Ash Isaac

Eng 111 section 24

Sarah Hughes

March 25, 2017

Transgender Bathroom Law: A Gender-Neutral Bathroom, in MY House?!

Have you ever gone into a bathroom and been scared that you would be sexually

assaulted or beat up? Well, thats the case that both transgender and cisgender people are

proposing both for and against the bathroom law. What is the bathroom law, you might ask? The

bathroom law is a law that says all people must use the bathroom that corresponds with the sex

on their birth certificate despite their gender identity and expression. The whole issue

surrounding bathrooms and transgender people have been getting bigger and more well-known,

according to The New York Times in Understanding Transgender Access Laws, since 2012

when Cities including Austin, Tex.; Berkeley, Calif.; Philadelphia; Santa Fe, N.M.; and Seattle

were among the first to pass laws requiring single-user all-gender restrooms, following a pattern

emerging at schools and universities. Soon museums, restaurants and even the White House (in

the Eisenhower Executive Office Building) began rebranding restrooms.

The bathroom law causes problems for not only FTM (female to male transgender

people) and MTF (male to female transgender people) but also people who identify as a non-

binary gender (not fitting into the binary of either male or female). People transition from one

gender to another by taking hormones (either testosterone or estrogen) and possibly getting

surgeries. Transgender people can decide to transition as much as they want, take hormones for

as long as they want to and go through with the surgeries they want, says Lisa Fields in their

article What It Means to Be Transgender.

 This law causes problems for people who are passing (looking as if they are cisgender

even though they are transgender) because, for example, lets say a passing FTM transgender

would like to use the restroom. Because of this law, he is unable to use the mens restroom, even

though one would never be able to tell that he is trans, all because his birth certificate says that

he is female. This is a problem because he would go into the womens restroom looking

completely male and causing all the women in there to be uncomfortable. In What its Like to

Live Under North Carolinas Bathroom Law if youre Transgender, Matt Pearce shares another

example of this by saying Ethan Mayo, 18, started his gender transition this year, and he

struggled over the right time to switch bathrooms. He started using the men's room at his

Charlotte, N.C., high school when he started getting more weird looks in the girls' bathroom.

Not to mention, people who are stealth (people who arent openly out about being trans - for

safety or just personal preference), wont be able to use the bathroom that their gender

corresponds with without outing themselves because either their birth certificate or license says

they are another gender.

People want this law in place because they (mainly women) are scared that a MTF will

identify as a female long enough to harass, molest, or rape some girl or woman in a bathroom

or locker room somewhere states Deroy Murdock in Trump Should Dump Obamas

Transgender Shower Decree, or, per Onan Coca in One College Figures Out Why Gender

Neutral Bathrooms are a Bad Idea, Some students argue that reverting to single-sex bathrooms

could somehow make voyeurism even more likely. Its not very hard to be of [another] gender

and sneak into the single-gender washrooms if they know its in the wee hours of the morning, or

if they know that theres only one person in there, who actually might happen to be in the

shower, student Tessa Mahrt-Smith told The Varsity, the schools newspaper. So, I do feel that
while [gendered washrooms] may help, theres also the potential that [this system] could provide

easier targets for the voyeur.

http://www.adasigndepot.com/gender-neutral-bathroom-braille-sign-trans-symbol.html

Works Cited

Coca, Onan. One College Figures Out Why Gender Neutral Bathrooms are a Bad Idea. Eagle

Rising. 2016, eaglerising.com/24833/one-college-figures-out-why-gender-neutral-

bathrooms-are-a-bad-idea/.

Fields, Lisa. What It Means to be Transgender. WebMD, 2015, www.webmd.com/a-to-z-

guides/features/transgender-what-it-means#3.
Murdock, Deroy. Trump Should Dump Obamas Transgender Shower Decree. National

Review, 19 Jan., 2017, www.nationalreview.com/article/443974/obama-bathroom-law-

transgender-decree-no-deliberation-debate.

Pearce, Matt. What its Like to Live Under North Carolinas Bathroom Law if Youre

Transgender. Los Angeles Times, 12 June 2016, www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-north-

carolina-bathrooms-20160601-snap-story.html.

The New York Times, Understanding Transgender Access Laws, The New York Times, 24 Feb.,

2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/us/transgender-bathroom-law.html?_r=1.