Making bathrooms more “Accommodating” -Emily Bazelon
This article aims more focus on how transgender people are mainly being handled and treated in different places. It also explains how people are not sharing facilities that are targeted to accommodate one side of the sex. We all have this sign inside of ourselves saying that something is wrong when a person of the opposite sex walks into the wrong restroom. This is only arises people to become uneasy when this happens because everyone was taught to use the restroom of their own gender. Many people are against having the opposite sex enter the dominantly opposite sex of the person entering the restroom. Even in cases of transgender are sometimes never an excuse for them.
One crucial issue that we all stumble upon even up til this very day is sex distinction and the ability to cope with it. Transgender people has caused lots of confusion and discomfort for many people. Some of the confusion involves taking showers, sharing gender based bathrooms and associating with them. Schools decided to treat transgender people with the same equal rights that everyone else has. This applies to every part of life except for where these people are going to use the restrooms and locker rooms to change. Accommodation is a term that denotes for hospitality and adaptation. On the other hand, it can also mean to make room for other people whether you like it or not.The word “accommodation” has built up a lot of contradictions between one side and the other. There are two sides where accommodation takes place. One is by the transgender people and the other is everyone else being affected by it.
There are a few distinctions between the men and women restrooms that make it a little frustrating for how it is not entirely equal for both men and women. The lines in the men’s restroom are always moving or rarely seen at all. While on the other side, the line in the women’s restroom seem to grow as time goes by. On the bright side about the women’s restrooms is that they are highly clean and refined. As an extra, women also have “retiring rooms” due to how women are more vulnerable to dizziness and fainting.
Although many people are against sharing the same facilities with the opposite sex, some people prefer to use unisex bathrooms. Unisex bathrooms are open to both sexes and they could also be used because of how men tend to have women physical characteristics or vice versa. An example is that men could have manly boobs and women could have hair in places that men do. All in all, this promotes a little bit more privacy and it comes in favor of the transgender people.
The Transgender Law Center provided society with a resource guide called “Peeing in Peace” that states a couple of strategies to bear the existence of transgender people. The first strategy is called Invisibility where one ignores the other person’s presence. This may seem rude at first but it can avoid disagreements and fights. The second strategy is called Gender Proof. This is where gender can be identified by simply picking out the physical characteristics of a human being.
Overall, this community still struggles with the concept of how transgender people should be put up with. They somehow come up with small solutions to somehow squeeze transgender people in the society successfully but not entirely. There are still conflicts here and there about these issues being presented in public.