Before joining the clamor about transgender rights to choose which public restroom suits their identity, let us acknowledge an unacknowledged truth:

Pretty much nobody is comfortable in a public restroom.

OK, that’s an overstatement. A few highly evolved or completely numb individuals can poop carefree in tiny stalls with doors that don’t lock or shut or even go high enough to shield the head and shoulders.

But for the rest of us, if we could hold it till we get home, we would. And even then, alone in our own houses, we sometimes lock the door and run the faucet for complete privacy.

This is one of those topics where it’s foolhardy for any one person to speak for the group, I realize. We each have our own dearly held and supersecret set of hang-ups in this regard. Some may have become desensitized growing up in a big family with a small house. Some can carry on long, chatty conversations with a person in the neighboring stall without fear of fleeting flatus or losing focus. Some people aren’t bothered at all.

And others would rather get a raging kidney infection than risk social contact of any kind in the lavatory.

Perhaps the solution to all manner of bathroom angst is for builders of public buildings to build more single-stall facilities.

Moms with little boys know what an ordeal it is to drag a 6- or 7-year-old boy into the pink stall with them. But what else can you do? Most moms wouldn’t send their little guy alone into a men’s bathroom — what if he needs help? She’d have to go busting in there. Dads with little girls have their own version of that awkwardness – daddy can’t very well take a girl into a men’s room. Thank goodness for single-stall family restrooms. When you have little kids, you memorize the location of every public one-seater in town.

Caregivers who are the opposite gender of their patients would benefit from single stalls as well. These private bathrooms would be there for whoever wants them — the desire for privacy shouldn’t be a thing to feel ashamed of. It’s natural and it’s a basic human right.

None of this is to minimize the struggle for equality and freedom of choice for trans people. We live in a complicated time where learning to be open and accepting isn’t something we get all at once. We have to take out our biases and assumptions over and over again and take a hard look at stuff we thought we had right and make adjustments as we go. If that means getting used to somebody in the next stall that doesn’t look the way we think somebody in the next stall should look, then get used to it. (Or stop looking, for goodness’ sake!)

But along with fair policies that ensure access to the bathroom of choice for trans people, maybe more public places and schools can make privacy a choice for everyone.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.