When teaching “The Politics of the Bathroom,” my students and I realized that nearly every social justice movement of the century has involved bathrooms.
Jim Crow laws and apartheid dictated separate bathrooms for whites and non-whites. Women’s liberation also fueled debate over bathrooms. Feminists coined the term “potty parity” to protest inequalities in the distribution of restroom facilities (restrooms for female senators were not provided in the U.S. Senate until 1992), while opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment argued that its passage would spell an end to separate bathrooms for men and women. Disability activists fought to make bathrooms accessible for individuals with physical handicaps.
Today, nothing is more symbolic of transgender politics in the U.S. than bathrooms. For a transgender individual, every trip to the bathroom is accompanied by anxiety and dread, so much so that many simply avoid public restrooms altogether, often risking their health. If transgender individuals cannot use public facilities, they cannot participate fully in public life. They cannot be regular consumers — or citizens.
Public bathrooms both reflect and construct sexual dimorphism, our sense that nature produces bodies of only two kinds. Those supporting “bathroom bills” — the legislation of separate bathroom facilities for men and women in public buildings — see sex as fixed and immutable. For supporters of transgender rights, the biology of sex is not so cut and dried: Genes, anatomy and hormones do not always line up neatly on one side or the other of an absolute divide. The concept of “gender” attempts to recognize that life can’t be defined in simple either/or terms; it’s a more complex, messier project.
Ultimately, public restrooms create social anxieties because they are spaces in which the public and private collide in the most intimate ways. While the need to eliminate unites us all, the design and distribution of bathrooms carve space according to social hierarchies of gender, race, class and ability, making the toilet a historic symbol of public debate
The good news is that physicists have developed complete, tested and verified models of time travel that perfectly explain how objects (including humans!) can, and do, travel through time.
The bad news is that it’s the ultimate one-way street. We constantly are traveling through time, but our velocity in that direction is, with all the unfortunate consequences, unstoppable.
The theories of special and general relativity fully explain the rich physics of how to manipulate the rate at which clocks can tick due to large relative velocities and/or different altitudes — not to mention the even more significant effects of strong gravitational fields or near-light speed travel. It’s unavoidable to draw the analogy between these models and humans’ perception of how quickly time seems to pass; an hour in lecture can seem like a minute or a day depending on your frame of mind.
Understanding time travel, at least in this sense, is more than an academic exercise. The observable consequences of relativity are relevant in many of the processes that we take for granted. For instance, not a day goes by that I don’t rely on my GPS to tell me how long it will take for me to get home. This technology would be useless without a careful understanding of why the clocks on the GPS satellites tick at a (relative) different rate to those we have in our phones.
The great mystery, however, is not the fact that we travel through time in one direction, but rather why we travel in one direction. Macroscopic physics — thermodynamics, to be exact — dictates the rules that compel us forward, and forbid us to travel backwards, through time. On the other hand, microscopic physics has (almost) nothing to say about the choice of early versus late or young versus old. All microscopic laws of physics are time-reversal symmetric, meaning that these laws don’t care if time goes forward or backward. The origin of the arrow of time, the principle that dictates that we bleed after we’re cut, is an open question in physics.
In short, we’re great at time travel; we know a lot about how time works and have harnessed its power in multiple ways. The limitations of this model that get us down, but these same limitations help our GPS get us to where we need to go.