Jacqueline Smetak| Writers' Group
If the first time is tragedy, the second time farce, the third time annoying, then the fourth has to be a very bad joke. This past month has been a perfect storm of deja vu. Starting with bathrooms.
We had this discussion in the 1980s when the Equal Rights Amendment was flushed by Phyllis Schlafly and her Eagle Forum, claiming that the ERA would require unisex toilets. State efforts, like Iowa's ERAmet the same fate.
OK, there were other issues, but that one stood out for sheer idiocy. Regardless, it was effective. Seems there's a deep-seated panic over men and women sharing the facilities. In fact, there's a pronounced reluctance for many people to use the restroom designated for the opposite sex even whentheir own is out of order.
This is odd, given that human beings have been using what amounts to unisex facilities since the first humans walked upright. Public baths and toilets, many “gender neutral,"were the norm in ancient Rome. Rome collapsed and public baths and toilets disappeared, because there was no longer the infrastructure or public money to support them. A thousand years later, they reappear in the early- to mid-19th century along with the shift of cottage manufacturing to factories, indoor plumbingand an increased awareness of the connection between dirt and germs and disease. Separate facilities for men and women, which to us are as eternal as the sun setting in the west, were actually in response to the increased presence of women, most of them young and single, in the workforce.
While that detail may explain gender-segregated restrooms, it doesn't explain the current freakout overwomen who used to be men in women's bathrooms. Nor does it explain why men who used to be women in men's bathrooms is nowhere near as alarming to those who are alarmed. Given that transgenderpeople came out of hiding back in the 1890s—they called themselves “androgynes” —and the first person, Christine Jorgensen, to have sex reassignment surgery did so in 1952, it's not as if transsexuals suddenly appeared out of nowhere.
So what's the deal? Could be it's something that has nothing to do with transexuality at all. Perhaps it has something to do with the word “restroom."
That's a throwback to a time when the ladies' loo in posh nightclubs, theaters, stores andrailway stations actually had lounges where women could seclude themselves away from men. And these rooms themselves were a throwback to another time and place.
In former times in areas where polygamy was common, wealthy households had separate quarters for women and their children and servants. Men could not enter. Europeans, dating back to the 17th century, have referred to these quarters as “harem” from the Arabic “haram” meaning “forbidden because sacred."“Haram” also translates as “sin."In Western terms it's “uncanny,""unheimlich,"“un-secret."
But maintaining this ancient taboo is becoming increasingly inconvenient. The strict segregation makes it difficult for adults with small children of the opposite sex —recently a man was sucker punched for bringing his 5-year-old daughter into the men's room with him —and those with disabilities but assistants of the opposite sex. And that's not even touching on the long lines to one while the other remains empty.
The response has been to install “family” restrooms, but perhaps the response should be to re-think this Bronze Age taboo. And also to leave transgenderpeople alone.
Writers' Group memberJacqueline Smetak lives and writes in Lone Tree.
