The Daily Signal reports today that the Department of the Interior has declared visitors to the parks “are welcome to use restrooms that best align with their gender identity.”
As it happens, I just returned from a visit to America’s oldest and grandest national park, Yellowstone. The bathroom situation at a national park is, almost by definition, kind of uncomfortable. For everyone. That’s part of the point of being out in nature. It isn’t the Ritz.
In Yellowstone it was kind of a big deal to find facilities that had running water. In those cases, even these fancy-pants bathrooms with flushers were small, spare affairs offering little privacy and less dignity.
Most of the bathrooms in Yellowstone were what are euphemistically referred to as “vault” toilets, which are essentially one-person outhouses, with a rickety plastic cylinder arranged on top of a hole in the ground. (One of the vault toilets I passed north of Lake Yellowstone featured a sign proudly proclaiming “Your Recovery Dollars at Work!”) Weirdly enough, the vault toilets are covered with signs warning patrons: “No Squatting!” Kind of like this.
At first, I didn’t quite understand the signage. But one afternoon I wandered up to a vault toilet that stood next to what was labeled a “squat toilet.” As I walked up, a woman emerged from the squat toilet looking stricken. As she walked past me she muttered to herself in delayed horror, “Part of me just died inside.”
No matter how dirty, run-down, and remote a bathroom is, no matter how many families with small kids are likely to use it, there is no battle too insignificant to escape notice in World War T.
As one of the Popehat guys joked a while back, “I feel like the culture war is over and the victors are going around (metaphorically) humiliating and shooting survivors of the losing side, and conducting mop-up operations.”
The good news is that we’re almost ready to move on to the next Most Important Social Injustice Ever. Just as soon as the trans movement squares the circle on Title IX scholarships and the prison system.
