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‘gender’ was mostly confined to grammatical categories. However, the term was co-opted in the 1950s by psychologist and sexologist John Money as a tool to reconstruct the sex binary and avoid the outright acceptance of the existence of intersexual babies, or babies of sexual organs that could not be immediately identified as male or female (Preciado, 2017). This definition took on a more modern form in 1968, when psychologist and author of “Sex and Gender” Robert Stoller used the term ‘sex’ to pick out biological traits and ‘gender’ to define the amount of femininity and masculinity a person exhibited, beginning to explain the identity of trans individuals, in which the sexual and gender identities of an individual do not align (Mikkola, 2019).
The outstanding conflict between the opposing sides of this litigation, and the national discussion that continues today, is a direct consequence of the sex-separation of public restrooms dating back to the discriminatory “Separate Spheres” ideology of the nineteenth century. Still, in crafting their opposing litigation strategies, all parties accepted the existing model architectural configuration of the sex-separated public restroom as a given, unaware or unwilling to reckon with the role of architecture in the organization of bodies, and therefore sexuality and gender, within space. By advocating for individuals to use one of the two options of public restrooms that most closely align with ones gender identity, adhering to the longstanding codified division of public restrooms into two, normative sex-separated spaces, the sexgender binaries are reaffirmed, leaving large groups of non-conforming trans individuals unprotected (Kogan, 2017, pp. 1222-27).
This distinction between sex and gender and trans identity has emerged as the basis of the latest debate over the separation of public restrooms. In March 2016, as a response to a non-discrimination city ordinance passed in Charlotte, North Carolina that allowed the right to access the bathroom best matching ones gender identity, North Carolina drafted House Bill 2 requiring, among other provisions, people to use public toilets that correspond with the sex stated on their birth certificate (H.B.2, p. 2). By restricting trans individuals from using the bathroom that matched their gender identity, House Bill 2 alienated their rights and threw them into the center of a national culture war. While a compromise was eventually reached in North Carolina, the mark of House Bill 2 remains as the repeal did nothing to advance the rights of LGBTQ individuals within public space.
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As such, the key to this debate returns to the code. If multi-user public restrooms in the future become all-gender, the central debate raised over the criterion for restroom usage in the North Carolina House Bill 2 would dissolve. Intersectional bathroom equity groups such as “Stalled!” have worked to reimagine the public bathroom as a space not only to liberate trans individuals, but everyone — from those with medical issues, to parents with young children of a different gender identity, to people needing a space to practice religious rites, or people with a physical disability not accounted for in the American Disabilities Act. In 2018, thanks to the work of “Stalled!” among
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