Potty politics has been in the news a lot lately. Maybe it’s time we review the basics.

Between Houston’s Equal Rights Ordinance being defeated and presidential hopeful Ben Carson’s comments on the issue, where transgender people go to the bathroom has become news again. And while it may seem like toilet humor to some, these issues are very real in people’s lives, and they deserve to be treated with some consideration.

Photo Credit: David_Hepburn cc
Photo Credit: David_Hepburn cc

Going to the bathroom is one of those things that everyone does every day. But for trans people it’s often an unsafe experience. Like anyone, trans folks feel awkward when forced to use a bathroom that doesn’t align with their gender identity. But that’s really putting it mildly when you take into account that trans people also face a severe amount of discrimination and harassment when they use their preferred restroom, with one study finding that nine percent of respondents had been physically assaulted.

But the appropriate way to handle these problems is not, as Carson suggested in an interview with Fusion, a separate transgender bathroom.

“It is not fair for them to make everybody else uncomfortable,” Carson said of transgender people. “It’s one of the things that I don’t particularly like about the [LGBT] movement. I think everybody has equal rights, but I’m not sure that anybody should have extra rights—extra rights when it comes to redefining everything for everybody else and imposing your view on everybody else.”

Setting aside that “separate but equal” is a terrible roadmap for any idea involving someone’s civil rights, this plan misunderstands what it means for many folks to be transgender.

Some people in the LGBTQ community identify as a separate gender; you may have heard of folks who identify as “gender nonconforming,” “genderqueer,” or other identities that fall outside the traditional spectrum of male or female. For these communities, the male/female, man/woman dichotomy doesn’t fit them.

But there’s no one trans narrative, and many people under the “trans umbrella” don’t fall into this part of the gender spectrum. For them identity can be certain: As trans advocate and television host Janet Mock has spoken about at length, even with her native Hawaiian culture being accepting of a “third gender” she was always certain of her identity as a woman.  

“When I look back at my childhood, I often say I always knew I was a girl, since the age of three or four; ever since I started cataloguing memories,” said Mock in her memoir “Redefining Realness.” “No one, not my mother, my grandmother, my father, or my siblings, gave me any reason to believe I was anything other than parents’ first-born son, my father’s namesake. But it was my first conviction, the first thing I grew certain of as a young person when I say I always knew I was a girl with such certainty.”  

Carson’s comments, though seemingly keeping in line with the “gender neutral” bathroom option that many universities and employers are providing trans men and women, are wildly off-base when considering the whole scope of the trans community. As Mock has said many times, she has not and does not identify as any sort of “third gender.” She is a woman. And if she’s a woman, why can’t she use the women’s restroom? And why would anyone think to put her in the same bathroom as someone who (may have been classified as female at birth but) identifies as a man?

The justification for barring transgender people from using their bathroom of choice has long been the threat of “public safety,” with many bills that bar transgender people on the basis of genitalia claiming to be preventative against “sexual predators” who would otherwise take advantage of a loophole, be they cisgender (people whose gender identity aligns with the one assigned at birth) or transgender. The thing is, the idea of such violence happening is not only slim it’s nonexistent. There has never been a case of voyeurism occurring in states with legal protections for trans people. As The Advocate noted earlier this year, “There has never been a verifiable reported instance of a trans person harassing a cisgender person, nor have there been any confirmed reports of male predators ‘pretending’ to be transgender to gain access to women’s spaces and commit crimes against them.”

So while it’s never been the case that trans people perpetrate violence when permitted to use their chosen restroom, there is, sadly, plenty of evidence to support the notion that trans men and women are in danger when they do—which is just one reason the misleading campaign against Houston’s Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) was so disappointing. Despite what HERO-detractors would argue, the protections would not allow “men in the women’s room.” It would allow women—cis or trans—to use the bathroom that makes them comfortable, while also providing much-needed protection for them.

Carson hasn’t exactly shown a track-record of looking out for trans civil rights, but whatever attempt this was at a compromise is little more than a flush.