Disgust, Morality, and the Transgender Bathroom Debate

Bathroom bill restrictions require trans men to use women's bathrooms due to being assigned female at birth.

Source: Photo by RODNAE Productions from Pexels

The past few years have seen a great deal of political energy focused on the question of which bathrooms transgender individuals should be allowed to use when out in public. On the one hand, trans people and their allies argue that trans people should be free to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity, such that trans women should use women’s bathrooms and trans men should use men’s bathrooms. The counterpoint comes from those who argue that a person’s sex, as assigned at birth, should dictate which bathroom they use. In this case, trans men and women are relegated to the bathrooms that match their sex assigned at birth, but often not their current gender identity.

To be clear about what this means, bathroom bill restrictions state that trans women should use the men’s bathroom, which, in most cases amounts to someone visually understood as a woman entering the men’s bathroom. Transgender men, according to bathroom bill restrictions, should be required to use women’s bathrooms, which, in most cases, amounts to someone visually understood as a man entering the women’s bathroom. In fact, the #WeJustNeedtoPee hashtag was created by trans people to visually demonstrate the often striking incongruence between such bathroom bill restrictions and their outcomes.

In general, attitudes about trans people’s access to public bathrooms tend to follow traditional political lines, with liberals being more supportive of access based on gender identity (referred to as support for bathroom access) and conservatives more supportive of access based on sex assigned at birth (referred to as support for bathroom bans, or restricted access). While knowing the average political leanings of people who support bathroom bills that either allow or deny access to bathrooms based on gender identity may be somewhat useful in understanding this issue, given the increasingly polarized state of political opinions, it is important to understand the underlying sentiments generating support for such bills. A recent article by Matthew E. Vanaman and Hanah A. Chapman published in a special issue of Politics and the Life Sciences focused on political attitudes and disgust as potential predictors of bathroom bill attitudes.

In the study, 663 Americans completed an online survey in which they answered questions about their propensity for three different types of disgust, their tendency to be concerned about specific moral values, and their attitudes concerning hypothetical policies concerning transgender access to bathrooms. Participants were randomly assigned to answer questions about bathroom access for transgender men or transgender women.

The researchers hypothesized that there may be three specific types of disgust associated with bathroom bill attitudes: pathogen disgust, sexual disgust, and injury disgust. Theorizing about subtypes of disgust often relates to evolutionary theory, such that it is believed that we feel various forms of disgust as a means of protecting ourselves from potentially dangerous scenarios. Pathogen disgust is triggered by things that we associate with disease. For example, we may reel from someone coughing near us. Pathogen disgust is not necessarily rational: We can experience pathogen disgust in response to things that are not contagious or threatening, such as birthmarks. Sexual disgust refers to being turned off by behaviours that may jeopardize long-term reproductive success, and injury disgust has been theorized to function as a reverse form of empathy, such that instead of feeling sympathetic towards an injured individual, one feels disgusted and repulsed. While transgender people are not a source of disease, have many options for becoming biological parents, and are not any more likely to appear injured than anyone else, the close links between prejudice and disgust could mean that individuals may associate transgender people with one or more of these subtypes of disgust based on the negative stereotypes and connotations they hold about transgender individuals.

Disgust is also closely tied to our moral values. According to Moral Foundations Theory, we make a variety of moral judgments along 5 dimensions of moral values: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and purity/degradation. Vanaman and Chapman focused on the dimensions of harm and purity, theorizing that they were most closely aligned with the public debates of bathroom bills. Indeed, those who argue for and against the bills often bring up the potential for harm on either side, either the harm that could be caused to “women and girls” by allowing “men” into women’s bathrooms, or the documented harm that often comes to transgender people in public washrooms.

Participants randomly assigned to evaluate trans women’s bathroom access were asked to rate their agreement with the following statement:

“When it comes to public bathrooms, someone who was born into a male body should be required to use the men’s bathroom, even if they are a woman.”

For the participants randomly assigned to evaluate trans men’s bathroom access, the statement read:

“When it comes to public bathrooms, someone who was born into a female body should be required to use the women’s bathroom, even if they are a man.”

The results of the study supported the notion that individuals who were more conservative were more in favor of bathroom restrictions. (In other words, they agreed more strongly with the above statements.) Turning to the measures of disgust, both pathogen and sexual disgust predicted greater support of bathroom restrictions, but pathogen disgust was by far the strongest disgust predictor. The researchers also found that the more a person was generally concerned with violations of purity, the more supportive they were of the bathroom restrictions. In fact, purity was a stronger predictor than conservatism and concerns about harm. Concern about harm functioned slightly differently, such that the more people were generally concerned about harm and the welfare of others, the less they supported bathroom restrictions.

The researchers concluded that feelings of pathogen disgust and concerns about violations of purity may contribute to people wanting to avoid transgender individuals, and they may see support for bathroom bills as a means of accomplishing this goal. Rationally speaking, however, restricting access to bathrooms based on sex assigned at birth is, if anything, more likely to increase awareness of contact with trans individuals, given that trans individuals would then be forced to use bathrooms that do not match their gender presentations. Ultimately, those interested in increasing support for the rights of transgender individuals to access public bathrooms of their choosing may want to focus on combatting harmful stereotypes of transgender individuals and promoting efforts that underscore the humanity of all trans people.