Brian Barnett is a psychiatrist in Cleveland, Ohio. He is sub-specialty trained in addiction psychiatry and is currently completing a fellowship in forensic psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University. Follow him on Twitter @BrianBarnettMD.
I don’t give a great deal of thought to which bathroom I’m going to use when I’m out in public. I look for the word “men” or a male symbol on the door and head on in to do my business. Like everyone else, I’ve got plenty in my life that I could better spend my time thinking about than bathroom selection. And I don’t need to think about it, because I fit neatly into the binary system our society has created to describe gender; I was born anatomically male, and that’s my gender identity, too.
But many transgender people spend a lot of time thinking about bathrooms and give serious consideration to which set of toilets they are going to use each time they need one. It’s a game of bathroom calculus: Should they go in the room designated for the gender they know themselves to be, or should they go in the one designated for the gender that other people say they are? Either decision risks harassment and violence.
Transgender bathroom selection has been a big part of our national consciousness in recent years. In March 2016, North Carolina passed the first state law in the U.S. explicitly limiting transgender bathroom access. The law required that people use the public bathroom corresponding to the sex listed on their birth certificate. The law was finally repealed a year later, a small piece of progress in the shadow of a larger setback ― the Trump administration’s rescindment of federal rules allowing transgender people to use bathrooms consistent with their gender identity. More recently, a transgender girl named Maddie Rose in Oklahoma was the target of threats from parents and adults on Facebook after using a girl’s bathroom on the first day of school. She and her family are now planning to move with the help of a GoFundMe campaign that has already raised more than $50,000.
Several states continue to consider bills restricting bathroom access based on biological sex, though none have yet passed. In the meantime, transgender people are still having to waste time and lose sleep over which bathroom they’ll spend at most a couple of minutes in. The impact this worry has on their lives is profound. A survey of nearly 28,000 transgender participants revealed 59 percent avoided using a public restroom at least once in the previous year due to confrontation concerns. Read more via HuffPo
The Transgender Bathroom Debate at the Intersection of Politics, Law, Ethics, and Science
Brian S. Barnett, Ariana E. Nesbit, Renée M. Sorrentino
Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law Online Jun 2018, 46 (2) 232-241; DOI:10.29158/JAAPL.003761-18
Abstract
The debate over whether transgender individuals should be allowed to use the public restrooms (including locker rooms and changing rooms) that correspond to their currently expressed gender rather than their biological sex has been of recent interest nationally. The first state law addressing transgender access to restrooms was in North Carolina in 2016. This law prohibited transgender individuals from using the restroom that corresponded to their gender. The terms used in the bill and other legal documents caused it to be referred to as the “bathroom bill.” Shortly thereafter, such bills were proposed in many states. Proponents of the bills identify the need to protect public safety by mandating that individuals use the facility that corresponds to their biological sex. Opponents describe such bills as discriminatory. The debate about these bills incorporates ethics-related, legal, and biological arguments. In this commentary, we review the history of such bills in the United States as well as the ethics-related, legal, and evidence-based arguments raised in the debate.