S.J. Quinney College of Law professor Terry Kogan was quoted in the April 1, 2016 edition of The Washington Post in a story titled, “How the bathroom became a political battleground for civil rights.” North Carolina recently passed a law that requires transgender individuals to use the public restrooms that correlate with the gender listed on their birth certificate.
“There was this notion that women were subject to hysteria, that they would decompensate under stress,” says Terry Kogan, a University of Utah professor who studies legal and cultural segregation by sex. Women’s spaces, Kogan says, were a way of “creating a haven in the public world.” Gradually, all of the segregated spaces fell away except for the bathroom.