Do I really need a urinal?

My partner Rebecca and I were half way home on a recent road trip.

We stopped at a restaurant in Des Moines, Iowa, for food and relief.

Two bathrooms lined one wall, both with this sign.

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I was born in America in 1949, when white, heterosexual, protestant men ruled.

Two years earlier Jackie Robinson smashed American baseball’s color barrier.

12 years later John Kennedy jumped over American politic’s religious wall.

In 1981, Sandra Day O’Connor started writing Supreme Court opinions

Tomorrow, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg will bring husband Chasten and twins Joseph and Penelope to the White House Christmas Party.

This year the New York City Marathon added nonbinary to its traditional men and women categories.

During my lifetime, it’s been one new group after another, with struggle and resistance, demanding America toward justice for all.

Reform Reform Reform

It’s what I love most about my country.

But

Difference and different are never easy.

Particularly for those used to being favored.

And who have to pee.

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When I come upon an all gender bathroom, what’s a white, cisgender, straight man who attends a Presbyterian church to do?

Except to ask myself:

Do I really need a urinal?