The North Carolina law to vacate Charlotte’s bathroom ordinance has got me wondering if there are ways to come up with solutions to bathroom ordinances without wasting time with new laws? It seems foolish to me to have the government get involved in “all the things” when there may be simpler solutions like tweaking certain policies here and there, instead of holding hearings and playing political football. The biggest is obviously what to do with public-use restrooms, and people are also going to question whether private businesses should be allowed to deny restroom access or not. This is a bit of a “middle ground” approach, but it’s one which might work if people take a deep breath and stop and think about it.

When it comes to public use facilities (aka government owned ones), the best solution may be having a bathroom monitor of some kind in every restroom. This means when someone walks into a bathroom at a government-owned building they see a police officer or security guard of the sex of the designated bathroom sitting on a stool by the inside of the door. If the officer believes the person going into the restroom is there for nefarious means, then they can be stopped and told to leave. This does NOT mean doing a bathroom version of “stop and frisk,” but simply allowing officers to give someone a once over as they enter. It might even prevent someone from trying to sneak into a public facility to install a camera or sexually assault someone because they’d know the law was tangibly there watching them.

The main problem with this idea is how does a female cop or security guard decide whether or not someone walking into the woman’s restroom is there to do harm. Can the “eye test” be seriously trusted or will bureaucrats get involved with either extremely high or low bars of “acceptance” for transgender people wanting to use the bathroom. One possible solution is installing a camera facing the door of every restroom, so if a complaint is lodged then there’s video which can prove the officer was in the right or in the wrong. That might cause a city or state to deal with a legal bill at least once, but I seriously doubt a situation like this would happen on a regular basis.

The private sector is even more simple: let individual businesses set their own bathroom policy. If it means Business A allows people into the bathroom of their gender (or gender choice), then fine. If it means Business B doesn’t, then that’s fine as well. It should also be completely acceptable for Business C to either not have bathrooms at all or have a single use bathroom either sex can go into one at a time. Businesses can also hire security guards to be a “bathroom monitor” if they want or assign employees to watch the bathrooms. But this shouldn’t be forced upon any private business because they should not be coerced to do something they don’t want to do. If people don’t like it, then they can first go talk to the manager or the owner about the problem. If that doesn’t solve the issue, then they can go to press, tell their friends, organize a protest, create a petition, etc. etc. It’s then up to the private business to decide whether they’ll keep their policy in place or change it to adhere to the wishes of the other side. There are options for people who believe they’ve been wronged to ask for a change in policy, without getting the government involved.

This idea isn’t perfect and will probably make one side or the other angry (or both). Obviously there are people on both sides of the bathroom issue who want to shove their beliefs down the throats of the other side. There are also logistical issues, and how people will react when they discover what the policy is or isn’t. All this shows is there are other options out there, outside of just passing one law after another in hopes of “solving” (or complicating) a problem. Yes, it does tend to expose hypocrisy from certain people on the Left when they decide to act all high and mighty about a law in the U.S. only to go to a country where certain behavior is banned outright (looking at you Bryan Adams). But this at least is a bit of a middle ground which will allow both sides to enjoy a certain kind of victory, and protect the individual freedoms of private businesses who shouldn’t be under the auspices of government anyway. It also destroys the narrative of the Left that all the Right wants to do is get into the private lives of others.