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Public restrooms are the one area of American life where access to a basic universal necessity remains strictly controlled by anatomy. This persistent version of “separate but equal” does more than express a sense of propriety or privacy. It imposes order and implies policing. Bathroom segregation hasn’t always been only about gender. Jim Crow laws required the establishment of separate facilities for whites and blacks. In that era public restrooms doubly anatomized users, maintaining racial boundaries at a most elemental level of existence. In the 1970s, restroom segregation was further politically freighted. Opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment invoked the specter of unisex restrooms and gay marriage as examples of the horrors that would surely come to pass if the constitution was amended to guarantee equal rights for women. So perhaps it was inevitable that the struggle for transgender rights would ultimately land squarely in the restroom.

Old Assumptions Much of the current conflict over bathroom rights still revolves around the pivot of old assumptions: the idea that one ought to relieve oneself in a place allotted to one’s true gender. The main point in dispute is where this truth of gender actually lies. For social conservatives, gender is evident at birth, in the supposedly unambiguous facts of anatomy. End of discussion. For many trans people and their advocates, gender is a no less essential inner truth, albeit one sometimes belied by the outer signs of anatomy. These viewpoints may never be harmonized. But do they need to be for trans people to achieve bathroom justice? Do we, as a society, truly need sex-segregated public restrooms? Halting answers to this question have already been put forward, and some of these solutions are not especially controversial. A version of the unisex toilet — consisting in a single toilet and sink behind a lockable door — is already widely available. Of course, current practices remain a hodgepodge. Some cities prohibit single-occupancy toilets from being gender-assigned, but many states have laws requiring male and female designation if two single-occupancy toilets exist. But single-occupancy toilets won’t serve all needs. High-traffic areas in airports, lecture halls, museums, or stadiums will always require large-scale facilities. Meeting these needs will require us to think about public spaces in new ways and to design built environments in a genuinely progressive style — in a manner that provides greater personal freedoms for everyone while restricting the access of no one. Oaxaca’s anthropological museum at Monte Alban has a large unisex facility that could serve as a model for this type of public space. In place of two separate rooms designated for men and women, the Monte Alban museum bathroom features a large opening that permits a partial view of the restroom from a busy hallway outside. Thus, no one need fear being trapped in an enclosed space with a menacing stranger. Along the long right wall is arrayed a series of secure enclosed stalls for anyone to use. Along the left wall are faucets and mirrors. The design is at once unsegregated, child-friendly, and handicapped accessible. Accommodating a section of urinals behind a partition would also be simple enough. So would equipping each stall with a disposal bin for sanitary napkins. (I cannot remember whether the space included a diaper changing station or two. This, too, would pose no special problem.)