In Maine, we had a front-row seat to an early legal battle in the debate about which bathrooms transgender people should use. A young transgender girl in Orono (Nicole Maines, now a talented and beautiful young woman who you can see as a regular in the CW series Supergirl) wanted to use the girls’ bathroom at her elementary school because she identified as female, and had since age two. The school and staff were very supportive in all respects, from allowing her to use the proper bathroom to calling her by her female name.

All went well until September 2007, in her fifth-grade year. From the subsequent court decision by the Maine Supreme Judicial Court in 2014 (Doe v. Regional School Unit 26):

“Her use of the girls’ bathroom went smoothly, with no complaints from other students’ parents, until a male student followed her into the bathroom on two separate occasions, claiming that he, too, was entitled to use the girls’ bathroom. The student was acting on instructions from his grandfather, who was his guardian and was strongly opposed to the school’s decision to allow Susan to use the girls’ bathroom. The controversy generated significant media coverage. As a result of the two incidents, the school, over the Does’ objections, terminated Susan’s use of the girls’ bathroom, requiring her instead to use the single-stall, unisex staff bathroom. That year, Susan was the only student instructed to use the staff bathroom.”

This was despite Nicole having a diagnosis of gender dysphoria—meaning she wasn’t just pretending to be a girl—and despite this boy apparently being a pawn in the game of what sounds like someone unable to accept any reality other than the one he wanted. The school’s cowardice forced Nicole into the staff bathroom, and this policy carried over into her sixth-grade year in middle school in RSU 26.

The court found that RSU 26 had violated the Human Rights Act, and that denying a transgender person the right to use a bathroom in line with his or her gender identity was unlawful. The family was awarded $75,000—the going rate, apparently, when you’re treated like a subhuman. Naturally, in cases like this, you’d expect right-wingers to lose their minds. Well, they didn’t disappoint.

I will actually go so far as to say that I could understand this concern. I say COULD and not CAN. I COULD understand it if someone had a real belief that this transgender girl was just a boy trying to get into the girls’ bathroom. But I seriously doubt that was the real issue for this grandfather. If he really thought it was inappropriate for a biological boy to use the girls’ bathroom, why send in his grandson? Because the real issue is probably about some people’s refusal to see anything from a perspective that differs from their desired reality—wrapped up in a shell of conservative traditionalism, a desire to control the bodies and limit the rights of others, and a refusal to understand that gender is not just about one’s genitals.

But back to my point: I COULD understand it. I COULD understand the worries of a nervous parent whose little girl goes into a public bathroom and is followed by someone who is obviously a man. But the question here shouldn’t be whether we should control who uses which school bathroom. It should be: Why the hell would you want your little girl using any group public bathroom alone in the first place? Come on—at a big-box store, she’s in dropping her pants in a room full of complete strangers, including adults. Why would you trust any young child alone in a public bathroom?

In one respect, the Orono school got it right when they directed Nicole Maines to use the staff bathroom. They didn’t get it right when they separated her and treated her as if she were nothing more than a boy trying to peek under the stall and up little girls’ skirts. But it would be absolutely right if we could ALL use the equivalent of the staff bathroom, which I assume in Nicole’s case was an individual little room with a toilet and a sink and a door that locked. That would solve this problem in a hurry.

And “this problem” isn’t that transgender people want to use bathrooms that match the genders they identify with. If we’re all going to use group public bathrooms, then transgender people must be allowed to use the bathrooms that match who they are; otherwise, we should ditch the MEN and WOMEN signs and just have one big shared bathroom. No, “this problem” is that no one should have to use a group public bathroom in the first place.

There is something inherently barbaric about going into a big room with a bunch of strangers to partially disrobe or otherwise expose ourselves, usually in a stall that doesn't really afford real privacy, with walls that don’t go from floor to ceiling. It’s the modern-day equivalent of groups of primitive humans squatting in the woods together. The idea that men line up next to each other at urinals to hold their penises is ridiculous—to say nothing of urination troughs, where males don't even enjoy tiny barriers that feign privacy. No, we stand shoulder to shoulder—literally, and adults with children—and we all hold our junk and do our business. I can’t imagine that a young boy needs the genitals of adult strangers practically on either side of his face.

Even in the comparative privacy of a stall, it’s awkward to defecate while someone a couple of feet away from you—whose shoes you can see—is doing the same thing. And, face it, nearly all of us would rather not be listening and smelling as someone does that. And I’d rather not be the guy providing those special effects for others.

Emptying your bladder or evacuating your bowels is quite a personal thing. We all do it, and it's nothing to be ashamed of, but the idea that we should share the experience with total strangers is just silly. The same goes for gang showers. Who the hell ever thought that made sense? I can remember being the scrawny kid in high school, without pubic hair, being forced to shower with a bunch of other kids. The last thing an insecure teenage boy needs is to be worrying about body comparisons in a locker room full of naked guys. Even today, I am not a fan of gang showers at the gym. We should be allowed the dignity of privacy when we’re naked or doing our business.

It’s time to abandon group bathrooms. It will cost a little more to construct individual bathrooms, but, in the name of civilized society, it's about time we afforded actual privacy for such a basically private thing.

A byproduct of this common-sense basic change in how we build public bathrooms would be that we no longer have to listen to intolerant right-wing folks whining about who's using which bathroom. But, more importantly, transgender people will not have to endure intolerant right-wing attempts to publicly characterize them as subhuman.

David M. Fitzpatrick is a fiction writer in Maine, USA. His many short stories have appeared in print magazines and anthologies around the world. He writes for a newspaper, writes fiction, edits anthologies, and teaches creative writing. Visit him at www.fitz42.net/writer to learn more.