To the editors:
I am writing in anger at your ignorant editorial, “Rethinking Privacy,” which argued that the University should not implement gender-neutral bathrooms because doing so would promote sexual assault. I have a number of problems with the editorial.
First of all, you argue, without citing a single statistic, that “the risk of sexual assault is simply too high.” On the contrary, the Transgender Law Center states that San Francisco Police have not received a single report of assaults on cisgender (i.e., non-transgender) women in public gender-neutral bathrooms.
Secondly, The Crimson did not contact QSA, the Trans Task Force, or University administrators to support their hollow claim that “there are very few transgender, intersex, and non-gender identified students.” I can only conclude that you thought of your friends, and failed to recognize any trans people among their ranks.
Finally, The Crimson’s recommendations would result in bad University policy. They don’t address the issue of what their policy means for library bathrooms or bathrooms in the Science Center. Do you really believe that the only safe space for trans students is, and should be, in their bedrooms?
As a bisexual woman who has dated, partied, played sports, and studied with trans students at Harvard and in the wider world, I am disgusted by the faulty reasoning and insensitivity that underlie the editorial.
In the 1950s, segregationists used faulty arguments about sexual assault to justify racial segregation. In the 1980s, radical conservatives used faulty arguments about the imagined horrors of gender-neutral bathrooms to defeat legislation that would have made gender discrimination, like racial discrimination, illegal in America.
Is Phyllis Schlafly comping the Crimson? If so, I hope she fails the comp.
KATHERINE WALECKA ’11
Cambridge, Mass.
Feb. 13, 2011