Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Gender Studies and Sexuality, 2024
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Potties and Prejudices: An Intersectional Legal Battle for Access to Public Bathrooms
Wynn Tashman
ABSTRACT:
Bathrooms have become battlegrounds in the fight over transgender legal rights. Recent years have shown record-breaking legislative efforts across the United States, aimed at targeting gender-affirming access to these places of public accommodation. The societal discourse surrounding these issues has been shrouded in a fog of fears for safety and questions about how society should adapt to the mainstream emergence of expansive gender identities. However, this is not a novel issue. This paper examines the legacy of legal struggles surrounding the right to access public bathrooms across segregated lines of race, disability, and gender identity. An interdisciplinary literature review is provided, drawing upon legal sources of authority and social sciences research to juxtapose the ongoing contemporary legal challenges faced by transgender people alongside similar barriers historically encountered by people with disabilities and people of color, in their respective legal battles for access to public bathrooms. This comparison highlights the intersectional nature of discrimination, revealing how similar legal frameworks have been used to limit or conversely liberate lavatories. Further, a critical examination of the concept of public bathrooms as more than mere physical spaces, but as battlefields where issues of privacy, safety, and identity converge, repeating prejudiced narratives time after time. This paper serves as a call to action for civil rights scholars, activists, and advocates alike to unite and continue the fight for racially desegregated bathrooms, to continue the fight for physically accessible bathrooms, and to today fight for gender-affirming access to public bathrooms, an intersectional legal battle.
keywords: Bathroom; Civil Rights; Intersectional; LGBT; Transgender