Bathroom Doors

“Señores” and “Señioritas.”  “Pointers” and “Setters.” “Ladies” and “Gentlemen.” “Boys” and “Girls.” A stick figure in pants and a stick figure in an A-line dress.

We all, at some point, make our way to public bathrooms, choosing between one door and another, assessing our relationship to the labels on the door. Sometimes the decision between doors is easy, sometimes it is fraught, sometimes it is deadly serious.

When I say “easy,” I mean something more like “familiar.” Cisgendered people leaving a table in a restaurant to pee or wash their hands, or stopping to smoke or relieve themselves in between classes in a school bathroom, may be on automatic pilot when they ponder—if they do—the choice between “Ladies” and “Gentlemen,” or “Boys” and “Girls, ” between what we have all learned to read as the “man” in pants and the “woman” in the A-line dress. When I say “easy” I might mean something more like “privileged,” the privilege in question being an alignment between the gender assigned to one at birth and the gender inscribed on the “correct” bathroom door.

But even for cisgender people, the alignment is imperfect.  Although comfortable with being called a woman, I do not think of myself as a “lady.” Given a choice between “Ladies” and “Gentlemen”, if it were not for the urgencies of bathroom visiting, I might say “neither” or “no thanks.” I might choose to go elsewhere—but where? I am old enough to remember the feminist campaign to replace the phrase “Ladies’ Room” with “Women’s Room.” I can also remember Marilyn French’s novel The Woman’s Room derives its title from this struggle, and can see in my mind’s eye it’s cover, with the problematic phrase crossed out and replaced with the second, more capacious one, one that still replicates a binary (non) choice.

The ubiquitous A-line symbol also raises issues of gender-identification. Although I sometimes wear dresses, I have never, since I was five or six, worn one shaped like a triangle, the one that most frequently signals womanhood through the icon for “woman” in (or should I say “on”) bathrooms here and in Europe. Mostly I cross the threshold into the “correct” bathroom without pausing to consider that if it were all about clothing, I would have more in common with the trousered figure from whom I have turned away.

Mostly, indeed almost always, I enter the “right” bathroom. My few mistakes register as trespass: a feeling of shock, even of shame, as I see a urinal after opening the wrong door in error; the flush of self-satisfaction about what feels like courage when I buck the binary on purpose to make a point about the long line outside the place I belong.

 In my informal long-term study of bathroom doors, which began in graduate school after reading philosopher Jacques Lacan on gender identity, I found (please don’t quote me on this) that the 80’s were probably the historical apex of cutesy bathroom signage. It was in that decade of conflicting dress codes for women, with its huge shoulder pads and huger neck bows, that I ran across the “pointers and setters” pairing when running to the bathroom. Each term featured an image of an indexical dog: one upright and sniffing and the other squatting. These dogs remain in my mind as a perfect example of how easily all kinds of  characteristics, all kinds of identities, get translated into and onto gender—and specifically into binary notions of gender. Despite the ubiquity of female pointers and male setters, the language of breed gets easily rewritten onto the language of gender. This translation from words that have nothing to do with gender, to a strict gender binary is, for many people, shockingly easy to process: confronted with the two breeds, I paused and squinted only for a few seconds before choosing my doggy door, but even that short pause may have been because the eighties were also the decade I refused to wear glasses. The more common “Señor” and “Señiorita” (almost always without diacritical marks) tended to appear in Mexican restaurants with a primarily Anglo clientele; I doubt seriously that anyone, no matter how ignorant of Spanish, misunderstood the binary here, even when the words were not helpfully accompanied by a figure in a sombrero and a figure in a swirly skirt. After all, stereotypes are stereotypes because most people know how to read them, because we all have had a lifetime of practice in decoding them to the point where decoding seems unnecessary.

Pointers and setters may be adorable, paired human stick figures seemingly benign, but as we know today, bathroom doors are serious business. Bathrooms are dangerous, and not simply because so many accidents take place in them, and certainly not because transgender women use them as places to attack “real women.” If we linger for a moment outside the bathroom doors, we might see a transgender person lingering at the door pondering their choices, not because they are unsure where they feel they belong, but because their state has just passed a law forcing them to use a bathroom whose marker no longer represents who they are. Nonbinary bathroom goers might think that both options are equally problematic; unless there is an “all genders” bathroom or, more problematically, a “family” bathroom, they will be forced to choose one door or the other, door number one or door number two, with each number representing a highly policed gender identity.

Bathrooms—and I would argue, primarily their doors—have been central to political debates and to a right-wing agenda of bodily and psychic control.  To take one example close to (my) home, in 2014 Houston passed an ordinance, the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO), that prohibited discrimination in housing and education based on sexual orientation or identity. The following year, right-wing activists placed on the ballot a referendum that would repeal the bill. Their stunningly successful tactic was to refer relentlessly to that bill as the “bathroom bill,” conjuring elaborate scenarios of the sexual assault of those deemed worthy of protection-the only people the referendum recognized as “women.” The invocation of bathrooms allowed activists to recast transgender people who are so often victims of violence into perpetrators of it. Politicians who had never shown any particular interest in violence against women used bathrooms as a site of gender gatekeeping, activating the familiar language of protection and the familiar place of the public bathroom.

The repeal of HERO testified to the cultural power of bathrooms, of bathroom doors, and of everyday physical instantiations of binary gender. In Texas as well as other states, the bathroom most valiantly to be defended is the bathroom in that already rich site of rightwing anxiety—the public school. Fantasies of assault in those bathrooms, often propagated by people who have evidenced no other interest in mitigating violence against women—are accompanied by stories so bizarre as to become merely symptoms of phobia. Opponents of HERO contradicted themselves about the embodiment of their fear, sometimes invoking transwomen, but also, oddly but apparently persuasively, men posing as transwomen.

Another moment of the wacky world of right-wing phobia is the urban—or perhaps suburban—legend perpetuated on social media by, among many others, Senator Ted Cruz, that claims students identifying as cats have asked for and been provided with litter boxes by certain unnamed public-school systems. As with the setters and pointers guarding bathrooms of a restaurant, this story maps gender onto species, as it constructs a slippery slope argument that ends with bestiality and excrement (see same sex marriage, oppositions to).

Of course, bathrooms and their signage have changed since the 1990s. We now have “all-gender bathrooms,” sometimes featuring a ghostly return of the two stick figures, this time, appearing as a couple, or much more rarely as a thrupple.  We have family bathrooms, usually marked by a man with pants, a woman with a dress, and a child, the last usually without clothes of any kind, thus presumably signifying gender possibility if not fluidity. We have bathrooms, and stalls within bathrooms, marked with stick figures in wheelchairs, or less frequently, figures with canes—these are almost always less obviously gendered since it seems disability trumps and is incompatible with gender or sexuality. It may be my imagination, but the word “restroom” seems to appear more often than it used to, perhaps signaling a respite from continual decision-making that cannot be called choice. Some parts of the country, then, have expanded bathroom choice, have opened those doors to more possibilities and accommodations. These accommodations remain flashpoints in a culture war of attrition, as bathroom users become pawns in what can seem like a ridiculously bigger game.

But not perhaps, so ridiculous. Public bathrooms do not just police gender; they construct it. Unlike other everyday items that contribute to binary ideas of gender—clothes, for example, or toys—bathroom doors are literally barriers, the rooms they guard especially heightened sites of vulnerability. They are public expressions of privacy, places entangled with so many of our culture’s ideas about what we call private parts.

In the absence of legislation that fetishes them, bathrooms can be places of (relative) safety. How many of us have retreated to a bathroom to compose ourselves after a disturbing event, have recomposed ourselves at a bathroom mirror? Historically, bathrooms served gay communities as places to meet and to have sex. Historically, women were denied public bathrooms; as late as the nineteenth century the lack of a place to relieve oneself meant that women were less likely to venture out. (We owe the existence of women’s bathrooms to the appearance on the urban scene of department stores, whose women’s “lounges” still feature couches for fainting, at least at the upper end of the scale).

Of course, bathrooms are permeable; a door you choose on the way in can be opened suddenly, violently.  Right-wingers like to imagine, and to make sure we imagine, a man dressed as a woman on the other side of that door. When I listen to my fears I see far more likely intruders: school officials, transphobic bullies, police.  I see people operating out of a fear that gender is not in fact binary, and that conversations about and lived embodiment of broader ideas of gender might literally find a place.

I am still working out the relationship between gender policing and gynophobia. It is not simply that more conservative elements in our culture cannot (and do not want to) imagine a biological man taking on the identity of woman. For me gynophobia is part of the problem of gender designation itself: the idea that there are male bodies and female bodies, male psyches and female psyches. The obsession with bathrooms is of course the flip side of a phobia about the bodily parts that for conservatives are those that constitute sex and sexuality. The protection of cis women from imaginary trans assailants is the flip side of not caring about women’s bodies, their safety and autonomy.