My parents were Civil Rights workers. It’s a declarative fact of my childhood that has, without my even realizing it, influenced my entire life. No white person can claim to not be racist — white supremacy built this country on the backs of Black slaves and Indigenous genocide. As a consequence, all white people, even those of us in other marginalized communities, benefit from that reality and the concomitant reality that white supremacy and anti-Blackness still drive this nation, much as some of us doing true anti-racist work are trying to upend that.
Yet some of us, myself among them, are indeed doing anti-racist work, being staunch allies and striving to listen to and not talk through or over Black and Brown people. I was reflecting on my parents’ work recently after a conversation with a friend about Nex Benedict, the nonbinary Indigenous Oklahoma teen who died after being beaten in the girls’ bathroom at their high school.
Nex didn’t belong in that bathroom. Nex knew it and so did the three upper class women who fought Nex in that bathroom over the mere fact of them being there and being transmasculine. In August 2023, Oklahoma’s GOP governor Kevin Stitt signed a repressive anti-LGBTQ+ executive order that erased the identities of nonbinary and trans people in the state.
That executive order applied to schools and state institutions. It stipulates definitions for certain terms, like “man,” “boy,” “woman,” “girl,” “father” and “mother.” The narrow definitions in the so-called “Women’s Bill of Rights” exclude trans and nonbinary people or anyone whose gender does not fit into the binary categories of male or female. The language doesn’t even address individuals with chromosomal variations, like intersex people.
In September 2023, Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters proposed an emergency rule prohibiting school districts and local school sites from altering any sex or gender designations in any prior year student records without authorization from the State Board of Education.
This is why Nex was in the girls’ room at Owasso High School on Feb. 7. This is why Nex is dead. One gender neutral bathroom at that high school and Nex Benedict would still be alive.
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Jim Crow Discrimination
America has a long history of bathroom discrimination. When I was a young child in the 1960s and my parents were doing their Civil Rights work, Jim Crow laws were still very much in place. While schools had theoretically been desegregated with the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, very few schools were actually integrated even a decade later when I was in grade school. Ironically, it was a Black lesbian who leaned toward nonbinary — Pauli Murray — who helped pass Brown.
Well into the 1970s, busing — programs that would bus Black and Latino students from predominantly minority schools to white schools or the much more controversial obverse — was still going on and a conflict in a myriad of American communities, including Philadelphia. Ironically, Philadelphia schools are now more segregated than ever, 70 years after Brown was decided.
Some of my parents’ friends who were working on the same Civil Rights actions and in the same organizations — SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and CORE (Congress for Racial Equality) still lived in the Jim Crow South. They would stay at our house when they were in Philadelphia, sleeping in my and my sister’s beds while we slept in sleeping bags on the floor.
Our small row house in Germantown had only one bathroom. So my parents’ friends, who were barred from sharing bathrooms with white people in their home states of Mississippi and Alabama, were sleeping in the beds of two little white girls and using the bathroom of the white household in which they were staying. No whites only, colored only in our house.
It wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I realized how extraordinary that was for those friends of my parents and for my parents, who were living in an intensely racist period in American history during which they received threats for their work. My sister was too young to understand that most white people didn’t have Black people staying in their houses. I only understood it because I got racist comments at school. But the fact is, Black women and men were sleeping in our beds and using our bathroom and no one died.
Homeless Discrimination
The fight over where — or whether — people can use the bathroom for one of our most basic and most private human needs is frankly inhumane. Some years ago, I was interviewing Sister Mary Scullion, the co-founder, executive director and president of Project H.O.M.E. who was named by TIME as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World” in 2009. Scullion, a Roman Catholic nun who has dedicated herself to the homeless for decades, will retire at the end of this year. We were talking for a story I was writing on homelessness and she was telling me how inhumane it was to not provide bathrooms for the homeless in Philadelphia — something I had never considered. Yet it’s part of the demeaning and degrading of homeless people — they have no access to restrooms.
Protecting White Women
The fixation by white racists in the Jim Crow era (which still has its tentacles deeply embedded in this country) and now the anti-LGBTQ+ GOP on who gets to use what bathroom is — on its face — inhumane. And as was true during the most overtly violent period of American racism, it’s become a locus of violence in our schools and elsewhere.
Bathroom bills and restrictions now are about enforcing gender codes the way Jim Crow laws were about enforcing segregation and protecting “white purity.”
Lesbians who don’t present feminine enough have been chased out of women’s restrooms, and this is happening more frequently. As a femme-presenting lesbian, I have never been denied entrance to a women’s bathroom, but I have been partnered with butch lesbians who have been. Once while attending the Metropolitan Opera with my then-partner who was a passing woman wearing a tuxedo, she was denied entrance to the women’s room and forced to use the men’s room. It was a discomfiting experience for us both that put a negative spin on an otherwise exciting experience for two young 20something lesbians.
In my teen years when I was going to the gay bars in Philadelphia with my fake ID, there were always trans women in the women’s bathrooms and no one blinked. Now there is pushback from some feminists about “women-only” spaces and complaints that trans women make women’s bathrooms unsafe for cis women, a charge for which there is no evidence.
Trans women are at risk of violence from straight cisgender men if they are forced to use the bathroom of the gender they were assigned at birth. Yet many trans women, like activist Charlotte Clymer, have been denied entrance to the women’s room.
And now Nex Benedict is dead because they needed to use the bathroom and other girls didn’t want them in there.
In the Jim Crow South, white men did not want Black people anywhere near their white women. Emmett Till was only 14 when he was murdered for allegedly speaking to a white woman. That happened a year after Brown was decided. Till was born just a year before Joe Biden. These events were not that long ago. Vice President Kamala Harris was bused to a white school as a child.
Now GOP men don’t want trans women near their daughters. Mark Robinson, current lieutenant governor of North Carolina is Donald Trump’s choice for governor, and Robinson is virulently anti-LGBTQ. He has said that trans people need to go outside and find a place to urinate there.
Gender Neutral Bathrooms Save Lives
Why are we going backward on this most basic human issue? My parents were raised in the Jim Crow era of deeply entrenched racism, yet made Civil Rights their political focus and raised their children to be anti-racist. We could be raising our children to be good LGBTQ+ allies rather than embracing yet another form of bigotry. Gender neutral bathrooms are an easy fix that could literally save lives. No one should experience discrimination, harassment or violence just to use the bathroom. If you don’t see that, ask yourself why.