Module 8 Discussion- Spectrums of Gender

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bathroom battlegrounds
and penis panics

by kristen schilt and laurel westbrook

In January 2008, the city commission in Gainesville,

Florida passed an ordinance prohibiting discrimi-

nation on the basis of “gender identity and gender

expression” in employment and public accom-

modations (such as public restrooms and locker

rooms). Advocates argued that the legislation

was a key step toward addressing discrimination

against transgender and gender variant people.

However, 14 months later voters were considering

a ballot initiative to overturn the law.

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27S U M M E R 2 0 1 5 c o n t e x t s

Even though there had been no reported problems, those

that were pushing for the repeal of the new ordinance suggested

that such protections had unanticipated, dangerous conse-

quences for women and children. Citizens for Good Public Policy

ran a TV ad that featured a young, white girl on a playground.

She jumps off a merry-go-round, and, alone, enters a doorway

clearly marked “Women’s Restroom.” A moment later, a White

man with a scraggly beard, dark sunglasses, and baseball cap

slung low on his forehead approaches the door, looks around

furtively, and enters. As the door swings shut, the ad cuts to

black and the message appears: “Your City Commission made

this legal. Is this what you want for Gainesville?”

The question at the heart of the ballot initiative—the place

of transgender people in society—has never been a more visible

issue than it is today. Advocates for transgender rights have

effectively demonstrated that transgender and gender variant

people face large-scale discrimination in areas such as employ-

ment, housing, and education. Yet, while city and state policies

to address such discrimination are rapidly expanding, each new

transgender-supportive law or policy typi-

cally results in an outbreak of protest.

As sociologists of gender, we were

interested in accounting for the opposition

to transgender rights in the face of greater

societal acceptance of transgender people,

as it presents a puzzling aspect of gender:

why are transgender people accepted in

some spaces and not others? We did a

content analysis of media articles about

transgender-inclusive legislation from 2006-2010, and discov-

ered that the Gainesville ad was not an anomaly. Opponents of

transgender recognition often brought up the specter of sexual

predators in sex-segregated spaces as an argument against the

passage of transgender rights legislation. Interestingly, such fears

centered exclusively on women’s spaces, particularly restrooms.

What do sexual predators have to do with transgender

rights? Moreover, why is the concern only about women’s

spaces? In our research, we find that opponents are making an

argument against any bodies perceived as male having a legal

right to enter a woman-only space because they imagine such

bodies to present a sexual danger to women and children. Under

this logic, they often conflate “sexual predators” (imagined

to be deviant men) and transgender women (imagined to be

always male). This exclusive focus on “males” suggests that it

is genitals—not gender identity and expression—that are driv-

ing what we term “gender panics”—moments where people

react to a challenge to the gender binary by frantically asserting

its naturalness. Because most people are assumed by others to

be heterosexual, sex-segregated bathrooms are imagined by

many people to be “sexuality-free” zones. Opponents’ focus

on bathrooms centers on fears of sexual impropriety that could

be introduced by allowing the “wrong bodies”—or, to be more

precise, penises—into spaces deemed as “for women only.”

Gender panics, thus, could easily be relabeled “penis panics.”

The shift from gender panics to penis panics as a point of analysis

accounts for critics’ sole focus on the women’s restroom—a

location that, opponents argue, should be “penis-free.”

While such arguments are not always politically effec-

tive—Gainesville, for instance, did not repeal its ordinance—they

reinforce gender inequality in a number of ways. Opponents

disseminate ideas that women are weak and in need of protec-

tion—what one of us (Laurel Westbrook) frames as creating a

“vulnerable subjecthood”—and that men are inherent rapists. At

the same time, they generate fear and misunderstanding around

transgender people along with the suggestion that transgender

people are less deserving of protection than cisgender women

and children (cisgender people are those whose gender identity

conforms to their biological sex). As such, the battle over trans-

gender people’s access to sex-segregated spaces is both about

transgender rights and about either reproducing or challenging

Contexts, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 26-31. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-60521. © 2015 American
Sociological Association. http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504215596943

In none of the media accounts we analyzed
have opponents been able to cite an actual case
of bathroom sexual assault after the passage of
transgender-supportive policies.

A promo image used by the Canada Family Action group in
protest of a bill adding “gender expression” and “gender
identity” to the list of prohibited grounds for discrimination.

A Maryland Group used a popular image to try to stop what
they called a “Bathroom Bill.”

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damaging beliefs about what it is to be a man and what it is

to be a woman.

transgender rights legislation to “bathroom bills”
The public response to transgender-supportive policies has

varied across different social contexts. Within gender-integrated

settings, such as college campuses and workplaces, the trend

toward transgender-inclusive health care coverage and non-

discrimination policies in terms of hiring and promotion has

become widely accepted as an important dimension of diversity.

Yet, transgender inclusion in sex-segregated settings has proven

to be more controversial. In particular, the part of inclusive poli-

cies that allows transgender people to use a bathroom that aligns

with their gender identity and expression—rather than with their

chromosomes or genital confi gurations—has generated a great

deal of opposition.

Supportive politicians and advocates frame transgender

rights policies as a way to alleviate discrimination against trans-

gender and gender variant people. Opponents, in contrast,

reframe the debate as being about bathroom access. This con-

certed effort to focus on bathrooms was evident in the media

accounts we analyzed. Critics did not discuss “transgender rights

legislation,” but rather “bathroom bills.” Reporters picked up

on this aspect of the debate, creating pithy, attention-grabbing

headlines such as “Critics: Flush Bathroom Bill” (Boston Herald)

and “Bathroom Bill Goes Down the Drain” (New Hampshire

Review).

Opponents repeatedly expressed their belief that public

restrooms have to be segregated on the basis of gender and that

people’s genitals, not their gender identities, should determine

bathroom access. Kris Mineau of the conservative Massachusetts

Family Institute, quoted in The Republican, worried about the

potential outcome of the proposed state transgender rights bill.

“This is a far-reaching piece of legislation that will disrupt the

privacy of bathrooms, showers, and exercise facilities includ-

ing those in public schools… . This bill opens the barn door

to everybody. There is no way to know who of the opposite

biological sex is using the facility for the right purpose.” Evelyn

Reilly, a spokesperson for the same institute, told The Berkshire

Eagle, “Men and women bathrooms [sic] have been separated

for ages for a reason… . Women need to feel private and safe

when they’re using those facilities.”

In actuality, the segregation of public bathrooms on the basis

of gender is a relatively recent phenomenon in the United States.

Prior to the Victorian era, men and women used the same priv-

ies and outhouses. With the invention of indoor plumbing came

water closets and later bathrooms, which were not segregated

until Victorian ideals of feminine modesty—and the mixing of

men and women in factory work—established a new precedent.

By the 1920s, laws requiring segregated public facilities were de

rigueur across the country. As sociologist Erving Goffman has

pointed out, men and women share bathrooms in their homes.

In public restrooms, by contrast, the sense that men and women

are opposite is exacerbated by the placement of open urinals in

men’s rooms and the private stalls found in women’s rooms. Such

separation, then, is not biologically necessary but rather socially

mandated. Highlighting this point, bathroom segregation is not

universal, as some European countries, such as France, often have

gender-integrated public restrooms.

Transgender-supportive policies present a sharp challenge

to this bathroom segregation logic. Opponents struggle with the

sense that their belief in a static gender binary determined by

chromosomes and genitals is being undermined by institutional

and governmental support for transgender people. The outcome

of the resulting gender panics is often a call to socially reinforce

what opponents position as a natural division of men and

women. In a “Letter to the Editor” in The Bangor Daily News,

a concerned author contests transgender bathroom access,

An ad released by the group CitizenLink in Colorado.An ad released by the group CitizenLink in Colorado.An ad released by the group CitizenLink in Colorado.

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arguing, “What makes an individual able to claim gender? As I

always understood it growing up—and I know I am not alone

in this—your anatomy dictates your sex.” A follow-up response

on The Bangor Daily News “ClickBack” page read, “The policy

should be boys use the men’s room and girls use the lady’s room.

Identification does not change physical plumbing.”

These ideological collisions between those advocating

transgender rights and those who insist on sex at birth deter-

mining gender, and the ensuing panics, put into high relief the

often-invisible social criteria for “who counts” as a woman and a

man in our society. Yet, in our study, such gender panics focused

exclusively on the threat that transgender-supportive bills pres-

ent to cisgender women and children. Highlighting this point,

opponents to trans-inclusive policies proposed in Massachusetts

and New Hampshire in 2009 and 2010 repeatedly discussed

that these policies would, as The Associated Press reported,

“put women and children at risk.” It was

in these fears of “risk” that the image of

the sexual predator emerged.

enter the sexual predator
The conception of the “sexual pred-

ator” is deeply gendered. People often

assume that they can establish whether

someone is a potential sexual threat by

simply determining if they are male (pos-

sible threat) or female (not a likely threat).

Critics charge that transgender rights laws

will make such determination difficult and,

will, like “sheep’s clothing” on a wolf, give predators open

access to those seen as vulnerable. Evelyn Reilly, a spokesperson

for the Massachusetts Family Institute, argued that a proposed

state-level law protecting gender identity and gender expression

would allow “a sexual predator using the guise of gender confu-

sion to enter the restrooms.” In Colorado, Bruce Hausknecht,

a policy analyst for the evangelical organization Focus on the

Family Action, fought against a proposed transgender rights

bill in 2009, stating: “The fear… is that a sexual predator would

attempt to enter the women’s facilities, and the public accom-

modation owner would feel they had no ability to challenge

that.” In Nevada in 2009, conservative activist Tony Dane told

The Las Vegas Review-Journal that transgender-rights policies

would allow men to legally enter women’s restrooms “in drag,”

which would “make it easier for them to attack women and

evade capture.”

from gender panics to penis panics
Transgender people, along with gay men and lesbian

women, have a long history of being conflated with pedophiles

and other sexual predators. Within the articles we analyzed,

opponents worried about what transgender women, who they

assume have penises, might do if they were allowed access to

women-only spaces. Demonstrating such concern, reporters

frequently highlighted critics’ fears about “male anatomies”

or “male genitalia” in women’s spaces. Transgender women in

these narratives are always anchored to their imagined “male

anatomies,” and thus become categorized as potential sexual

threats to those vested with vulnerable subjecthood, namely

cisgender women and children.

Explicit bodily criteria for access to sex-
segregated spaces can quell gender panics,
but these criteria force transgender people
into restrictive, normative forms of gendered
embodiment that perpetuate the belief that
genitals and gender must be linked.

The bathroom sign at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in
California.

A poster on the campus of the University of Bristol.

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In contrast, transgender men—assumed by critics to be

“really women” because they do not possess a “natural”

penis—are relatively invisible in these debates. Transgender

men are mentioned directly by opponents only once in all of the

articles we analyzed. After conservative opponent Tony Dane

expressed his concern that the proposed Nevada policy would

make women “uncomfortable” in the bathroom because they

might have to see a transgender woman, a reporter for The Las

Vegas Review-Journal asked about his position on transgender

men. He stated, “they should use the women’s bathroom,

regardless of whom it makes uncomfortable, because that’s

where they’re supposed to go.” Transgender men are never

referenced as potential sexual threat to women, men, or chil-

dren. Instead, they are put into a category that sociologist Mimi

Schippers labels “pariah femininities.” They are not dangerous

to cisgender women and children, but they also do not warrant

protection and rights because they fall outside of gender and

sexual normativity.

As our research reveals, policies that would allow trans-

gender people to access sex-segregated spaces and do not

have specific requirements for genital surgeries generate a

great deal of panic. These panics matter, as they frequently

result in a reshaping of the language of such policies to require

extensive bodily changes before transgender people have access

to particular rights and locations. Such changes place severe

limitations on transgender people who may not want or cannot

afford genital surgeries. Further, while explicit bodily criteria for

access to sex-segregated spaces can quell gender panics, these

criteria force transgender people into restrictive and normative

forms of gendered embodiment that perpetuate the belief that

genitals and gender must be linked.

transgender rights and the struggle for gender
equality

In 2011, the National Center for Transgender Equality and

the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force published “Injustice at

Every Turn,” a report that highlights the findings of the largest

ever survey of the experiences of transgender and gender vari-

ant people. The report documents wide-ranging experiences of

discrimination. For instance, respondents had double the rate

of unemployment compared to the general population and

90% reported experiencing workplace discrimination, including

being unable to access a bathroom at work that matched their

gender identity.

Anti-discrimination legislation that offers protections for a

person’s gender identity and gender expression is an important

strategy for addressing inequality in hiring and promotion.

Additionally, these policies allow transgender people to use

public accommodations, such as bathrooms, in line with their

gender identity. In other words, a transgender man with a beard

would not be legally required to use the women’s restroom

simply because he had been assigned female at birth. While the

Vassar College students stage a multi-gender bathroom sit-in.

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31S U M M E R 2 0 1 5 c o n t e x t s 31

adoption of transgender-supportive policies has grown rapidly at

the state, city, and corporate level in the last ten years, in 2015

there are limited federal protections—a situation that would be

addressed by the passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination

Act (also known as ENDA). The regional variation in protection

for gender identity and gender expression—and the widespread

violence and discrimination aimed at trans-

gender people—makes this a key political

issue for gender equality.

unmasking the real debate
Gender panics gain legitimacy in the

realm of debate because many people

believe that women and young children

are inherently vulnerable and in need of

protection from men. In dominant U.S. culture, men—or more

specifically, people assumed to have penises—are both con-

ceived of as the potential protectors of vulnerable people they

have relational ties to, such as wives, sisters, daughters, and

mothers, and a potential source of sexual threat to others.

This idea emerges from a belief that men constantly seek out

sexual interactions and will resort to violence to achieve these

desires. As transgender women are placed into the category

of persons with penises—making them, for many opponents,

“really men”—they become an imagined source of threat to

cisgender women and children. And, as there are no protective

men present in women’s restrooms, opponents to transgender

rights imagine women (and often children, who are likely to

accompany women to the restroom) as uniquely imperiled by

these non-discrimination policies.

Proponents of transgender-inclusive laws and policies can

make strong arguments about the need for protections. The

increasingly large body of empirical data on transgender people

in the United States emphasizes that transgender people are

much more likely to face violence in the restroom rather than to

perpetrate such violence. In fact, in none of the media accounts

we analyzed have opponents been able to cite an actual case

of bathroom sexual assault after the passage of transgender-

supportive policies. But deep-rooted cultural fears about the

vulnerability of women and children are hard to counter.

It is not to be suggested that sexual assault is not a serious

and troubling real issue; rather, such assaults rarely occur in pub-

lic restrooms and no cities or states that have passed transgender

rights legislation have witnessed increases in sexual assaults in

public restrooms after the laws have gone into effect. Raising

the specter of the sexual predator in debates around transgender

rights should be unmasked for the multiple ways it can perpetu-

ate gender inequality. Under the guise of “protecting” women,

critics reproduce ideas about their weakness; depict males as

assailants, and work to deny rights to transgender people.

Moreover, they suggest that there should be a hierarchy of rights

in which cisgender women and children are more deserving of

protections than transgender people.

Beliefs about gender difference form the scaffolding of

structural gender inequality, as those that are “opposite” cannot

be equal. Thus, bathroom sex-segregation must be reconsidered

if we want to push gender equality forward. Many college

campuses are moving toward gender-integrated bathrooms and

widespread availability of gender-neutral bathrooms. And, in

California, bill AB1266, passed in 2013, authorizes high school

students to use bathrooms that fit their gender identity and gen-

der expression. These examples demonstrate that the social order

of the bathroom can change. While such changes may spark

gender panics, these examples suggest that the battles fought

over bathroom access can be won in favor of gender equality.

recommended readings:
Sheila Cavanagh. 2010. Queering Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality,
and the Hygienic Imagination. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto
Press. An instructive and exhaustive look at the cultural construc-
tion of bathrooms, including how they maintain binary under-
standings of gender and disadvantage queer and transgender
people.

Erving Goffman. 1977. “The Arrangement Between the Sexes,”
Theory and Society 4(3): 301-331. This classic article theorizes the
social construction of gender by exploring several venues, includ-
ing bathrooms, which are designed to support the deeply held
view that males are opposite and superior to females.

Jaime M. Grant, Lisa A. Mottet, Justin Tanis, Jack Harrison, Jody
L. Herman, and Mara Keisling. 2011. Injustice at Every Turn: A
Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey. Wash-
ington, D.C.: National Center for Transgender Equality and the
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Summarizes the findings
of the largest ever survey of transgender and gender variant
people, including experiences of unemployment, discrimination,
and violence.

Harvey Molotoch and Laura Noren (eds). 2010. Toilet: Public Rest-
rooms and the Politics of Sharing. New York: New York University
Press. An interdisciplinary set of essays examining the history and
implication of public restrooms.

Kristen Schilt is in the department of sociology at The University of Chicago. She is

the author of Just One of the Guys? Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender

Inequality. Laurel Westbrook is in the department of sociology at Grand Valley

State University in Allendale, MI. Her multi-method studies revolve around the inner

workings of the sex/gender/sexuality system.

Raising the specter of the sexual predator in
debates around transgender rights should
be unmasked for the multiple ways it can
perpetuate gender inequality.