Sean C. Morgan
City Councilor Jeff Goodwin proposed an ordinance last week that would make it a crime to enter a bathroom, locker room or similar facility designated for exclusive use of the opposite sex.
He called it a “very, very draft” ordinance during the City Council’s regular meeting on June 14, and Mayor Jim Gourley referred it to the Public Safety Committee for review. The committee will consider the proposal at a meeting following the next regular council meeting on June 28. The council meeting begins at 7:30 p.m.
Under the draft ordinance, a violation would constitute a class C misdemeanor. It would not apply to any first responder operating in an emergency, children 5 years old or younger or to any individual of “abnormal gender.”
It also would not apply to any new public facility constructed more than a year after passage of the ordinance.
The proposed ordinance is a broad approach to dealing with an issue that has conflicting interests, Goodwin said, balancing the competing interests of individuals to have privacy in public restrooms.
As a draft, it needs further adjustments before moving before the council for approval, Goodwin said.
Recently, in Lebanon, a 9-year-old girl was using the locker room at the community swimming pool when a man entered and used the shower facility in front of her, Goodwin said. The man was wearing a woman’s bathing suit.
Lorlee Engler, Lebanon Pool aquatics director, said her staff spoke with the parent of the 9-year-old girl as well as the transgender individual and also reviewed video.
They asked the transgendered person to use the family changing room in the future.
A recently adopted board policy states: In an effort to meet the varying needs of all community pool users, all transgender individuals must use the family changing room to undress or shower.
“I want to provide pool access to everybody,” Engler said. “We get all kinds of people here. It’s a whole new world that everybody’s trying to navigate.”
And now is the time to take action, Goodwin said. Currently, anyone can walk into any bathroom.
His proposal requires bathrooms to be constructed differently in the future to address those competing interests while requiring that existing bathrooms are used as originally intended, he said.
His proposal explains that sex is an inalienable biological characteristic of human beings; a long history exists of sexually violent behavior between males and females; and that members of the opposite sex trying to view, photograph or inappropriately record each other for their own gratification.
“Because males and females have a long history of violent and abusive behavior, they have a strong preference for privacy from each other when in a state of undress,” the draft ordinance said.
“No way exists to distinguish someone who legitimately struggles with gender identity from a predatory individual,” the proposal added.
Struggling with gender identity is a “legitimate mental illness” and should be protected, the draft said, but the overwhelming majority of “public facilities privacy areas” in Sweet Home are divided between areas for males and areas for females.
The purpose of the division is to protect the safety, privacy and comfort of all occupants, the draft ordinance said. Those divisions have existed since the founding of the city and do not exist for discriminatory purposes.
The most effective method to balance the interests of all persons in the city in the future is to construct privacy areas with individual or family privacy areas and not group areas, the proposal said, but the cost of replacing all public facility privacy areas in the city is prohibitive.
The proposed ordinance would apply to public facilities, which means any place in the city that is open to the public. It refers to bathrooms, showers, dressing and changing rooms and any other area designated to providing privacy from members of the opposite sex.
The ordinance bases biological sex on the existing of sex-determining x and y chromosomes while recognizing “abnormal gender” among those who possess other combinations than xx or xy.
The ordinance also outlines the conflict of rights, between an individual who struggles with gender identity to use a privacy area that conforms to the person’s self-perceived gender identity and the right of other individuals to be free from using public privacy areas in the presence of individuals who are biologically of the opposite sex.
Present at the meeting were councilors James Goble, Ryan Underwood, Greg Mahler, Gourley, Dave Trask and Goodwin.