Over at the Hastings Center blog Bioethics Forum, Charlene Galarneau (who has written for IJFAB Blog, as well) has a few thoughts on how to broaden our understanding of what “Bathroom Bioethics” should mean.
What do many transgender persons, farmworkers, homeless persons, people with disabilities, and many other persons in the United States have in common? One answer: they/we live and work in spaces lacking safe, accessible, and adequate toilet facilities. Think about that for a minute. Think about how you respond–multiple times each day–to your needs to eliminate your body’s wastes. Think about the distress you feel when finding a bathroom becomes difficult – or impossible.
Virtually all humans have toileting needs and these needs vary, as do our bodies in their social-political contexts. Our particular needs vary by gender, age, pregnancy, menstruation, medical condition, and work, as well as by cis-centric, andro-centric, and ableist societal norms that obscure some persons and their needs as well as the caregivers that some need for toileting. Drawing attention to the global inadequacy of toilets, the United Nations has declared November 19, World Toilet Day. This year’s theme is “When Nature Calls.”
An extraordinary panel on “toilet justice” at the 2017 American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting explored the nature of toilet justice/injustice in refreshingly candid, inclusive, and insightful ways. (Some of what was said there is available here.) I attended this session because three decades ago I, with other public health workers in Colorado, advocated for “field sanitation,” that is, for porta-potties and drinking water in the state’s agricultural fields. Most farmworkers then and many still now work long and hot days in fields without effective access to a toilet, to hand washing, and to safe drinking water. Working with community and migrant health centers, the state Department of Health, and farm labor groups, we testified to the state legislature on a proposed field sanitation bill. I spoke specifically about the bodily needs of female farmworkers and their children, children who were also working or otherwise present in the fields.
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The American Academy of Religion panel offered a scope and depth of discussion that led me to recognize the similar (but not the same) experiences of farmworkers and many others: transgender persons who are effectively barred from using bathrooms because of their gender identity; homeless persons who must rely on quasipublic spaces to relieve themselves, to varying degrees naked and squatting, and thus at risk of arrest for indecent exposure and at risk of physical and sexual violence; persons with a wide range of disabilities who are unable to find accessible toilets that meet their needs; and many others. Not only do these people share related toileting experiences, they are members of groups that are societally stigmatized and marginalized in many ways.
There is much more to this substantive blog essay. Check it out!
And check out Alison Reiheld’s IJFAB Blog consideration a few years ago of a MSU Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences post by Jamie Nelson on transgender persons’ access to bathrooms and what it says about the gender binary.
