Columnist Susan Snyder: Pushing potty parity

Monday, March 7, 2005 | 8:13 a.m.

A troubling movement is occurring in some of the nation's bathrooms.

Gender-neutrality is the hot topic on the potty politics frontier, according to a New York Times News Service report.

Transgender people -- whose gender identity and expression differs from the biological gender they were born with -- fear harassment every time they must use a public bathroom that forces them to choose between being male or female.

This situation is especially troubling for those who are undergoing the long transition process of altering their birth genders. They look like one gender on the outside, but, technically, they are of the other gender.

A person who looks like a man but is technically a woman might cause a stir when she first walked into the "ladies' " room. But thankfully, women are afforded stall doors and, well, what goes on behind them is private.

Men's bathrooms (I've heard) are another matter entirely. And I think the challenges here are obvious enough. We need not discuss the differentiations in plumbing. (Pipes and porcelain, you ninnies. The reference was not figurative.)

Still other problems arise for people who are androgynous and feel neither completely male nor female.

So in order to make it all less confusing and more inclusive for everyone, places such as the University of Chicago, Wisconsin's Beloit College and the University of California at Santa Cruz have opened gender-neutral bathrooms, the New York Times says. And activist groups are pushing for more of them.

What makes a bathroom gender-neutral? An absence of urinals and the little white cookie, proponents says. The doors have none of those little skirt- or slacks-wearing figures on the doors.

This last characteristic could be a selling point among those of us suffering with the freckles, big thighs and everything else we were born with.

After all, it would effectively abolish all those cutesy bathroom gender differentiations in restaurants.

Imagine the horror of being a non-horse person who drinks one too many Cokes at dinner and rushes to the bathrooms to find them labeled "Colts" and "Fillies."

This is not the time to have to figure out which little baby horsie I'm supposed to be.

And how refreshing it would be to hit the head in one of Henderson's most popular new chain restaurants and find the bathrooms were no longer labeled "Mens" and "Womens," eliminating the attempt to create atmosphere by poking fun at the perceived Southern dialect.

Still, there is one inherent problem in making all public bathrooms gender-neutral.

Girls don't want to share a bathroom with boys. Actually, we don't like sharing the bathroom with anyone. Other people take too much space in front of the mirror and leave icky stuff around the sink. Our icky stuff is OK. Yours is not.

Gaining widespread acceptance will mean addressing the unanswered questions for those of us whose identity crises revolve around being ordinary.

Whose job is it to put the seat down? What would they put in those machines on the wall?

And would the lines still be long at halftime?