Essential Background on Restroom Segregation

[I haven't had time to complete my rant on restroom segregation, but I want to put this background material up where it can be read.]

There has been a lot of outcry from the community that calls itself transsexual about segregated restrooms. 

In order to untangle the philosophical knots, I think we need to understand the original reasons for segregated restrooms.

But, in order to understand that, we need to go back to the reason for having public restrooms in the first place.

Up in the national parks in the Rocky Mountains, if there are any restroom facilities at all, they were built there by humans. Animals don't need them. For a long time, even humans didn't need them. This is true in any nature reserve area on any part of the planet.

When you see an outhouse, it is because the number of humans in a particular area has increased to the point that humans taking a dump in nature becomes a source of pollution and disease. The archetypical issue being bacteria and other stuff from human feces in the groundwater and rivers.

Nature can take care of that, to a certain extent, but when you have too many out camping or whatever, nature tends to get overloaded. 

-- Particularly when people take a diarrhea dump straight on the ground within 50 meters or so of a river or stream, or even properly bury their dump within 1 meters or so. Specifics get messy to calculate with, so when you average several visitors in a week, threshold depending on a variety of considerations, the Park Service personnel will often set up an outhouse.

Urinal-only facilities are generally not provided in the wilderness, because urine is usually clean enough that urinating behind a tree is not a public health problem. 

However, we must notice a difference between males and females for urination.

Men can stand and urinate and maintain a defensive profile, relative to bears and other wild animals.

Women, not so much. It is true that a woman in skirts could hike her skirts up and take care of business without becoming totally defenseless, but most women do not hike in skirts any more. And even hiking up skirts is not nearly as defensible profile as unzipped jeans for men.

Hygiene is also more of a problem for women urinating outdoors, because of the number of layers that they must remove to adequately clear the path of the urinary stream, and because they tend to need to squat to get the stream to move away from themselves. 

Unzipped jeans for women means unzipped and dropped, and that does leave women far more vulnerable while they are relieving themselves. Outhouses are more necessary when the number of women who are not accompanied by companions they can rely on for defense increases.

So, the outhouse protects the visitors and the environment.

Note that outhouses can overflow, and that there are other ways that the protection can fail. But that does not invalidate the concept or the implementation. Having outhouses provides a significantly better result than not having outhouses. 

At larger scale, public restrooms allow larger numbers of people to gather in one place. Consider the mess when soccer stadiums or train stations don't have restrooms.

That is to say, I think the problems are obvious enough I'll leave you to consider them on your own.

Again, public restrooms have never been a one hundred percent foolproof safe and hygienic solution to the problems of handling human waste in public facilities. But lack of public restrooms has historically created terrible problems, and providing them can alleviate such problems to a large degree.

Public restrooms are part of the necessary infrastructure for places where large numbers of humans gather. 

And we should note that the increased presence of women in public places has been a factor in both making public restrooms available and making women's restrooms available. 

We should note here that outdoor public urinals in non-wilderness public places work better for men than for women. The wall can be high enough that passers-by aren't forced to see what they don't want to see, and the men can take care of their business standing up and then move on.  

For women, outdoor public urinals suffer from problems similar to going behind a tree in the wilderness. I'll refer you to my comments on that above. 

In spite of that, they have been tried in some places, where full restrooms cannot be constructed to meet demand -- with predictable results. Women just need a more complete stall for safety and hygiene. 

Remember, that bears are not the worst danger to defenseless women in public places.

So, now we know why we have restrooms, but that begs the question of why we need to provide for people to get together in such large numbers. And I'm going to leave that question begging for the purposes of this post.

At first, we didn't segregate. Single occupancy was expected, and if lines formed people tried to be well behaved about it.

Later, it was found to be efficient to construct stalls, and put urinals up for men.

But having women in the same confined area as men with the pants unbuttoned and down (This was pretty much before zippers for much of the world.) just raises to many possibilities of bad things happening.

No. You can not take a random sample of men and a random sample of women and ask them to relieve themselves in the same area at the same time and not expect that some men will misbehave.

Do some women misbehave in restrooms? Yes. But the odds -- the frequency of it happening is much less. Just the difference of frequency provides women with more options of defense. Also, the statistical strength disparity is not nearly as great when a woman attacks a woman.

Do men misbehave when it's just men? Yes, but, again, the frequency of attacks and the strength disparity are enough different that men have more options against men than women have against men.

So it made sense -- and it still makes sense -- to have segregated facilities for men and women.

Some people raise unisex facilities that are being tried some places as an example that it can be done. This requires individual lockable stalls, meaning that they can't have the more space efficient urinals for men. 

And the stalls themselves do not offer full protection unless they are full floor-to-ceiling and strong enough that a man who has become sexually excited can't break the lock without drawing attention, meaning that stalls that open directly to fully public spaces are not just a matter of efficiency, they are required to actually offer those who use them protection.

Now, about racial segregation -- 

Unfortunately, when white people and people of other races were in the same line, some of the people became disorderly. It's easy to lay blame on the other guys, but arrogant and rebellious whites and arrogant and rebellious blacks could both misbehave quite readily, depending on who there was more of.

So we tended to provide segregated facilities for whites and for people of color in places like train stations, theaters, public schools, etc.

Unfortunately, the facilities for people of color tended to be less of everything than those for whites. 

Ultimately, the segregated facilities became tools of racism, causing more problems than they solved, and, as a part of the general movement to get people to quit being uncivil because of race, were abandoned.

The problems were not fixed. We just started looking for other ways to deal with them. 

[I ran out of time before I could take up school restrooms and the issue of restrooms for trans-claimants, which was why I started this post. But it may be better to take those up separately anyway.]