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Adventures in Gender-Neutral Bathrooms
These are interesting times for people trying to work out their identities on college campuses. If, for instance, you feel neither male nor female, or in the lingo of the times, if you are “gender non-conforming,” “transsexual,” or “gender questioning,” then you may feel the need to have a bathroom specially designated as gender-neutral. That way you do not feel oppressed by the gender labels that society tends to force upon people. It’s a bigger issue than you’d think, as I note over at The College Fix:
Published in GeneralWhat sort of person actually needs (or thinks he needs) such elaborate accommodations wherever he goes? Take, for instance, Ignacio Rivera, a recent guest speaker at the University of Wisconsin who describes himself as “a ‘Two-Spirit, Black-Boricua Taíno, queer performance artist, activist, filmmaker, lecturer and sex educator who prefers the gender neutral pronoun ‘they.’”
If you are the kind of person who insists that others must use the awkward pronoun “they” to refer to you, as a single individual, or if you demand that others refer to you by a made-up words such as “ze”, “sie”, or “ve”, then you also probably believe that others should build special bathrooms wherever you happen to go just so you don’t have to define yourself in terms of the socially-constructed gender binary system, which, of course, you believe has nothing to do at all with the anatomy between your legs.
So, tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars later, a university can provide you with the holy grail of progressive identity politics– a “gender-neutral bathroom.” That’s what the good folks at Columbia University are now doing.
Also, it allows things to be knocked onto the toilet rather than knocked into the toilet.
I once spent a year living in wheelchair-accessible quarters. The huge shower was great. The lidless toilet was a constant source of anxiety. What’s funny is I don’t remember how many things, if any, I had to fish out of the toilet after accidentally knocking them in, I just remember worrying about the possibility.
I once had a cat who delighted in jumping onto the toilet seat. Inevitably, he finally lost his footing and fell in. As he vanished from the room in a blur of wet fur, I collapsed laughing. He never forgave me the lese-majeste.
(Corrected to inevitably. I really can spell. Just not on an Android device.)
I have a cat (seven-months old) who likes my deskside trashcan, so I can’t put trash in it, because she likes to cuddle up in there. Cats!
Cats. And the men who love them.