Help Make All DC Single Stall Restrooms Gender Neutral!

Calling all Washington, DC residents and visitors:  The DC Office of Human Rights requires that single-occupancy restrooms in the District be gender neutral.   Some DC bars, restaurants, and shops are already in compliance, but many are not aware of this requirement.  YOU can help make sure that everyone follows the rule!  If you live in or are visiting DC, check the bathrooms of the places you frequent.  If you encounter single-occupancy bathrooms that are marked "Men" or "Women," send an e-mail to DCTCBathrooms@gmail.com, or call 202.681.DCTC (202.681.3282) with the name and address of the establishment and the date you were there.  

For more details, visit the DC Trans Coalition website:

http://dctranscoalition.wordpress.com/campaigns/our-bathroom-safety-campaign/    

"One Guy, Two Women"

Some people are possessed of a bizarre compulsion to engage strangers in awkward chit chat on the elevator. One of my early posts on this blog details a number of cases of what I call "mistaken identity."  In that post I alluded to an instance on an elevator when a woman I'd never met asked me if I was Justin Bieber.  This kind of thing happens a lot, particularly on elevators - not my being mistaken for Justin Bieber, which for the love of god I hope does not happen again, but strangers trying to make conversation that for whatever reason, seems to frequently relate to gender or age in some way.  I understand that because of my gender presentation, it's normal for me to get "sirred" or for folks to assume I'm a dude.  People also tend to assume I'm young.  What I don't understand is why people can't just make normal chit chat, like commenting on the weather or talking about how painfully slowly the elevator is moving.  Just this morning, my partner, a friend of ours, and I were in a hotel elevator when an elderly heterosexual couple got on.  Out of the blue, the husband glances briefly at us and says, "One guy, two women.  That's the benefit of being young.  When you get older, you'll settle for one."  His wife nodded and said, "You'll only be able to handle one."  I said nothing, since my voice would likely give me away as female, and I wanted, for some inexplicable reason, to spare this poor old man embarrassment.  My partner tried to fill the silence by saying something neutral, without encouraging him to say anything more.  You'd think the whole exchange would have ended at that point, but no - the old man keeps talking (and of course we're all still trapped together on the elevator.  See above re: painfully slow elevator rides).  The man takes stock of the group again and adds, "Good-looking women, too."

We got off at the ground floor, and were still awkwardly stuck with this couple as we all made our way through the lobby, out to the parking lot, and finally, to the safety of our car.  We tried to deconstruct the conversation.  Our friend had not realized the man was referring to me when he said "One guy, two women," and had been extremely confused as a result.  We considered how this man arrived at the decision that his comments were appropriate ones to make to strangers.  Male bonding attempt?  Obviously he had assumed that I was not only male, but also much younger than I actually am - was he joking with me the way one jokes with a teenage nephew or grandson?  Still, we returned each time to the same question I always have in these kinds of situations - no matter what his assumptions about who or what I am, why say anything at all?  What compels people to joke like this with strangers?  Even if I was a teenage (or twenty-something, for that matter) guy, that whole conversation would have still been awkward and uncomfortable.  It's not nice.  It's not particularly funny.  It makes me wonder about people who can't seem to filter their thoughts well in public.  Like the folks who ask interracial families if their kids are adopted in the grocery check-out line (or worse - where they "got" the kids and how much it cost), or the folks who ask strange women if they're pregnant, or the lady who wanted to know if I was Justin Bieber.  It seems that sometimes otherwise mature, grown people just say the first thing that pops into their heads without regard for either logic or boundaries.  How someone else's family was formed is none of your business.  Whether or not a stranger is pregnant is also not your business.  And on what planet would Justin Bieber possibly be riding a random elevator by himself at a conference center outside Orlando, FL while wearing someone else's nametag?  Use.  Some.  Sense.  Common sense.

So, for the record: if you're a random stranger, as follows are the topics I am open to discussing with you:

1. The weather.
2. The location of the nearest gas station/restaurant/coffee shop/highway entrance/random landmark
3. Elevator speed.

I am open to a limited number of topics beyond the above-mentioned so long as they do not relate to any of the following:

1. My/your/the general public's dating or mating habits.
2. Justin Bieber.
3. My age (or your uninformed estimation of such).

Now that we've got that cleared up, I look forward to spending our next elevator ride together deep in blissful conversation about those rain clouds rolling in.

Gender Codeswitching

NPR has this great new blog called Codeswitch (www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch) that explores peoples' different uses of language and other forms of communication based on cultural context.  Last week, the blog's writers posted a fascinating piece on the use of a gender neutral pronoun, "yo" among youth in Baltimore (read the whole story here).

But the Codeswitch blog as a whole is not limited to language.  It expands on the linguistic notion of "code-switching" to reflect the way people navigate identity and culture in a diverse and complicated world.  In the blog writers' own words, "We're looking at code-switching a little more broadly.  Many of us subtly, reflexively change the way we express ourselves all the time.  We're hop-scotching between different cultural and linguistic spaces and different parts of own identities - sometimes within a single interaction."  This interpretation of codeswitching got me thinking about other means of expression and communication beyond language - particularly the ways in which genderqueer and transgender folks might codeswitch in different situations either to fit in, or be read correctly, or out of self preservation.

I know that I sometimes alter my gender presentation or my gender expression to fit certain situations - particularly ones in which I feel at risk of being harassed or bothered.  I do this frequently in public restrooms.  When I enter a women's room in a strange place - especially when I don't have a female friend or ally to accompany me - I pitch my voice higher, narrow my stance, zip up my jacket so folks can't see that I'm wearing a men's button-down shirt.  I pull my hair carefully to one side - out of my eyes, and try to smooth it down to make it look like I comb it (which I do not).  After I wash my hands, I hold them carefully and delicately away from my body, and over the sink until I locate the hand dryer or paper towel dispenser, which I use, also carefully and delicately, even though my instinct is to wipe my hands on my jeans and saunter out the door.  I smile and greet people as I enter and exit, so as to convey that neither I, nor they, are in the "wrong" place.  I essentially try to act out my interpretation of femininity as best I can.  Sadly, on my part, this may come across as more of a poor imitation of an effeminate gay man than an approximation of a short-haired modern lady.  Either way, I hate it, but acting this way makes me feel safer and more in control of my environment when I'm in a public restroom, which is a place that causes me significant and regular social anxiety.

"We're looking at code-switching a little more broadly. Many of us subtly, reflexively change the way we express ourselves all the time. We're hop-scotching between different cultural and linguistic spaces and different parts of our own identities — sometimes within a single interaction." - From NPR Codeswitch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity

I'm not the only genderqueer person I know who codeswitches in this way.  My partner and I recently went to see musician Tylan Greenstein (from the group Girlyman) perform a solo show.  I don't know exactly how she identifies herself, but Tylan has an undoubtedly masculine gender presentation.  During her between-song banter she described her own women's bathroom woes, particularly at rest stops while she's on tour.  As she tells the story, she pulls a neon pink plastic barrette out of her pocket and clips it in her hair.  She looks ridiculous, but she says, "When I put this on, I suddenly have no troubles at all."  She's half joking, half serious.  And I completely believe that if she's actually tried this, it works.

On the flip side of the women's bathroom is the scenario in the men's clothing section of the department store, which I also frequent.  Several friends and I who identify as queer or somewhere on the transmasculine spectrum, have learned the ins and outs of shopping for clothes alongside cis men.  We've joked that men don't take a lot of time perusing the options in the sock and underwear aisle.  They know their size, they don't care much about the color.  You go in, grab a package of undershirts and boxer briefs and get out.  Lingering there is not considered socially appropriate.  If you're trying on jeans in the dressing room on the men's side of the store, you don't make eye contact.  You don't talk.  In these situations, I have no idea if I'm being read as a teenage boy or a 30-year-old lesbian, but either way, I do almost the opposite of everything I do in the women's bathroom.  I widen my stance, don't smile, don't talk, and try to mess up my hair as much as possible.  I'm more personally comfortable with this presentation of gender, but the situation always feels charged anyway because I am still aware of my crossing into space that is not supposed to belong to people like me. 

Gender is like language in many ways.  It is one of the primary ways that we communicate to others, both verbally and not, how we wish to be perceived and where we think we belong.  Gender codeswitching takes place in many more places than in public gender-segregated space.  We codeswitch with our families, with our friends, at work, on the phone with electric company, at school, and with romantic partners.  Gender queer and trans folks, in particular, must often be fluent in the total language of both mainstream femininity and masculinity in order to function and sometimes to evade harm.  The need to codeswitch can cause queer and trans folks a certain level of anxiety and possibly paranoia that cis folks don't experience, but I also hope that the more we explore the boundaries of gender and blur the edges, the sooner we'll arrive at a point where gender codeswitching can be purely for fun, rather than for survival.    

Surviving the Wedding Industrial Complex

I'm getting married in one month.  My partner and I are pretty excited about it, though for a long time, we thought we would never get married or have a wedding because we feared the wedding industrial complex.  But in the end, we liked the idea of celebrating our relationship with our family and close friends.  We went to our siblings' and cousins' and friends' weddings and they were all like mini family reunions, or friend-unions, with food and drinks and happy dancing, so we finally said screw it, we want a party, too, and got down to planning.  In doing so, we have learned the following about weddings:

1. Balloons.  You must have balloons accompanying the sign announcing your wedding at the hotel where your guests are staying.  Signs without balloons are insufficient.  Guests are incapable of navigating a modest sized hotel lobby without the guidance of balloons.  If you do not have balloons, your guests will become confused and may leave the hotel believing themselves to be lost.  Hotel staff agree that this is non-negotiable.  You will be permitted to choose the color of your balloons.  

2. Name.  You should know what name you plan to use in advance.  It is not advised to have multiple names.  If your family and friends know you by two different names, you must reconcile this prior to your partner calling to book various wedding vendors.  If you become upset at any confusion caused by lack of clarity around which name to use for which purpose, you should become irate and immediately blame your partner for not reading your mind and knowing your every thought at all moments.

3. Flowers.  The belief that a wedding cannot occur without flowers is prevalent.  Some vendors seem to be under the impression that when you say "we do not want flowers," you mean "we are too cheap to buy flowers and we would be willing to consider flowers if they are not very expensive."  These people are not exhibiting good listening skills.  If you explain to a vendor that you don't want flowers and they respond by nodding and jotting down "$500 budget for flowers," you should not hire this person.

 4. Heteronormativity.  If you have a female voice, everyone you talk to over the phone will ask who is the groom.  Even when you are both standing there in person, people will ask about the groom.  This is called heteronormativity.  It is a common problem in the wedding industrial complex.   You will also encounter this problem pretty much everywhere else ever.

5. Vegetarian Food.  Many people will try to impress upon you the virtues of either the portabella mushroom or something called "deconstructed lasagna."  If you are not a fan of portabella mushrooms or if you do not understand what was wrong with intact lasagna, you will prove challenging to some vendors.  Luckily for you, the local foods movement means you will be able to find a trendy, earth-crunchy caterer who is aware that the only substitutes for meat in a meal are not piles of cheese or giant fungi.  Even in the midwest this miracle is possible.

Gender and Sex 101: There's No Such Thing as Male and Female

Gender is constructed
The single biggest idea that blew my mind in college was the notion that not just gender, but sex, too, is socially constructed.  I had been previously well-versed in the now familiar idea that sex is biological and gender is social.  This idea is simple.  People are born with a biological sex, male or female.  They are then socially conditioned in ways that reflect cultural expectations about how male people (men) and female people (women) should act.  Certain behaviors and characteristics are associated with masculinity, and some with femininity.  These behaviors are not necessarily biological or the same across cultures, but are absorbed by virtue of growing up in the place we're from and around the people in our communities.  I was developing a clear sense that gender was quite fluid, possibly existing on a spectrum and that anyone who said there could only be two genders was either lying or didn't know any better.  Still, I believed there were only two biological sexes.  I had no reason not to.

Sex is constructed, too
During my senior year of college, I took Sociology of Gender and learned that biology is just as complicated and confounding as all the expressions of gender and self that the human mind can produce.  I learned that while we may interpret our bodies as representing a biological binary, nature has other ideas.  Science has associated certain physical traits with biological maleness and femaleness.  When babies are born with penises, we call them male.  When they're born with vaginas, we call them female.  But that doesn't mean that everyone comes ready-made with the exact "right" set of those physical features that places them squarely in one category or the other.    What floored me most was what happens when science, or medicine - which is stuck like a stick in the mud on the notion that binary sex is a biological fact - is confronted by people whose bodies defy the sex binary.  The idea that all people are either male or female, and that these categories are strictly defined by specific body parts, is so ingrained that even when the medical field is faced with a newborn infant whose penis is "too small" or whose clitoris is "too big," doctors will surgically alter those infants to make them fit in one or the other category.  There's no room for a third (or fourth or fifth or sixth...) option.  There's no waiting for the infant to grow up enough to state its own preferences.  These are medical doctors presented with what appears to be a medical problem - a child that is not clearly male or female.  Instead of responding by considering whether we were wrong about there being only male and female sexes, we make those children become male or female.

I recently read a news article about small children, gender, and play in which a psychologist was quoted as saying that boys are "born with stronger connections in the area of the brain where visual spacial abilities are centered, and girls have stronger connections in areas where language and fine-motor skills are centered."  That statement struck me as both problematic and just plain wrong.  I happen to have spent a fair amount of time looking at studies on early childhood brain development and actually felt pretty confident that babies are born with most of their brains' neurons in place, but not the synapses - which are in fact the connections between neurons that form as we grow and allow us to engage in complex human behaviors.  My understanding was that while tons (actually, most) of a child's synapses, or connections, are formed very rapidly in the first few years of life, they're not really on the radar pre-birth or even at the moment of birth.  In other words, I wondered what the eff this psychology woman was talking about.  What did she mean that boys were born with more of certain connections and girls with others?  I started to doubt myself, since after all, this was a trained psychologist being cited in a major national newspaper, so I looked up some of the newborn brain stuff again, and not to toot my own horn, but from all I can tell, I was right.  Some synapses are in fact formed at birth, but very few - mainly the ones dealing with basic new baby functions - breathe, eat, sleep, poop.  I'd say it's a stretch to say all boys are "born with" more brain connections related to spacial abilities and all girls are "born with" synapses related to language and fine motor skills.  Maybe the psychologist means that baby boys' brains and baby girls' brains have different measurable capacities for certain skills, but I'm pretty skeptical about that.   But this idea persists - that boys and certain "natural" tendencies and girls have others.

"You know it's all around you, but it's hard to point and say, there"
Around the time they begin preschool, many - though not all - girls start demanding head-to-toe pink outfits, princess Barbies, and all things related to kittens and unicorns, while many - though not all - boys demand trucks, blocks, sports gear, whatever...  Even the most gender-conscious parents sometimes throw up their arms at this stage and wonder if biology really does play a role here.  They see all of the things they've done to challenge gender stereotypes and can't understand why their children haven't followed suit.  Gender is socially constructed, but it is a powerful construct and it permeates our every interaction and relationship.  Children don't just interact with their parents - they are exposed to gender norms everywhere they go and everywhere they look.  They absorb all of this.  Sex and gender norms are pervasive, but nearly invisible to most folks most of the time.  The point is that people witness the phenomenon of young children acting these norms out and chalk it up to biology.  That psychologist from the news article is probably right that there's evidence that later on, young boys do have more synapses related to spacial awareness and girls more synapses related to language, etc... but since synapses are formed (or not) as a direct result of infant and early childhood experiences, couldn't we also conclude that boys have greater spatial skills because we encourage boys to play with a lot of blocks and balls?  Couldn't we conclude that girls' greater language and fine-motor skills are the result of encouraging them to play with dolls and arts and crafts rather than some biologically-determined capacity they were born with?  

"Natural" Facts

Facts are not the only things that shape science.  Social pressures and norms shape science, too.  The subtitle of this post is misleading because there is such a thing as "male" and "female" - but these categories exist because we have named them so, not because they are biologically undeniable categories.  All throughout history, we have believed things that we now dismiss as awful - things that  were once accepted by the medical community as scientific "facts" - that women are less intelligent than men, that removing the uterus cures "hysteria," that people of color have smaller brains than caucasian people, and that African-descended people are "naturally" better athletes than people of other ethnicities.  For our generation, and maybe another few generations left to come, perhaps it's the idea that there are only two biological sexes, male and female, that one day our great-great-grandchildren will remember with shock and disbelief.        



  

Busting 5 Myths About Co-ed and Trans-friendly Bathrooms

I post a lot about bathrooms on this blog - mostly pictures of gender neutral bathroom signs, or my own often stressful experiences in public restrooms.  I cannot stress enough what an issue this is for gender non-conforming folks.  Finding and using a public restroom should be simple and easy, and it's just not.  The Arizona state legislature has been considering a bathroom use bill that would make a lot of trans and gender queer folks' lives even more challenging.  The original version of the bill would have made it a misdemeanor for trans folks to use bathrooms designated for the gender they identify with, rather than the one marked on their original birth certificate (how anyone goes about enforcing this, I haven't got a clue...).  It also seems that it would call into question any people using a restroom that appeared not to match their gender - such as butch lesbians using the women's room or boys with long hair using the men's room, as one author has pointed out.  After an uproar in opposition to the original bill, it was re-worked so that using the "wrong" bathroom would no longer be a crime, but so that it would also be legal for business owners to discriminate against trans folks (or any others perceived as using the "wrong" restroom) using bathrooms in their stores, restaurants, etc...

I think the simplest solution to a lot of public restroom problems would be to make them all co-ed or gender neutral.  Then everybody fits in every bathroom.  There's a lot of transphobia in general associated with public restroom use.  The original proposed bathroom bill in Arizona takes such phobia to the extreme, but I'm astonished at the number of ordinary people who are uncomfortable at the thought of co-ed public restrooms.  At home, male and female-identified people use the same bathrooms all the time.  Of course, folks tend to be more comfortable and familiar with members of their own household, but even when most people have a party, or host a big group of folks who don't know each other, they don't post signs on their home restrooms (if they even have more than one) designating one for women and one for men.  So why do this in public?  For multi-stall bathrooms, I understand people's hesitation a little more, though I don't necessarily agree (see below...), but designating single-occupancy bathrooms for men or women has never made any sense to me.  If I'm at the gas station and there's a line 5 deep for the one-hole "women's room" and no line for the one-hole men's, I'm going in the men's.    Still, I've found that people come up with all kinds of bizarre reasons that men and women should pee in separate spaces in public or that trans people shouldn't be able to use the bathroom they feel most comfortable in.  Most of these reasons are based on myths that I'd like to go ahead and bust.

1. Allowing trans folks to use women's restrooms, or instituting co-ed restrooms will be unsafe for women.
When people say this, they really mean they think it will be unsafe for cis women (see the blog glossary at the bottom of the page if you need a definition).  But not ensuring that people can use the restroom that matches their gender identity is also unsafe for women - it's at worst fatally unsafe, or at the best, extremely uncomfortable, for trans women.  Furthermore, just because a bathroom is labeled "Women" doesn't mean there's some magical barrier that will prevent male people from entering if they really want to.  If someone really wants to make a random attack in a bathroom, a sign on the door probably won't prevent it.  Gendered bathrooms create the illusion of safety, not actual safety.  Just watch the first few minutes of Copycat.  

2. Children will be exposed to naked people.
This issue relates to locker rooms more so than bathrooms and seems to be a main concern of some of the Arizona lawmakers who fear allowing trans folks to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity will lead to "naked men" in the locker rooms.  This is, frankly, ridiculous.  First of all, there's nothing inherently wrong with nudity in a locker room - when you go to the pool, people change in and out of swimsuits in the locker room, rendering them momentarily naked.  That's how swimming works.  Not everyone gets naked in the locker room anyway - plenty of people use the private changing stalls usually provided for more privacy.  If locker rooms are a problem for you or your children, change at home and enter the pool deck another way.  Or use the family changing room - many pools have one.  Our favorite neighborhood pool actually requires that children of a certain age be taken through the family changing rooms to the pool deck rather than through the adult locker rooms (that's not why it's our favorite pool, but it's not a bad thing either).  I also imagine that few of us are planning to leave our young children unattended in the locker room.  Though I have to say, of all the things I worry about related to my potential future children, saving them from a random naked person chasing them around a locker room full of elderly water aerobics ladies and adolescent lifeguards is not among them.

3. Children will be molested.
This is not a concern to be taken lightly but in this context it infuriates me for several reasons.  One, it implies that trans folks are all creepy child molesters just waiting for their chance to put on dresses and get into the women's room to kidnap little girls.  Such fears are both bizarre and extremely transphobic.  They've also got little basis in reality.  Second, it feeds into our hyped-up fear of strangers sexually abusing children when in reality, most kids who are abused are abused by people they know.  That kind of abuse is harder to see and easier to ignore, but it's unfortunately not rare and we do kids a disservice by freaking ourselves out about strangers more so than empowering children to have control over their bodies and to recognize and speak up about abuse when it happens - no matter who is doing it.  Third, like I said above, if people want to walk into the "wrong" bathroom with the express intent to harm a child, just having the "Men's" or "Women's" signs up on the doors don't create a magical barrier that none can cross.  If a stranger wants to kidnap a child, they'll find a way.  Be a good parent - keep an eye on your kids.  On that note, I think co-ed restrooms could make that admonition a lot easier.  More and more "family" restrooms are popping up all over the place, which are great, but a co-ed public restroom means that a parent of any gender can accompany a child of any age or gender to the bathroom, which feels a lot safer to me. 

4. Men are gross.
I hate to burst this bubble, but the truth is that everyone is pretty gross.  Yeah, stand-to-pee people sometimes miss and pee on the floor.  That's gross.  Make sure your shoelaces are tied tight.  Squat-to-pee people also sometimes miss and pee all the fuck over the seat.  Also gross.  Learn to hover.  Some people don't understand that garbage cans are for putting paper towels in, not next to.  Some people have problems with flushing (I'm all for letting it mellow at home, but friends, no matter where you're at, if it's brown, flush it down).  Some people who menstruate leave their used tampons and pads in the toilet, on the toilet seat, on the floor, even next to the sink (um, hello?).  I've used a lot of public restrooms - men's, women's, co-ed - and I've found that disgusting-ness is pretty equal opportunity.  Public restrooms?  Not clean places.  I'd follow the advice on the signs for the employees and wash your hands.  Maybe a couple of times.

5.  Transgender people want "special" rights.
Some people seem to think a law allowing businesses to discriminate against trans people using the "wrong" bathroom will only affect trans people, but the reality is that few of us fit neatly into the categories "male" and "female."  Few of us are wholly masculine or wholly feminine.  There are days when someone could say any one of us doesn't "belong" in one restroom or the other.  Who gets to decide?  And how will this make us happier or safer?  Trans folks don't want anything more special than the right to pee when they need to, in a place that won't get them yelled at, stared at, beat up, or kicked out.

Dear Justice Scalia: "Tradition" is a Social Construction. Love, Everybody

I so badly want to be done with this whole mess of the marriage rights business because there are approximately eighty bazillion things that I care more about, but some of the stuff people have said this week gets under my skin so much that I can't shut up about it.  Supreme Court Justice Scalia wants to know when exactly it became unconstitutional to discriminate against same-sex couples in terms of the right to marry.  I'm personally curious as to when exactly the "traditional marriage" Scalia is so fond of referring to became in fact "tradition."  I think Scalia himself estimated the figure at two thousand years.  Others have thrown out the casual "thousands of years."  Still others simply go with "time immemorial."  Many of these folks are learned individuals who have studied scripture and history and thus must be aware that there has been no single definition of or purpose for marriage since "time immemorial," or even for the measly past thousand years.  Marriage meant many different things during biblical times (including polygamy, violence, rape, and slavery) for instance, and almost never reflected notions of romance, consent, or monogamy that many folks value today.  In ancient Egypt, members of the royal family married their siblings to keep bloodlines "pure," a practice surely anathema to most of us today.  In ancient Greece, it was acceptable for men married to women to also engage in sexual relationships with other men.  In Europe, up until about a century ago, marriages among wealthy families, nobles, and monarchs were used as economic transactions or to bolster political alliances.  Very romantic.  There are a few societies in Asia in which it has been historically accepted for women to marry multiple men.  There are instances in pre-colonial southern African history of women marrying women.  In some cultures, wealth, property, and family names are passed down through the father.  In others, these things pass down through the mother.  In all of this mess, I'm having difficulty discerning how it is that we know what "traditional marriage" is and how, if such a thing does exist, do we point to an origin that is thousands of years old?        

Social norms evolve.  Marriage has evolved rapidly in the United States in just the past fifty years, with most changes having relatively little to do with queer folks wanting to get hitched to each other.  Fifty years ago, marriage meant that men went to work and women were denied career opportunities.  That is increasingly less the case.  It also meant that husbands could sexually assault their wives and it would not be considered rape.  Legally, at least, this is no longer the case.  Prior to 1967, it was illegal for blacks and whites to marry each other in some states.  That is no longer the case.  Prior to the 1970s, divorce was akin to a social and economic death sentence for many women.  This very different today.  For the generations before mine, there was still significant stigma attached to the notion of unmarried people starting a family.  Now such arrangements are common.  Fifty years before that, things had also changed a lot.  And fifty years before that, and fifty years before that, and so on ad nauseum.  So, Justice Scalia, I'll ask again.  Exactly when did the notion that marriage is between one man and one woman, 'til death do us part, become such an undeniable "tradition?"