Gender Neutral Bath Room Book Review

Who’s Afraid of Gender-Neutral Bathrooms?
“Today, men and women, not assumed only to be heterosexual, are expected to function at work alongside one another, eat at adjacent seats in restaurants, sit cheek by jowl in buses and airplanes, take classes, study in libraries, and, with some expectations, even pray together. Why is the multi-stall bathroom the last vestige of gendered social separation” (Gersen 7)? As many of us know, men and women are constantly being compared in our society, based on their biological aspects. These differences cause society to separate genders into “social spheres” this would not exist without a culture that is seemingly hung up on groupings and causing division. Jeannie Suk Gersen’s analytical look into gender
Watson, Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where she has taught criminal law and procedure, family law, and the law of art, fashion, and the performing arts (‘Harvard.edu”). Gersen has written many books, among them, being; At Home in the Law, A Light Inside, and Postcolonial Paradoxes in French Caribbean Writing. Her book, At Home in the law, has been awarded the Law and Society Association’s Herbert Jacob Prize for the best law and society book of the year. Gersen’s personal achievements include being a recipient of Harvard Law School’s Sacks-Freud Award for Teaching Excellence, serving as a law clerk to Justice David Souter on the United States Supreme court, also to Judge Harry Edwards on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C.
She presents her knowledge with a scholarly simplicity and apparent attachment that adequately sways her readers. As far as Gersen’s ethos goes, she’s able to provide many accurate court rulings and ordinances to support her argument because of her background in law and her persistence in keeping up with current law proposals imposed on gender. For example, Gersen begins her article by presenting a recently proposed Indiana law that “would make it a crime for a person to enter a single-sex public restroom that does match the person’s “biological gender,” defined in terms of chromosomes and sex at birth”(para 2). Gersen also presents logical content such as actions of historical figures and detailed explanations of court cases and their decisions. This is evident when she mentions the Senator Larry Craig scandal, where he being arrested at an airport restroom for signaling his sexual interest with a stranger (para 5). The connection of public bathrooms with condemned sexual behavior has correlations with our history of criminalizing