The biggest advantage to private bathrooms is that no one tries to tell you “You don’t belong here” because private bathrooms are for the person occupying them. This notion that bathrooms must be sex-segregated seems a bit silly and old-fashioned anyway.
In the future, people will shake their heads in befuddlement at the idea that their grandparents and great-grandparents cared so much about the genitalia of other people. “What?” they might ask… “What did they think people did in bathrooms?”
Of course, the revelatory moment comes when we realize why these people cared so deeply about the genitalia of others…
…they were trained to do so.
It all comes down to that — any behavior that we aren’t born with is behavior that we are trained to. If we are compassionate, it is because that is our training. If we are angry, it is because that is our training. If we are telling people how much we hate math, it is because that is our training.
This is probably why folks who Deeply Care About The Genitalia Of Others are having such a hard time with all of this business — because it’s not only their own preconceptions and myths and assumptions that are being revealed to be smoke and mirrors and bullshit…
…it’s also the preconceptions and myths and assumptions of their parents, their teachers, their peers, their clergy, their colleagues, and their friends.
In order for a person to consider the notion “I might be wrong,” they must also consider the notion “My parents might be wrong, my preacher might be wrong, my co-worker might be wrong, my Facebook group might be wrong, and all my friends might be wrong.”
That takes a helluva lot of guts. Probably more than most people have just casually lying around. Remember all those PSAs about how peer pressure can make you drink booze and smoke pot and cut off the heads of people who disagree on imaginary friends? That’s where all that comes from — so it’s non-trivial.
And moreover, handling change is rarely well-trained into people because a facility towards flexibility and easily handling change makes a person less controllable by their parents, their peers, their clergy, and so forth. That would be a bit of a foot-shoot in any power structure that survives on control.
So if someone seems stubborn in the face of the question “Why is it that you care so damn much about other people’s genitalia and can you really justify it in any moral way whatsoever?” consider that even asking the question is basically threatening everything and everyone they stand for.
(set aside for the moment that a big reason why we have these debates is because people are often trained to respond to threats by invoking what are allegedly unassailable moral codes [that are anything but, of course, in every demonstrable way possible, but I digress], which turns things that could simply be discussions into Vast Moral And Ethical Quandaries)
This is not to excuse them, of course.
Just to suggest that the path may not be as easy as thought, and a little compassion for their pain and confusion may be in order. Change is very painful to those who have not been trained to handle it well.