The Bathroom That Ends the World

How a Single Gender-Neutral Bathroom Revealed the Gentleness Hidden Behind All Their Fear

Our new church building has a gender-neutral washroom, and before we opened the doors, we held our breath. Would people accept it? Would they understand?

In many ways, this single room represents everything certain politicians claim to fear most: gender boundaries dissolving, children exposed to "confusion," traditional values under siege. Here, in one modest space with sinks and stalls, we've apparently built the apocalypse they've been warning about—a place where the rigid categories that once seemed natural and eternal simply... don't matter.

And you know what? They're right to be afraid. Not because our bathroom poses any actual danger, but because it reveals how unnecessary their fortress walls really are.

The Curb Cut Effect in Action

You walk into the bathroom to find a row of sinks facing a row of stalls—simple, clean, functional. We designed it for our trans members, but here's the thing about what disability advocates call the "curb cut effect": accommodations built for one community's specific needs often end up serving everyone better. Just as sidewalk curb cuts—originally mandated for wheelchair users—now help parents with strollers, delivery workers with dollies, and travelers with rolling luggage, our gender-neutral bathroom has become a space of unexpected care and grace for our entire congregation.

A few months ago, I heard a child crying inside the washroom. In the old world of gendered bathrooms, I might have hesitated—am I allowed in there? Will someone question my presence? But I walked straight to the sink area without a second thought and found a parent with their daughter, who'd scraped her knee. I could help immediately, fetch a bandaid, be present for a small crisis without navigating the invisible walls of gender policing.

Later, I watched a congregation member accompany her husband, who's navigating dementia, giving him the dignity of support without the awkwardness of explaining why she's crossing into "men's" space. Parents don't have to choose which child gets to come with them or leave one waiting outside.

These moments reveal how acts of supposed boundary-crossing expose the pain caused by the boundaries themselves, rather than proving their necessity.

Bathroom Surface’s

In the last year, regressive political forces have deliberately turned bathrooms into battlegrounds, using strategic fear-mongering and trans panic as a wedge issue to mobilize their base. They have rushed to pass laws forcing people to use bathrooms "according to biological sex"—a requirement that appeals to a certain common sense experience, until you try to figure out how it would actually work.

In practice, these laws weaponize what gender theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton calls "surface-reading"—the assumption that we can know someone's entire identity from "external genitals, skin color, clothes. These are surface matters and they mean the world to us—with a world of consequence."

No one has been more forceful in promoting these bathroom bills than Representative Nancy Mace. Yet this January, she and Representative Lauren Boebert confronted a cisgender woman in the Capitol restroom, mistaking her for transgender Representative Sarah McBride. Boebert burst out complaining to security about "a guy" in the bathroom, then returned with Mace before realizing their error and apologizing.

I remember, when I was growing up, my sister came back from summer camp at seven years old with the practical short haircut she preferred. She was an active kid who didn’t want hair getting in the way. A camp counselor, looking at her cropped hair, decided she couldn't possibly be a girl and told her she wasn't allowed to have a girl as her bathroom buddy—the camp's safety system where children always went to the restroom in pairs. My sister, confused and humiliated, tried to prove her girlhood to an adult who had decided her haircut disqualified her from her own identity. She refused to get a short haircut for years after the incident.

Incidents like these expose a fundamental question: if we can't reliably read someone's gender from their appearance—even when we're actively looking for it—how can we possibly enforce bathroom access "according to biological sex"?

The phrase "biological sex" feels intuitive to many, but consult an actual biologist and they'll tell you about the complexity of our sexed bodies. As Stockton notes, even at birth we have "five layers of sex" that "do not always agree with each other": chromosomal sex, fetal gonadal sex, fetal hormonal sex, internal reproductive anatomy, and external genitalia. Consult intersex people—numbering roughly 1 in 2,000—and they'll share experiences of bodies that don't match binary expectations. Add in the countless ways we perform and resist gender categories through clothing, gesture, and presentation, and the impossibility of surface-reading becomes clear.

Surface Police

This is the violence of surface-reading in action. What these bathroom bills actually accomplish is turning everyone into gender police, putting targets on anyone who doesn't perform their assigned role perfectly enough. Your neighbor with short hair, your sister who wears work boots, your daughter who's tall for her age, your seven-year-old with a summer buzz cut—any of them could find themselves questioned by the same authorities who mistake cisgender congresswomen for transgender ones.

What does "looking like a woman" even mean when a practical haircut can disqualify a child from basic dignity? What does "looking like a girl" mean when trained politicians can't distinguish between cisgender and transgender women in real time? The cruel irony runs deeper: the very policies meant to "protect" women and children end up surveilling and punishing us all based on arbitrary standards of gender performance that none of us can perfectly meet.

Stockton calls this endless policing "gender fortification"—society's compulsive need to shore up categories that don't actually exist in nature. "We act as if we have to fortify it at every turn," she observes, because the categories are so unstable they require constant reinforcement. Bathrooms become just one more site where we're forced to prove we belong to identities that, as Stockton argues, are "irredeemably strange, ungraspable, out of sync" with the binary boxes we're supposed to occupy.

The surveillance doesn't just affect trans people—it creates a panopticon where we all become subject to inspection. As Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned, such policies inevitably result in "women and girls who are primed for assault because people are gonna want to check their private parts" to determine who belongs where. "All it does is allow these Republicans to go around and bully any woman who isn't wearing a skirt because they think she might not look woman enough."

This surveillance starts young, as my sister learned, and it never really ends. Because as Stockton reminds us, "lived gender fails to conform to normative ideals and expectations, even when it is played quite straight." None of us perfectly embody the impossible standards we're supposed to represent. We're all just trying to navigate a world that demands we prove, again and again, that we belong to categories that were never designed to contain the full complexity of human experience.

The Contradictions Made Flesh

But let’s play out the world they want us to live in:
The law would force a bearded, muscular man—whose masculine appearance embodies exactly what lawmakers claim to fear—into the women's restroom, simply because he was assigned female at birth. This trans man would be compelled by law to enter the very space our culture is being told needs protection from "male intrusion."

These laws create the very chaos they claim to prevent, instead of asking what are the boundaries that actually create safety.

The boundaries that keep us safe in a washroom, are the boundaries of privacy that unite gendered experiences.

The reality is, a well constructed washroom, you should have the privacy of a stall. No matter the gender of who is on the other side of the partition. What actually matters in a bathroom? Privacy for your business, cleanliness, accessibility. One other factor that contributes to a sense of safety in our washroom is the lack of a door to the washroom, you walk in and go around a bend, which means that in an emergency you could be heard for help.

I generally believe the best solution is making single-stall washrooms widely available alongside multi-stall gender-neutral options, knowing there are many different factors that contribute to accessibility and safety for multiple populations.

The Apocalypse They Warned Us About

Meanwhile, our church washroom hums along quietly, hosting the radical act of people simply existing in their bodies without having to prove themselves worthy of basic dignity. It embodies Stockton's vision of "splitting what we see from what we presume"—creating space where surface presentation doesn't automatically trigger assumptions about identity, threat, or belonging.

Here, we can respond to what she calls the "mysterious depths" of human need without first having to decode someone's gender performance. When that child scraped her knee, when that husband needed support with dementia, when congregation members just needed to wash their hands and get on with worship—none of that required gender categories. It required care.

And as Stockton reminds us, "Care holds the promise of exquisite speaking back, collective pushing back, creative giving back." Our bathroom becomes a small act of restoration—not returning to some imagined past, but "addressing the needs" of people "if they would thrive."

Sometimes the most revolutionary thing you can build is a place where people don't have to prove they belong.

Sometimes resistance looks like a row of sinks and stalls where the only thing that matters is that we're all human, all needing the same basic dignities, all deserving the same basic care.

The apocalypse they warned us about? It turns out to be a place where scraped knees get bandaged and confused spouses receive gentle guidance—where the boundaries that seemed so essential dissolve into the simple recognition that we all just need somewhere safe to tend to our most human needs.

Author's Notes

1. This piece owes a deep debt to Kathryn Bond Stockton and her brilliant book Gender(s). Kathryn visited our congregation at Foothills Unitarian Church before we even had our gender-neutral bathrooms, sharing with us a beautiful meditation on the queer divine that planted seeds I'm still discovering.

2. This piece ended up being a bit more academic than I initially expected—I found myself diving deep into gender theory and citing more scholarly sources than usual. One of my goals is to create accessible resources that bridge academic insights with everyday experiences, so I'm genuinely curious: did this work for you as a reader? Did the personal stories and concrete examples help make the theoretical concepts feel relevant and understandable, or did it still feel too dense? I'm always trying to find that sweet spot between intellectual rigor and accessibility, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on whether I hit the mark or if there are ways I could make these ideas even more approachable.

Glossary

Assigned Female/Male at Birth (AFAB/AMAB) - Medical terminology referring to the sex designation given to infants based on external genitalia, often shortened to "assigned female/male at birth."

Binary - The traditional Western classification system that divides gender and sex into only two categories (male/female, man/woman), which doesn't account for the full spectrum of human experience.

Biological Sex - A term politicians use to suggest simple binary categories, though biologists recognize at least five different layers of sex (chromosomal, gonadal, hormonal, internal anatomy, external genitalia) that don't always align with each other.

Cisgender - A person whose gender identity aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth (as opposed to transgender).

Curb Cut Effect - The phenomenon where accommodations designed for one community's specific needs (like wheelchair-accessible curbs) end up benefiting everyone (parents with strollers, travelers with luggage, etc.).

Gender Fortification - Kathryn Bond Stockton's term for society's compulsive need to constantly reinforce gender categories because they're actually unstable and require continuous policing to maintain.

Gender Performance/Gender Performativity - The idea that gender isn't innate but is created through repeated acts, gestures, and presentations that we perform daily, often unconsciously.

Gender Policing - The social enforcement of gender norms through surveillance, questioning, or punishment of those who don't conform to expected gender presentations.

Intersex - People born with reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn't fit typical definitions of male or female bodies, occurring in roughly 1 in 2,000 births.

Normative Ideals - The socially constructed standards of what constitutes "proper" or "normal" gender expression that most people can't perfectly achieve.

Panopticon - Originally a prison design where guards could observe all prisoners without being seen themselves; used here to describe how bathroom laws create a system where everyone becomes subject to potential gender surveillance.

Surface-Reading - The assumption that we can determine someone's complete identity from external appearances like clothing, hair, or perceived physical characteristics—what Stockton calls "surface matters" that "mean the world to us—with a world of consequence."

Trans Man - A person assigned female at birth who identifies and lives as a man.

Trans Panic - A legal and cultural phenomenon where fear or disgust toward transgender people is used to justify discrimination, violence, or exclusionary policies.

Wedge Issue - A political strategy that deliberately creates division on emotionally charged topics to mobilize voter bases and distract from other policy concerns.