Policing Where We Pee

By ART CULLEN

It’s 6 a.m. I’ve had a strong cup of black coffee, two pieces of toast and a cigarette. There’s the pit-pat of feet and a knock-knock on the bathroom door. “Snookums, are you about done?” She always calls me snookums in the pre-dawn darkness.

“Just finishing up a chapter of ‘War and Peace’!” I reply. “It’s just getting to the war part.”

You hear the feet pit-pat away and rummaging in the kitchen for a bucket.

Such are the complications of modern life and indoor plumbing. You sit there thinking that you really need his and hers. But we are practical Iowans. I heard about outhouses, chamber pots and the like. I heard some of them were two-holers, whence bride and groom might never have to be without each other.

We put up with a unisex bathroom at the office. Men and their aim are generally the problem, even when sober. It has seemed to work out despite us.

There have been times, I must confess, if the Casey’s men’s room is occupied for too long and I really don’t want to wade into that wake, I have used the women’s room. It might be illegal. There is probably security footage of me with my cap down over my face cracking the door with the dress label on it.

It is a time-honored state tradition to pee along gravel roads while the red-wing blackbirds flit over the corn field. You are free with your back to the wind. When we walked beans boys and girls would do their business at the end of the row and nobody thought anything of it.

Which is why it is hard to understand why anyone cares who pees where. The legislature passed a bill recently saying that you must freshen up a bit in the bathroom of your birth gender.

“I’m not interested in waiting until the child is raped in a restroom by someone pretending to be transgender,” said state Rep. Steven Holt, R-Denison.

Wow. It’s hard to know where to start. So back to some basics: What’s inherently wrong with unisex bathrooms? They have them in other places. You come out of the stall and a woman is washing her hands. Good morning to you. Was she a woman? Was she transgender? She has clean hands, and that’s what matters.

In rural Mexican bars there’s a toilet with a short wall so you can watch during a break to make sure nobody is cheating at pool. It works. Nobody gets a cheap thrill.

There is no evidence that unisex bathrooms result in increased sexual abuse by anyone. There might be a problem in Denison with men posing as women raping children in bathrooms, but it is going underreported.

What it boils down to is when you gotta go you gotta go, it doesn’t matter what your perspective is. Whichever door is unlocked, pick it. Put the lid back down when you’re done, gents. And flush it.

One would think that with our bucolic appreciation for animals we would better understand digestion and stuff. She has to go, he has go go, and so do they, and none of us should try to get in each other’s way.

That would seem a practical Midwestern approach, given our recent history with outhouses and our contemporary experience with Port-A-Pots.

Morality must seep in to even our most basic functions. The preachers can tell you who you are, whom you can love, and even where you can go.

The bathroom bill is silly and absurd, which is why Gov. Kim Reynolds signed it March 22, as well as one banning gender-affirming care for transgender kids.

I would like to think the bathroom bill was born more out of ignorance than cruelty. I would like to think the same about a ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Whatever the intention, the effect is the same: It’s cruel.

Patients of Storm Lake Dr. Sabrina Martinez say that gender therapy saved their lives. Martinez says she is afraid a ban on medical care will lead to suicides.

People get all bound up in an idea concocted by some sexually frustrated old moral theologian and take it to extremes. If you would step back from it, and look at the bathroom bill, and then realize how comically tragic it is you can get a little more perspective.

We were reared to be homophobic. I’ve learned a lot along the way. You know, you find out that your old Twin Cities hockey star college buddy who moved to San Francisco turned out to be gay. He peed next to me! Or your old aunt who lived out there and seldom returned to Iowa. One of my closest friends had a son who was getting in a lot of trouble in high school. Once he came out as transgender, the problems disappeared — she just earned her master’s degree in public health and lives in New York, where she may use the bathroom.

Rep. Megan Jones, R-Sioux Rapids, Iowa, confesses that she has a lot to learn, too. Humility is a rare thing these days, especially in politics. She was among five Republicans in the House who voted against ignorance and overreaction. She has kids. She can appreciate how difficult some have it absolutely through no fault of their own with no reason to be discriminated against.

It’s your hang-up if you can’t handle someone going into a stall in a football uniform and coming out in a prom dress. Let it be. When someone who could be saved by medical care dies because of this legislation, that’s on all of us. It goes beyond the absurd and into the macabre.

Art Cullen is publisher and editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017 and is author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” Email times@stormlake.com.

From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2023

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