Freedom to Pee

All I want is for my children to be able to go to the bathroom with people of their same gender. Is that too much to ask?

When my boys were a bit younger ... the ages where they feel the need to go to the men's room, but Mama is still a bit uncomfortable having them do so... they walked into the men's room at Costco. I waited outside, always a little nervous about my children going into a restroom on their own. A man walked by me and into the restroom. He swiftly exited, checked the sign, and re-entered. He was back out as quickly as the first time. I looked at him and said, "they're boys - they just have long hair." The reply, "are you sure?" nearly had me on the floor with laughter, but I held myself together. "Yes. They were standing at urinals, weren't they?" Beet red, the man walked into the restroom for the third time. 

Some people want to force women to use men's restrooms and men to use women's bathrooms. They want to deny others access to restrooms that match their genders and won't consider a single-occupant bathroom option for those not comfortable using a restroom with multiple stalls. To me, that's just wrong.

I have friends who are transgender and would no more want them to be required to use facilities that don't match up with their gender than I would want my daughters to be forced to use the men's room or my sons to use the women's room.

Seeing so many arguments about the imagined dangers of allowing transgender people into gender-appropriate restrooms saddens me. Every single one is based on fear. 

But sexual predators will pretend to be transgender and take advantage of the opportunity to use the opposite gender bathroom, right? If someone is set on committing a sex crime, they'll figure out how to do it, regardless of who is allowed into which restroom. Allowing transgender people to use gender-appropriate facilities won't provide any more opportunity than not allowing them to do so.

Should we have separate restrooms for people born with both male and female genitalia? Should we ban parents from bringing their opposite-gendered children into the restroom with them, forcing them to leave their child standing outside the restroom door unattended and at risk? What about colleges with co-ed bathrooms? Should those be banned as well?

I'm not sure how people using the gender-appropriate restroom became such a topic of debate. I now fear for my long-haired children with penises, as this whole debate could now put them at risk of getting harassed in a public restroom. I fear for my children with vaginas, should they once again choose the short haircuts that so often got them mistaken for boys, that they might get kicked out of a women's room as happened to a woman on the news recently. 

Why can't we all just pee without worrying which genitalia are attached to the people who are peeing? Do you have enough interaction with bathroom patrons to really figure out which body parts they do and do not have? Honestly, we should be more worried about the health risks those who don't wash their hands after using the restroom pose than the imagined risks of "inappropriate" genitalia in a bathroom.

Which restroom should the people in the photos in this post use?

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Hint: there are five photos of boys and five containing girls. None are transgender (unless one of them tells me differently).