I’ve had it with cell phones in public restrooms. I nearly lost control at the urinal the other day when a ringtone version of the Marines’ Hymn started blaring next to me. Frantically searching for his phone, my urinal neighbor’s hands were flailing all over the place at a very inopportune moment, another reminder that men were not built to multitask. Then comes the Busy Executive who commandeers a stall as a second office. I encountered one recently who sat on the throne, barking commands into his phone and punctuating them with intestinal sounds only a gastroenterologist could appreciate. The kicker of the month, however, was a young male millennial shooting a selfie in the mirror above a communal sink. There’s a chance I may have accidentally photobombed him. If so, it may be my unauthorized debut on Tinder.
This is all so annoying. Can’t we make public restrooms a cell-phone-free zone? How about having a separate facility for people with electronic devices? It will never happen. It’s just not in the cards. Instead, there is a full court press to bar Gavin Grimm from using the boys’ bathroom at his high school in Gloucester, VA. Gavin never caused the slightest restroom disruption. He just did his business and went back to class, like everyone else.
Yet, there are those in Gloucester who insist that Gavin is not at all like everyone else. You wouldn’t know that from his pictures in the Washington Post. He looks pretty much like a central casting version of a high school boy: short curly hair, chubby cheeks, wire rimmed glasses and a slightly bored expression. All of the commotion is over the fact that Gavin was identified as a girl at birth, an identity that has been forever foreign to him.
According to the Post, Gavin never thought of himself as anything but a boy. He refused to wear dresses and didn’t understand why he couldn’t join his twin brother on the football field. He started transitioning in middle school with the full support of his parents who helped him obtain a legal name change. As a sophomore in 2014, Gavin used the boys’ bathroom at Gloucester High School without incident and with the full blessing of the principal.
Unfortunately, the kid ran smack into the last gasp of a bruised, beaten and frustrated religious right. Adults who don’t know Gavin have taken out after him with a fevered pitch as part of their campaign against transgender rights. As a result, he is spending his senior year banned from the boys’ restroom while the U.S. Supreme Court decides which bathroom he can use.
Sadly, we seem incapable in this county of having a meaningful conversation about human rights without inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on the children forced to serve as pawns in a battle they never asked for. Kids Gavin’s age just want to be who they are; they yearn to fit in and belong. Unfortunately, the historical path to securing a more just and equitable country is one of making unwitting trailblazers out of youngsters like Gavin.
That’s why many schools looked like war zones in the 1960s. Armed federal troops held back segregationists determined to keep black children from entering all-white schools. Ruby Bridges was all of six when she became the first black student in a New Orleans elementary school. I was in the fifth grade then and dealing with my own angst of having just transferred to a new school where I didn’t know anybody. That’s one reason the pictures of little Ruby, school bag in hand, walking up the steps of an all-white school while surrounded by federal marshals, was forever seared into my memory. I can’t begin to imagine the trauma, the fear, the trepidation she must have felt. No child should have to face that kind of abuse. But because Ruby and countless others did, – The Little Rock Nine at Little Rock’s Central High School, Autherine Lucy at the University of Alabama, James Meredith at the University of Mississippi, to name but a few – the Jim Crow notion of “separate but equal” was finally laid to rest.
Or was it? Gavin Grimm was offered a small, single-user toilet, along with the stigma of being the only student in his school prohibited from using a regular bathroom. Separate, we learned more than 50 years ago, is inherently unequal. I totally get that the LGBT movement is moving too fast for some people who aren’t gay or transgender. Folks were just starting to accept the notion that same sex marriage is the law of the land when along came the T’s insisting that they, too are entitled to equal rights under the law. And so, in this volatile summer of 2016, we are fighting over the use of a bathroom, the last stand in the culture wars being waged by those who would like life to go back to the way it was during the days of “Father Knows Best”.
There are those in Gloucester who say it is not natural to change your gender. Of course, the people in New Orleans who tried to keep Ruby out of the whites-only school said it was not natural for the races to mix. There are an estimated 1.4 million people in America who identify with a gender that is opposite of their birth sex. To them, the most unnatural thing in the world is being forced to be something they aren’t.
If your cousin Henry suddenly transitions to Helen, you don’t have to understand everything about her metamorphic journey. It’s okay not to get it right away; change is hard for everyone. Yet, you can still accept Helen’s decision on the basis that it is something she needs to do, something that is essential to her well-being, because that’s exactly what it is. One recent study showed that 41 percent of the transgender population has attempted suicide, compared to 4.6 percent of the general populace. This is about so much more than bathroom use. It’s about each of us having the right to authentically own our identity. It’s also about supporting people in our lives who had the courage to break away from a gender assignment that never fit.
Just in case the Supreme Court is reading this, I would, without the slightest hesitation, share a men’s room with Gavin Grimm any time, as long as he turns his cell phone off at the door.