Pearl-clutching at the restroom door

A man and a woman were having dinner with friends at a Nashville restaurant, and decided to visit the restroom. Both of them entered the ladies’ room.

Immediately pearls were clutched throughout the building. A poor hapless employee was tasked to go to the restroom and order them to leave. They returned to their table, and the manager then visited the table to tell them that men are not allowed in the ladies’ room because “we are a family restaurant that welcomes children.”

The owner then felt the need to post on social media about this incident, declaring “there may be a politically motivated divide on this issue but it’s my pub and my rules.”

Actually, no, there are laws about this sort of thing, but not in Tennessee since their ridiculous “post a warning” rule for places with all-gender restrooms was ruled unconstitutional. Other states have laws for or against allowing all-gender restrooms (and they’re pretty much the states you’d expect — oh Florida.)

So declaring “it’s my pub, it’s my rules” is pretty disingenuous, to be generous with the language. No one gets to declare “it’s my pub” and have separate bathrooms for Black and white patrons, remember? They did pass that law in Tennessee.

There’s no indication from the kerfuffle that the couple were doing anything other than relieving themselves, and I think most everyone’s pretty solid on “get a room” for any other kind of activity. There’s no explanation offered, such as perhaps a disability requiring assistance. But the comments are the usual parade of awful, demanding that the couple’s names be doxxed so “we all know who they are” and “name and shame!” One pearl-clutcher declared “If I would have walked into your bathroom with my granddaughter I would’ve gone ballistic!” Oh my!

It was the Victorians who first put up this idea of gender-separated bathrooms, in case you were wondering. (No one was, but scratch a journalist, get a research paper.) The first known gender separation in restrooms was in 1851. Scholars studying this issue found that the entire concept is “deeply bound up with early 19th-century moral ideology concerning the appropriate role and place for women in society.”

Wait, what?

Yes, the sex-separated bathrooms were created in public spaces because working women were “unable to withstand strains, fatigues and privations as well as [men],” and so the restroom provided “a…