If it is OK to segregate graduation ceremonies, it is OK to segregate bathrooms (and bathing suits for that matter).  As I walked into the women’s bathroom, someone who was clearly a biological man was walking out. Believe me, I didn’t need need my eyes to make this identification, my nose made the identification first.

Let’s face it Ketanji Brown Jackson, biological men leave a pungent aroma after defecating, and biological women do not. This is something that has been known to all women since Eve. You do not have to be a biologist to know this.

The source of the aroma is the microflora (how’s that for a euphemism) in the gut. According to Edwin McDonald, MD, assistant professor of gastroenterology at the University of Chicago, and someone who is known to follow his nose no matter where it might lead:

A stool’s smell depends on the types of bacteria living in the gut, as it’s the bacteria that converts foods we don’t digest well into gasses. Due to this variation in the types of bacteria, the types of gasses produced may also vary between men and women, and, as we all know, some gasses smell worse than others.

And research published in PLoSOne tells us that it does:

at the genera level, we observed that the abundance of the Bilophila genus was higher in women than in men (P = 0.002, Q = 0.041). Higher presence of Veillonella (33/39, 84.6% vs. 17/36, 47.2%; X² test P = 0.001, Q = 0.019) and Methanobrevibacter genera (33/39, 84.6% vs. 17/36, 47.2%; X² test P = 0.002, Q = 0.026) was observed in fecal samples from men compared to women.

In addition, at the bacterial species level, we observed that the abundance of Bacteroides caccae was higher in women than in men (P = 0.009, Q = 0.035). On the other hand, the abundance of Bacteroides plebeius was higher in men than in women (P = 0.001, Q = 0.006). Moreover, we observed a higher presence of Coprococcus catus (30/39, 76.9% vs. 13/36, 36.1%; X² test P<0.001, Q = 0.011) in fecal samples from men compared to women.

There is a distinction or a distinktion between men and women. So let biological men and their minions of microflora and women with ours defecate in separate but equal bathrooms.

Being colorblind is not kind, and neither is being microflora-blind!