Gender Neutral

There’s a group at Beloit college is pushing for ‘gender-neutral’ bathrooms. 

“There are people for whom that is a very troubling and unfair burden in terms of always having to identify themselves when they walk through a door to relieve themselves,” said Catherine Orr, who chairs women’s and gender studies at Beloit. “The bathroom becomes a very political space.”

My first thought on this is that it is not a right to not feel uncomfortable.  People feel uncomfortable all of the time for all sorts of reasons. 

My second thought is that if we are going to set rules to prevent people from feeling uncomfortable, shouldn’t we set them to make the fewest people uncomfortable?  I’m willing to bet that there aren’t more than a dozen kids at Beloit college who can’t figure out what gender they are.  As for the rest of the kids, I’m willing to bet that a great number of them would be uncomfortable with gender-neutral bathrooms.  I know that I would have been uncomfortable walking into a bathroom with a bunch of my female classmates and pinching a loaf. 

This is another case of an extremely small minority trying to make the world around them more comfortable at the expense of making everyone else uncomfortable.

UPDATE: HLN has come up with the perfect door label for these gender-neutral bathrooms.