Disclaimer: This is not a conversation about constitutional rights or the legal definition of labels, which is related to this (the social function of identities), but is out of scope and out of my depth.
We do not own most of our labels. We are a mother or a daughter or a teacher or an adult or a celebrity not because of what we identify as, but because of our relationship to others. The labels of mother or daughter or teacher or adult or celebrity are devices for others to identify us. They are descriptors used by third parties, and sometimes second parties, to communicate information about a person or about a relationship. For example, she is a teacher, he is his father, they are adults, he is a murderer, and so on.
One can argue the same for pronouns, that they are linguistics tools for a first person to communicate information to a second person about a third person, information based on what the first person wants to communicate to the second person.
Of course, once these labels begin to mingle with legal definitions and become objective and universal labels instead of subjective descriptors, that’s where the arguments get tricky. How can you call her a teacher if she doesn’t have a teaching degree? Is he his biological father or adoptive father? Are they legally adults or did they just look like adults to you? Was he ever convicted as a murderer?
But let’s not go so far into that world yet, because behind every label is a book length definition depending on your local legislature. Instead, let’s focus on the social function of labels for now.
Let’s of course talk about the elephant in the room, which is transgender access to public bathrooms. Should a person who identifies as a man go to a men’s room or a women’s room?
This is a poorly phrased and loaded binary question. Because all it does is to reveal the belief of the answerer, and says very little about the matter itself. Instead, let’s consider the following.
Are gendered bathrooms a thing because of fundamental differences in the need for bathroom fixtures? Or is it mostly a social practice (e.g. to accommodate people’s beliefs/social preferences to relieve in private and/or away from the other sex)? (Answer: It’s the latter, mostly.) Do you select which bathroom to use based on some innate desire to use a bathroom with certain fixtures? (Answer: Probably not.) Or based on what you perceive society should expect you to do or what you want to signal to society about what they should expect? (Answer: For most cis people, it’s the former.)
Ok. Now that I have typed these things out, I realize how detached from reality these questions are. Because the entire debate about transgender people using bathrooms as they play out in mainstream media is actually much narrower. It is about preventing women and girls from seeing surprise penises. The conflict does not exist to the same degree when a woman or a transman uses a men’s room, because, like women’s sports, women’s bathrooms were created as a safe space for women, away from men, which does not occur in the opposite direction.
Actually, almost all the debates surrounding transgender rights are about transwomen entering the female space. Academics and pundits sometimes like to pretend that it is a philosophical question about constitutional rights, etc., but that is misguided, I think. Because modern laws are expected to be written non-discriminatorily, the legal and philosophical space is often not effective in addressing these debates as they play out in the public space. It is also difficult to fight systemic discrimination with laws that are blind to discriminations. But I digress. This is a thought exercise about societal expectations, so, back to the questions.
Ok, so, if we can agree on the assumption that gendered bathrooms exist because they serve a social function, meaning they exist because people expect them to exist, then, which bathroom should this society expect a person whom they perceive as a man to use? (Answer: The men’s room.) Then, the next thing to ask is this: What information is communicated about one’s gender, in practice, besides visual appearance, among strangers in a public space? (Answer: None.)
This further specify the scenarios. While fundamentally, this debate should be equally relevant to people of any gender using any gendered bathrooms, in practice, the debate is mostly about transwomen who do not visually pass as a woman using a women’s bathroom. Efforts to frame this debate a fundamental issue about the definition of genders and identities are perhaps misguided, because the main thing that matters is to resolve the conflict between the need for a safe space for women in a society that sees a need for such a safe space, and the expectation for transwomen whom some people see as men to enter these safe space reserved for women. Of course, the same struggle exist in every other directions, but the conversations about these issues need to reflect the relative weight of the different scenarios. This applies for the debates regarding Asian Americans and college admission policies. This applies for discriminatory custody laws. The same applies here. The experiences of transwomen and transmen are not the same because they are somehow united by their transgender-ness, and the conversations need to be conscious of that.
But back to the premise of this article, which is about pitching fundamental rights against social practices. Here, I raise another analogy.
Should a non-Muslim woman visiting a country that requires all women to wear hijabs, wear a hijab? If you are visiting, you would probably wear it out of respect for other’s culture and expectations, unless it is a hill you choose to die on. If you live there, you might choose to fight for your right to not wear one. But, if you don’t live there but visit there regularly, say, as frequently as you would visit a bathroom, your degree of determination is probably somewhere in between, depending on the support you get from the natives.
