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
Scientists have been manipulating DNA for decades, but early genetic-manipulation techniques were slow, expensive and geared to individual species.
Enter CRISPR — a fast, cheap and flexible way to make precise changes in any cell’s DNA.
CRISPR’s enormous promise has both scientists and investors aggressively seeking new therapeutic applications, including altering a gene within retinal cells to restore sight to patients with a rare cause of heritable blindness.
A more ambitious goal is to modify the “germ line,” the cells that give rise to sperm and egg, thereby creating genetic alterations that could be passed on to a patient’s children. The hope would be to eliminate inherited diseases like cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy or Huntington’s disease. Edits in the human germ line must be made on in-vitro-fertilized human embryos. And that’s where serious concerns arise.
First, CRISPR technology is not yet safe enough for medical use in human embryos. In early attempts to perform CRISPR edits in an embryo, scientists based in China detected unanticipated changes at multiple sites in the genome, which might have caused birth defects or diseases if the embryo had been brought to term. Recent attempts in an American lab were more encouraging, but improved accuracy resulted from unexpected and poorly understood biochemical mechanisms.
While some medical scientists argue that it’s morally wrong to withhold the cure to a genetic disease, the alteration of the human genome raises profound ethical questions. What if we used technology to select specific traits in offspring — height, skin color or intelligence? How would widespread genome editing affect the population genetics of our species in the future? If a sophisticated experimental technique like CRISPR is available only to the rich, could it exacerbate and entrench economic inequality at the biological level?
Issues such as these cry out for international consensus. For now, the laws of many Western European countries and the policies of American research agencies establish a moratorium on genetic manipulation of the human germ line. But a panel from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences recently issued a report exploring the way forward for human gene therapy. Inaction by society is not an option. It is crucial that the pace of policymaking match the inevitably rapid advancement of genome-editing technology.