Last week at a local bar, I was waiting with a friend in an endless line for the women’s bathroom. There were two separate single-person bathrooms, the only distinction being the signs outside the doors and the urinal added to the men’s. While the line for the women’s was incredibly long, the men’s lay virtually empty, so women naturally began to use both bathrooms.
A male student who had finished was watching the situation, apparently distressed. As I arrived, he asked the woman entering the men’s room what she was doing, to which she replied, “Using the bathroom?” This concept apparently confused him. He condescendingly asked, “Do you have a penis?” When she said, “No,” he told her that she needed to use the girl’s bathroom. While it was ever so kind of this man to educate a group of women in their early 20's about how to enter a bathroom, she ignored his advice.
The conversation didn’t end, and when another friend of mine stepped into the conversation, he called her a “feminist bitch.” Outraged that a fellow student would use such language and aggression, I asked if he was kidding me, to which he responded by calling me a “fucking feminist.”
Reflecting on this the next day, I had a lot of questions: Why does gender socialization differentiate people so much that they can’t use the same bathroom? Why is “feminist” used as a dirty word? And last, but not least, why do people care so much about where other people are going to the bathroom?
Issues of gender presentation and roles have recently come to the national stage as legislation such as North Carolina’s new “Bathroom Bill” have made headlines. This particular bill, stating that one must use the bathroom that corresponds with the biological sex indicated on one’s birth certificate, is an incredible infringement on the human rights of the transgender community. I am in no way attempting to compare my experience as a cisgender woman to the discrimination that the transgender community faces; rather, this occurrence reminded me of themes of gender division.
While this debate occurs nationally, on DePauw’s campus, at least at an administrative level, we don’t seem to be experiencing the same pushback. All of the dorms have single bathrooms. As Hoover Hall is being built, it will include family friendly, single-stalled, gender neutral bathrooms. Senior Hannah Viti has been involved in advocating for these bathrooms to be incorporated in the new building, which will provide accessibility that traditional bathrooms do not. According to Viti, the administration was very cooperative in the inclusion of these bathrooms.
“So it’s really just about pushing people who wouldn't need it themselves just to listen and see the various reasons why these strategic moves of inclusivity are important,” she said.
It interests me that, today, our society has gendered everything to a point where even a basic human necessity requires labeling. I don’t understand the harm in sharing a bathroom with people of various biological identities. We do it in our homes and our dorms all the time. For those of the DePauw population who have been to a fraternity, women often have to walk by men using the urinals to get to the stalls. In a world where our definitions of gender extend to where we privately use the restroom, I think it’s apparent that we have a larger issue at hand. Are our definitions of femininity or masculinity so weak that they are so easily threatened?
If being a “fucking feminist” means questioning gender binaries in our society or simply trying to use an empty bathroom at a crowded bar, then I’m proud to be called a “fucking feminist.”
Betterman is a senior history major from Chicago, Illinois.