, my boyfriend is transgender and he has told me he avoids public bathrooms as much as possible for fear of verbal or physical confrontation by cisgender people. If it is more urgent, I usually walk in with him and wait outside of the stall in the men's bathroom to make sure that everything is okay. These are YOUNG PEOPLE fearful of what a random person, quite possibly an adult, might do to them. It is not fair to have queer people live in fear of what might happen to them if someone is queerphobic and aggravated.
Unlike the fears that cisgender people have about sexual assault by a trans person, the fear that transgender people feel while using a public restroom has validating statistics to back it up. There is severe mistreatment of transgender people in public restrooms and in general and it can be detrimental to their mental health. Nearly a quarter of trans people in a 2015 survey of trans people in the U.S. stated they were confronted about or questioned if they were in the right bathroom and one in eight of the participants said they were verbally harassed, physically attacked, and/or sexually assaulted when trying to use the bathroom. This very clearly has a bad effect on mental health as Thirty-nine percent (39%) of respondents were currently experiencing serious psychological distress, which is about eight times the rate in the U.S. population. By having gender-neutral bathrooms, there will be significantly less confrontation because there is no “wrong bathroom” for someone to try and keep people out of. If there are single-stall bathrooms, there should be no confrontation at all because there is only one person per stall.
By seeing the pressure and stress transgender people have to go through just to use the bathroom it is extremely prevalent there needs to be a change to the gender separation of bathrooms. Either single-stall or gender-neutral bathrooms will help effectively prevent the harassment of transgender people in bathrooms making them feel more comfortable and safe.