Justice, Law Schools

Yale Law School Is About To Make All Of Connecticut Get At Its Gender-Neutral Level

Connecticut can't want any bit of this lawsuit.

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(Photo by Sara D. Davis/Getty Images)

Yale University is suing the state of Connecticut. Not for being a soulless no-man’s-land exurb between Boston and New York that even Wonder Woman wouldn’t cross (that’s probably not a cause of action anyway). Yale is suing Connecticut over bathrooms. Good old, gender-neutral bathrooms.

Connecticut building codes require buildings to have a certain number of bathrooms. Those bathrooms have to be designated “men” or “women.” Yale wants to make the bathrooms in its law school gender-neutral. For the most part, Yale has single occupancy bathrooms anyway. Apparently some law students complained that there weren’t enough gender-neutral bathrooms at the law school, and Yale decided that the easiest fix would be to designate most of the bathrooms gender-neutral, instead of going through the process of building new bathrooms into its 315-year-old law school.

But the building code says no. And so Yale sued. Which is a surprisingly “normal” thing for the Yale School For Unicorns to do.

Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy hasn’t yet commented on the lawsuit, but I doubt that a Democratic governor of a blue state really wants to get into a fight with Yale over inclusive bathrooms. Assuming Yale hires some lawyers who graduated from UCONN to show them where the courthouse is, Yale can sue Connecticut as part of a “neat clinic opportunity” for bored 3Ls waiting for their clerkships to start. Fighting Yale on this is not a great use of state resources.

And what Yale is asking for is really very simple: it wants single-occupancy, gender-neutral bathrooms to count toward compliance with state regulations and building codes. Single-occupancy. It’s not dealing with the pervert fantasy Republicans seem to have about “boys” going into “girls” bathrooms to catch a glimpse of a woman defecating. We can put that battle aside for the moment.

All Yale is saying is that if you have a door and a toilet, you don’t need specific genitalia to bring the bathroom into compliance.

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Having a code that mandates a certain number of bathrooms for “men” and “women” is not on its face discriminatory. It wasn’t all that long ago that 315-year-old buildings in Connecticut did not have nearly enough “women’s” bathrooms. The distinction used to serve a purpose that promoted equality, not exclusion.

But it’s clearly outmoded now. Equal access now demands that people should be able to pee in whatever bathroom is closest to them, and that building regulations should not frustrate the attempts to provide gender-neutral access.

Yale has already won the issue, Connecticut can determine how embarrassing the state wants this lawsuit to be.

Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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