The academic plumbing perplex: more Charter bullying from the unisex crowd.

Much of modern life's numbing complication is due to a surfeit of less than compelling choices in matters of negligible consequence. Forget Baskin & Robbins' much-ballyhooed 31 flavours of ice cream; have you seen how many different kinds of balsamic vinegar are available at the grocery store lately? Or consider the complicating new trend underway in those rarely considered, acoustically resonant chambers routinely located just off the main halls of Canadian academe.

There was a news item this summer about the growing demand for universities to provide public washrooms for that teensy minority of students who do not consider themselves to be either male or female. A few years ago we heard about such demands being made at Montreal's McGill and Concordia Universities and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Now it looks like some plumbers and display sign designers in the Winnipeg and Toronto regions may be picking up a little extra work as well. Now the call for overhauling campus bathrooms has been raised at the University of Manitoba, the University of Winnipeg and Toronto's Ryerson University (just around the block from the Catholic Insight offices).

For far too long, advocates for this innovation argue, insensitive, close-minded, reactionary lackeys of the patriarchy have blindly accepted the tradition that men's rooms and ladies' rooms are all that are required to serve the evacuation needs of the human population. Well, not any more, Bub.

Oh sure, it may just be a tinkle or a spurt here and there right now, but forward-thinking university administrations are getting with the flow sooner rather than later. The era of oppression in personal waste management is finally being flushed away forever as one Canadian academy after another prepares to outfit and designate gender-neutral washrooms. Spiraling tuition costs? Appalling professor-to-student ratios in the lecture hall? Chronic under-funding in the arts faculties? Yeah, yeah, they'll get around to addressing that stuff in a minute. University administrators are a little preoccupied right now with assuaging the hurt feelings of a handful of transgendered megalomaniacs who think it's the university's problem to fix when the sight of a male or female pictogram on a washroom door magically detonates an identity crisis.

For most of us, visiting a public washroom isn't about affirming our identity or registering our niche in the social hierarchy. Washrooms are a convenience that certain institutions provide for carrying Out some pretty mundane functions. Not to be indelicate, but peeing is really the only variable here, and depending on the equipment you currently employ for that purpose, you nip into this room or that one and it really doesn't have to be a big deal.

While I have it on good authority that things can get a little more chatty in the ladies' than the men's room, even there, I'm assured, socializing is optional, and it's easy enough to execute a washroom visit without exchanging a single word or a glance with anyone. Two minutes maximum and you're out of there.

There are no pictograms whatsoever on transgendered washroom doors and because their patrons feel uncomfortable identifying themselves as either "men" or "ladies," the new signage simply says, "washroom." You might expect that a washroom designed to service so diverse a clientele would be equipped with every plumbing fixture known to man or woman or whatever. But instead, urinals are banished from these chambers altogether. And so far, all these transgendered washrooms have only the one toilet. Strange, isn't it, how the drive to affirm diversity so often results in a monotonous uniformity all around, an actual impoverishment of choices and descriptors for everybody?

If there's a kernel of good news hidden in this story, it is this. Virtually every household in the land is already ahead of the curve on this one. We may only have one bathroom at our house but at least the gender equity police aren't going to be able to slap us with a court order in ten years time to overhaul its design or get dragged before a human rights tribunal hearing. But as an unknowing owner/operator for all these years of a transgendered washroom, I have a warning for unwary university administrators who might think their washroom crises are behind them now that they've figured out how to accommodate the transgendered.

In actual fact, you poor eggheads are setting yourselves up for the biggest and most intractable bathroom fight of them all. When it comes to transgendered students with what we traditional troglodytes think of as 'male' equipment, what will be your policy about lifting the seat and putting it back down when they're finished? And if rules are required in this matter, just how do you propose to impose them on people who insist on seeing themselves as the glorious exception to every convention going?

Herman Goodden is a journalist who writes from London, Ontario.