Trans solidarity matters more than cis bathroom privacy

by Angel Cunningham

September 11, 2025

Amid the current discourse about whether or not trans and gender-nonconforming people should be allowed to exist, I would like to imagine Kenyon students are unequivocally on the side of empathy and personal freedom. Kenyon tries to teach all of us to think critically and commiserate as a community, but a lot of people never got the memo on what that looks like in action. Kenyon has a virtue-signaling problem, and you (yes, you) reading this are likely a perpetrator. If you actually want to help trans students in this time of bathroom-based warfare, stop monopolizing the gender-neutral bathrooms because you’re poo-shy.

Kenyon’s compliance with Ohio Senate Bill 104 (SB104) is a devastating hardship for the many trans and gender-nonconforming students and staff on campus: Not only does it make it hard for us to use the bathroom, it has created cracks in the culture of mutual support and solidarity Kenyon has cultivated. I’m personally hearing more anti-trans jokes and rhetoric than ever before. It’s easy to blame trans people for limitation to bathroom access when the actions of legislators are truly to blame. The single-occupancy gender-neutral restrooms on campus are often being used by cisgender students who want privacy while their last serving from Peirce Hall wrecks their intestines. This issue is much bigger than you and your bowels, as many of us are fighting for our right to live. If you could just as easily use the gendered bathrooms, please don’t use the gender-neutral one — especially if you’re going to make it smell terrible.

As a gender-nonconforming person, I don’t feel comfortable in gendered restrooms. Given the limited access to bathrooms trans folks have had to endure since the passage of SB104, I can confirm it’s near impossible to get into a gender-neutral restroom. There are places on campus where gendered restrooms are within walking distance, like the first floor of Chalmers Library, where cisgender students use the gender-neutral for their own comfort. There is almost always an available gendered restroom for you to use, but because you don’t have to walk as far, or because you can get your desired alone time, your comfort supersedes the needs of your trans peers on a daily basis.

You could say it’s hypocritical of me to lambaste students for using the gender-neutral restrooms at all. It’s easily justifiable for people to use the restroom they’re “most comfortable” with, regardless of identity or reasoning — and I would agree with you! It’s incredibly valid to want privacy, especially in such a social place where you’re almost never alone. You could also argue that I cannot tell whether the person I just saw leaving the bathroom was trans or otherwise (I see you, GSS majors, and I know gender is a performance). Unfortunately, there are plenty of people I know personally who are cisgender and only use non-gendered bathrooms for their privacy, which I argue is not reason enough. It’s understandable why some students do this, but it’s also understandable that I’m asking you to stop.

Community is more important now than ever, so I implore Kenyon students and staff to defecate elsewhere. There have been many Collegian opinion pieces on trans allyship that begged you to educate the ignorant people around you about their behavior, something that can be difficult for a lot of people. However, I am presenting you with something small you can do to help lessen the blow of the anti-trans sentiment currently polluting our country. Help us believe we’re more important than a cis person’s comfort.

Angel Cunningham ’27 is a sociology major with a law and society concentration from Niagara Falls, NY. He can be reached at cunningham3@kenyon.edu.

1 Comment

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D '98

September 12, 2025 — 12:24 pm ET

So, if I'm reading this correctly, the crux of the opinion is: 'Regardless of your level of discomfort in using public restrooms, and despite the estimated 7% - 40% of the population who experience some degree of paruresis, parcopresis, or other moderate to severe anxiety related to bathrooms, disregard your comfort and think of mine.'

Using a subjective metric like "comfort" and then writing a piece which appears to assume that no one but you and the similarly gender-nonconforming experience anxiety in the restroom space is, aside from being utterly self-centered, thoroughly indefensible when subjected to even basic scrutiny.

A "single-occupancy gender-neutral restroom" can also be accurately described much more simply as "a restroom" and, as a public facility, is open to anyone who may need to use it. That you feel uncomfortable using a gendered restroom does not supersede the discomfort that those with shy bladders feel when using one which is multi-occupancy. Your feeling may, arguably, rank lower on the comfort scale since, unless you also suffer from the condition, you still have open access to toilets conforming to your individual biology; urgency, rather than comfort, ought to be the measure of when and where you go, as it frequently is for those who find public excremental evacuation otherwise intolerable.

Interestingly, you even concede the points above in the final quarter or so of the piece, saying, "It's understandable why some students do this, but it's also understandable that I'm asking you to stop." You appear to have made the assumption throughout the piece that gender-conforming students simply do not understand the anxiety you feel, while also acknowledging that there may be reasons for them to use your preferred restrooms. However, you also poo-poo the idea of people being "poo-shy," some of whom are to such an extent that the feeling makes its way into therapy or is treated with anti-anxiety medications. Having known some who take a Xanax when they feel the urge approaching in a public venue, I suggest that you not minimize their trauma (hoping I got the expression correct; I am not yet fluent in Triggered).

Regarding the statement, "Kenyon has a virtue-signaling problem, and you (yes, you) reading this are likely a perpetrator," I would agree that the virtue-signaling is a problem. I would also say that I am not among those who engage in the practice (lacking the ravenous appetite for others' validation), and it is bold of you to cast such an aspersion against all who may read your piece. I would further say that Kenyon has a histrionic problem, characterized by the high likelihood that, at any given time, someone may pipe up with an emphatic declaration that encountering a minor bit of adversity is... How was it phrased? Oh, yes: "...fighting for our right to live."

You "...would like to imagine Kenyon students are unequivocally on the side of empathy and personal freedom," followed by a piece requesting restriction of personal bathroom freedom, and lacking empathy for reasons that people may use certain restrooms; instead assuming mere discourteous failure to acquiesce to your desires.

Finally, you suggest that, "If you could just as easily use the gendered bathrooms, please don’t use the gender-neutral one — especially if you’re going to make it smell terrible." I suspect that, besides not wanting to be pigeonholed into a gender for the minute or so it takes to go, you are one of those who "could just as easily use the gendered bathrooms." And, in a spectacular gift to anyone reading, "...if you're going to make it smell terrible," seems to indicate that you may very well think that your poop does not stink; which is emblematic of similar 'social issue of dubious actual (but extreme self-) importance' opinions I have read in the Collegian recently. Bravisse!