We’ve fought about who should be allowed in public restrooms before — by race

Schools reacted with a gamut of emotions to the Obama administration’s letter advising them on transgender bathrooms Friday, but all the toilet talk isn’t new. Fights over who should sit next to you in the bathroom stall have lasted as long as people have used the modern plumbing that makes them work.

The division of bathrooms between men and women dates back to Victorian times, when early women’s groups lobbied for female-specific bathrooms in public spaces. The United States took up the idea shortly thereafter, when Massachusetts passed a law requiring gender-specific restrooms in 1887, according to Slate. By the 1920s, most states had similar laws on the books, according to the Rutgers University Law Review.

The separation was about more than just decency. One study at the time wrote that female-specific restrooms were “a protective haven… where a woman could seek comfort and rest when her weak body gave out on the job,” the Rutgers paper documented.

Bathrooms developed another classification in the United States, based on race. Jim Crow laws throughout the mid-20th century restricted several public spaces, including bathrooms, between whites and blacks.

Segregation was more than water fountains or bus seats: restrooms for black people were often more distant and rarely “separate but equal” as the government had required. It took executive orders and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to integrate those accommodations, and even then slowly.

Men’s and women’s signs on bathrooms are still ubiquitous, and the latest salvo over bathrooms stems from a North Carolina law requiring people to use the bathroom that correlates with their birth sex. The law, passed in March, has since generated controversy and a legal battle with the federal government.

The Obama administration’s letter to schools Friday rejects that law without naming it, telling schools to allow transgender students to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity. North Carolina and the Department of Justice sued each other earlier this week over the law, and the Department of Justice has threatened to pull some federal funding if the law remains in place.

This story was originally published May 13, 2016 at 10:49 AM with the headline "We’ve fought about who should be allowed in public restrooms before — by race."