I like when I watch old movies and someone uses “gay” to mean joyful.

My alma mater is thinking about setting aside some gender-neutral bathrooms in its student center building. The argument put forward is that the traditional, heteronormative, bifurcation of men’s and women’s bathrooms leaves out those who don’t see themselves as fitting into those categories–those who see themselves as transgendered, gay, lesbian, etc.–and puts them in danger.

(Edit: it all started with this op-ed by the paper’s editorial board.)

An opinion column argues that this proposal is politically-correctness taken too far and (awesomely) warns that Pomona is perilously close to going overboard, as have institutions like Wesleyan and Oberlin.

Another opinion column responds to the suggestion that this is just “too P.C.,” noting that this is a serious matter for trandgendered and people who identify as otherwise outside the traditional view of gender–a personal safety issue.

There’s a lot of overblown invective on both sides here–keep an eye out for references to nazis and accessories to murder–but I do think this is an interesting issue and there’s merit to each perspective.

What’s my opinion? Well, there’s good moral reason behind trying to accommodate every member of the community, including those who don’t fit into the simple categories that serve the majority. Finally, bathrooms are gendered for very practical, anatomical reasons, and though that isn’t the whole story it is certainly relevant. It makes more sense to install urinals in a bathroom used by people with male anatomy, and to install more stalls in a bathroom used by people with female anatomy. Those with ambiguous anatomy might be left out, to a degree, but I don’t think that gender-neutral bathrooms will solve the problems raised in this discussion. The proposal asks for multi-stalled handicap-accessible bathrooms in extant facilities, which is as a purely practical matter pretty unreasonable. If the goal is to accommodate a clear minority, why set aside the bathrooms best equipped to serve large numbers of people? As a statement, it’s great, but if I were running the student center I’d be concerned with making sure resources weren’t being wasted in one place when they are needed in another. And as at least one of those pieces mentions, there are gender-neutral restrooms in most, if not all, dorms, so it’s not like the variant-gendered community is being disregarded. Pomona is certainly one of the most open-minded and tolerant colleges in the country, so I understand the concern that this may be political correctness for its own sake. I don’t really think its proponents see it that way, but I do think that at a certain point practicality has to trump principle.

And as for the safety issue, there’s an argument that “gender-variant” people feel uncomfortable or unsafe in gendered restrooms, and there’s a retort that “normatively gendered” people would feel uncomfortable or unsafe in gender-neutral restrooms. And there’s the retort to THAT that if the straight kids would feel uncomfortable sharing a restroom the campus has bigger problems that bathroom gender politics. And I think this last point if crucial, because it leads directly to my general opinion: if your biggest problem were gendered bathrooms in the student center, I’d say you’d be pretty far ahead of the curve in terms of gender awareness on campus. And, more importantly, if your biggest problem in fact IS gendered bathrooms in the student center, maybe the way to deal with it is to concern yourself with the intolerance or ignorance of heteronormative people on campus, rather than the mostly-symbolic gesture of gender-neutral bathrooms. The problem, after all, is in perception and attitude, and improving that would have a much greater effect in the long run than segregating the “normatively gendered” people from the “gender-variant” people.

Incidentally, here are the words I found in these various pieces that go a long way toward explaining why most people who read or hear about this see it as a liberal-arts joke (which, fundamentally, it’s not):

• gender-neutral
• normatively gendered
• transgender
• heteronormative
• gender-segregated
• gender-variant
• genderqueer
• transexual

I mean, good lord. What a morass. Is it any wonder that the whole discussion comes across to most people as politically-correct academic bullshit? Can we just speak seriously and honestly and skip the gender studies lesson?