Abstract
This Article examines how the law is complicit in educating and socializing children into the cultural practices of gender and privacy. It accomplishes this by analyzing case law that involves minors and men’s public bathrooms. The men’s room is a place rife with social ambiguity, an ambiguity that has come to a head in recent transgender school bathroom cases. Although this Article is primarily concerned with the men’s bathroom as an important legal site in the development of gender and privacy for all youth, it discusses transgender (trans) rights cases as presenting the most fundamental challenge to the hegemonic logic of the men’s room. It is with recent trans rights issues that one sees privacy at its most conceptually problematic. This Article also includes other bathroom scenarios in an attempt to unpack privacy and gender in ways that yield useful legal concepts for resolving some of the more novel claims that will recur when boys encounter formal law in the men’s room.
Recommended Citation
Steven J. Macias,
Public Men's Rooms and the Legal Construction of Gender and Privacy,
93 U. Cin. L. Rev.
100
(2024)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.uc.edu/uclr/vol93/iss1/3
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