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The New Frontier: Your Kids’ Bathroom
In the Atlantic this month, there was a great piece about the state of education in New York City. I wrote about it last week here. There was an interesting tidbit within the piece about bathrooms,
Within two years, almost every bathroom in the school, from kindergarten through fifth grade, had become gender-neutral. Where signs had once said boys and girls, they now said students. Kids would be conditioned to the new norm at such a young age that they would become the first cohort in history for whom gender had nothing to do with whether they sat or stood to pee. All that biology entailed—curiosity, fear, shame, aggression, pubescence, the thing between the legs—was erased or wished away.
The school didn’t inform parents of this sudden end to an age-old custom, as if there were nothing to discuss. Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day. Girls told their parents mortifying stories of having a boy kick open their stall door. Boys described being afraid to use the urinals. Our son reported that his classmates, without any collective decision, had simply gone back to the old system, regardless of the new signage: Boys were using the former boys’ rooms, girls the former girls’ rooms. This return to the familiar was what politicians call a “commonsense solution.” It was also kind of heartbreaking. As children, they didn’t think to challenge the new adult rules, the new adult ideas of justice. Instead, they found a way around this difficulty that the grown-ups had introduced into their lives. It was a quiet plea to be left alone.
I logged onto Facebook and saw this insanity is spreading. In my former town in New Jersey, a similar outrage is brewing. A post about the school deciding to make every single bathroom “gender-neutral” earned more comments than any other post I remember seeing since we moved there six years ago. Eventually, the school district and principal bent to the outrage they heard from parents and reverted back to the traditional system. Now a petition has been formed “on behalf of the students” to make all the bathrooms back into gender-neutral spaces.
“Why do you care what pronouns people want to be called?” We hear that a lot. The answer is, to quote Erick Erickson, is because we know we will be made to care. They are already making us care before they’ve won the battle. They know it’s a much more uphill climb – forcing Americans to disregard genetics, biology, etc, and they’re not just coming for adults, but our kids.
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This is a terrible terrible turn of events. We will see an epidemic of toxic shock syndrome because young girls won’t have the privacy they need to be comfortable.
If only the unwoke would just leave us alone to complete the construction of paradise.
They’ve always been coming for the kids. The parents just haven’t known it.
“On behalf of the students” drives me nuts. Kids don’t organize petitions. These groups weaponizing and politicizing kids makes me sick.
How about the teachers’ bathrooms? Are they gender neutral, too?
Our society is probably only five years away from just assigning a big trough in an empty room for everybody.
I love how the kids solved their problem by simply reverting back to the traditional use of boys/girls without any grown-ups being involved. That should tell those idiots something!! I cannot imagine why those adults are so unaware of the needs of their own children…I mean the actual needs! In all my years of teaching I’ve never met a single child who was clamoring to go to the “other” bathroom. Au contraire: there was a huge scandal if there was any intrusion of the “other” in the “wrong” bathroom. Children aren’t stupid, but they are pretty shy about personal stuff.
Who is funding this? Where is their money coming from? Under what legal pretext are they filing their suit?
I have a solution to this problem–and it is a problem, or at the very least, a problem in the making.
Have teachers, administrators, building engineers (the maintenance staff), and students all share the same bathrooms in the schools.
The difference between staff and students is a completely arbitrary cultural construct. Teachers are sometimes learners, and learners are sometimes teachers. Hence, the identification of “teachers” and “students” is fluid. We should allow teachers and students to “self-identify,” and there should be no physical barriers among these groups of people at any time for any reason.
Enacting this new policy would allow these formerly segregated groups to fully understand each other’s daily-life problems, such as finding privacy in order to eliminate body waste. Human beings have historically wished for privacy for these actions because it is a moment of acute vulnerability. Well, that’s just an excuse for unnecessary segregation. We will better understand each other if we are all one group.
Perhaps having all of these people share the same bathrooms all day long will enable the students and staff to see and acknowledge the human needs they both have. It will lead to greater sensitivity, tolerance, and understanding. In fact, it would be so helpful to completely merge these two groups that we should get rid of teachers’ desks and teachers’ staff rooms and lounges too.
We are all one. We are all exactly the same. No one has special needs or special status of any kind.
This reminds me of youth sports where the adults don’t keep score. The kids do . . .
In other words, seven-year-olds have more common sense than fully grown liberals.
The chances of that “artwork” actually having been produced by a child? Somewhere close to zero?
Probably doesn’t matter, since there probably aren’t any men on the faculty. A school that thinks that way is probably staffed by radical feminists who have driven off every male adult (except maybe the custodian, and he can just keep to his custodian closet with its floor drain).
There is no way children initiated that petition. Definitely adults using kids as pawns.
To elementary school aged children, children of the opposite (or complementary to us adults) sex has cooties (there may be newer terminology, but the principle still holds), and there is no way you would want to share a bathroom, where the unwanted transfer of cooties is even more likely than anywhere else in school life.
In the course of an earlier discussion about who has access to which bathrooms, one contributor claimed that sex-segregated public bathrooms were a fairly recent development. I suspect that was because until the late 19th century women weren’t much out where a public bathroom would be needed, so there probably was little to no thought given to public bathrooms for women. I do know that in the late 19th century big city department stores offered women clean segregated bathrooms to entice women to stay out shopping longer.
In any event, like so many projects of the “progressives,” the end result is a reduction in civilization and a return to more primitive practices.
“Liberals Hate You and Want to Eat Your Children”
I have that legend on a t-shirt, on a field of Leftist policies to that end, from Abortion, Ivory Ban, Government Schools, Head Start, Elian Gonzalez etc., to AFDC and banning employer IQ tests.
I remember when I was in elementary school that boys and girls used the same single-person bathroom in first and second grade. In third, forth, and fifth grade, each classroom had either a boys or girls bathroom with the students of the opposite sex using the bathroom in the adjacent classroom if they actually needed one. My mother said something about girls bodies getting to be different at that age, although sometimes in rare cases beginning at around ages 8 and 9.
My kindergarten was basically part of an old Army Air Corps base. Being only five years old, the ceiling seemed to be about 20 feet high, but it was probably only 9 to 12 feet high. Our kindergarten teacher marched us down the hall once a day during the half-day session to use the bathroom, although most us probably didn’t need to use it. Those group bathrooms were segregated. The boys all lined up and used what I heard one comedian describe as the man-trough, basically a bathtub group urinal. You could fit almost the entire boy’s section of the class around that thing. I remember one kindergarten boy had a broken arm, and the teacher instructed me to help him if he needed it.
I visited a geek culture store that caterers to a lot of men. Their new store now has two single-person unisex bathrooms.
The first time I remember hearing about real gender-neutral bathrooms was when the show Ally McBeal took off in 1997.
So, just like it was when I was a kid: no masculine role models until 8th grade.
But it’s the 21st Century. I thought there would at least be some drag queens on the staffs by now.
Mozart was pretty good with music . . .
Architecturally I am not certain how the space usage would work in square footage, but unisex toilet/urinal, single person only rooms with exterior multi-use handwashing stations seems like a trend. Women might not appreciate not having a private area to apply make-up. A mirror in the toilet room might solve that problem. But these are sophisticated solutions for adult public use. Kids in grade school don’t need anything this elaborate…seems to me.
Modern plumbing itself is a fairly recent development.
I really like this comment, though the problem is not a lack of common sense among the grown-up Leftists. They know precisely what they are doing. They are pressing with radical indoctrination and further desensitization to the rejection of traditional male and female roles.
I used the men’s faculty restroom today. Another lady was in the ladies room. Both were single use ADA with locks. Works for me.
However, The privacy and security for mixed student restrooms is going to be an expensive retrofit.
We dont need desks, books and supplies at school. We’ve got SJW bathrooms.
I can barely wait to be age appropriately exited from the teaching profession. I’m so disgusted at what makes the cut for our attention, energy, and resources.