It is said that by calling on schools to let transgender students use bathrooms or locker rooms that match their gender identity, the Obama administration’s “bathroom directive” will endanger the privacy and safety of women and children in bathrooms, locker rooms, dressing rooms and other intimate places. I believe that the very attitudes behind the anti-bathroom-directive movement amplify that danger.

At age 71, looking back over my life, I perceive an intensification of those attitudes in the U.S. and in contrast with much of Europe. I attended an international solar architecture conference in the eastern U.S. in the late 1970s, in which attendees were housed in a unisex dorm and shared unisex bathrooms – and it was no big deal.

The issue here is a social context where people are nude only to have sex. Nudity and arousal become synonymous. Internet pornography commercializes this, showing nudist beaches populated with handsome young men and women playing and engaging in public sex.

The actual beaches include babies, children, teens and elders, some handsome, some skinny, some overweight. In nudist situations I’ve experienced, it is an unspoken ethic that voyeurism and public sexual behaviors are not appropriate. While an occasional erection is normal and expected, Mother Nature visibly “flags” violators, who are shunned. Sightseeing men wearing pants are asked to leave.

A core ethic is respect for other people, including in their varied and visible bodies and sexuality. Children experiencing this are largely spared the ills of sexualized commercial beauty norms, distorted body perceptions, anorexia, bulimia, etc.

Developed respect for the variability and diversity of persons and their bodies extends naturally to bathroom behaviors. Real problems in bathrooms are aggravated by progressive loss of that experience.

I do not expect any future utopia where those problems will go away, but I encourage people to think in ways that don’t make the problems worse.

Joseph Seale

Gorham

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