Bathroom Definition Essay

The disunion of a people in public places isn’t new, as a matter a fact it’s over two hundred years old, and has always been justified as a solution to separating ‘superiors’ white cisgender men from the people deemed ‘inferior’ by them. In the Jim Crow era, African Americans had to use separate water fountains, lunch counters, and bathrooms than whites in Southern states. The reason for this was, according to journalist Katy Steinmetz, because many white southerners believed that African Americans were not clean or worthy of releasing bodily fluids in the same room as them, and it wasn’t until almost ninety years later that racial segregation was finally (and rightfully abolished) (“Everything You Need to Know About...”). Gender-separate bathroom …show more content…
To reiterate, public spaces have always been an issue for minorities, and even though African Americans and women now (legally) have equal rights, the public bathroom still stands as a bold symbol of discrimination with its sexist roots, and is a serious issue for trans* and gender nonconforming people today. The gender-separate bathroom stands as a symbol as a not-as-equal-as-it-should-be nation, and emphasizes, according to Matthew Kopas “a space in which the dominant binary conceptualization of gender is made more concrete than perhaps anywhere else in society” (3). Oddly enough, gender-separation is not a topic broached as one of gender injustice, but purely LBGTQIA, (specifically as a trans* and gender nonconforming) issue. Part of this is because cisgender men and cisgender women do not face the fear, harassment, and violence at the extreme rate that trans*, and gender nonconforming do on daily basis. It is both fascinating and troubling that it took the amount of time, and struggle, from the LBGTQIAD community to bring bathroom gender-separation to the