(Possible Trigger Warnings: Mentions of abuse and assault)

A few days ago, before I had to travel back to Austin to attend university again, some close friends of mine and I got into a heated discussion about whether or not they should get rid of public gender-specific bathrooms. It was basically me and my younger brother against 3 of my friends, with 2 of my friends choosing to stay out of the discussion. My side wanted to get rid of the bathrooms, and the other side was fine with public bathrooms the way they are now. The main arguments for keeping public bathrooms that really stuck with me was that 1) men and women cannot share a bathroom due to biological differences that cannot be ignored, 2) that teenagers would take advantage of the opportunity to have sex if there were gender neutral bathrooms (which was quickly dismissed after I pointed out that currently our bathrooms are separated and a bunch of our past high school classmates still had sex and managed to get pregnant, including another close female friend of ours who we still hang out with occasionally), and 3) that some people just like their privacy when in a bathroom.

However, what really surprised me the most as the discussion went on and me and my brother gave our reasons as to why we believe each of these arguments were invalid, was that I gathered that the prevailing shared belief on their side was that the issue wasn’t as important to them as other problems that have to do with sexism and gender. I was even told by one of my trans friends that I should just “let it go” when I brought up how even the labeling of different bathrooms could be sexist. Now let me tell you, the only thing I hate more than the whole “but men can’t help it because of all the testosterone” argument is when someone tells me that I need to let things go — because whether people choose to see it or not, having separate bathrooms is a big issue to a lot of people.

People continue to forget that public bathrooms were first separated in Ye Olden Times because — you guessed it — classical and institutionalized sexism. I’m talking about how on the evolutionary scale it was widely believed  that white men were considered evolutionary superior and women and black men were considered closest genetically to animals, with black women just one step above orangutangs. As in, not only did men NOT believe that people could be gender queer or that someone could identify as neither/both gender(s) or a third “other” gender, but that women were mentally incapable of doing things like voting or solving mathematical equations (and if they could they were considered exceptions, not the rule). This is the kind of deep-rooted bigoted sexism that makes my older sister tell me I could not ride alone in a car with my gay male friend simply because he was in possession of a penis, that makes my mother tell me I can’t go outside to walk the dog at night without my brother or father accompanying me, that makes the woman standing in front of me in the line for the bathroom at the gay pride parade refuse to use the men’s restroom even though it is the only one available at the moment. It is why trans people are being constantly harassed after they are forced to use gender-specific bathrooms even though it has been proven that single-sex bathrooms lower the risk of assault.

The real reason why people don’t want to share a bathroom is because they are either blinded by the sexism that they are surrounded by or voluntarily choose to remain unaccountable for it. They refuse to believe that if you just took the time to sit down and write down all of the things that are similar between men and women, you would find that those differences seem miniscule in comparison. So I’ll never be as physically strong as a guy — so what? I create long-lasting relationships with men based on what we have in common, on whether or not I understand him and he understands me; NOT on upper body strength or higher testosterone levels or whether he has a penis or not. And neither should anyone else.