Wichita library staff hassles mom for taking autistic son into the women’s room | Opinion
In 2017, I wrote a skit for Wichita Gridiron, the annual comedy show lampooning local news and newsmakers to raise money for journalism student scholarships.
The news story it spun off of was a bathroom bill that had been introduced in the Kansas Legislature that year. My skit featured local comedy legend Bucky Walters, who appears in drag at Gridiron every year, getting “arrested” for using a women’s restroom at the Orpheum Theatre while in costume for the show.
In my sketch, the KBI had been converted from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation into the Kansas Bathroom Inspectors, because during the Sam Brownback administration, there wasn’t enough money in the budget to repaint the letters on the sides of police cars.
It got a lot of laughs in the show.
But it’s not funny anymore. Now, it’s a sad reality we live with.
The deviously misnamed “Women’s Bill of Rights” that the Legislature passed last month, requiring all persons to use the public restrooms of their birth sex, hasn’t even officially taken effect yet.
And although transgender Kansans are the obvious target of the bill, they’re not the only ones liable to get swept up in the dragnet of the pee-pee patrol.
On Saturday, Karen Wild took her son, Ellis Dunville, to the Wichita Advanced Learning Library, to meet up with her mother, which they do just about every Saturday.
Ellis is 21, autistic and non-verbal. When he needs to go, the only way he can communicate that to his mother is to lead her toward the restroom.
He requires assistance with stall doors, so he doesn’t accidentally get locked in, and with hand-washing. So when he headed for the restroom, Wild did what she has done for his whole life and took him into the women’s room with her.
Ellis is obviously developmentally disabled, with no concept of sex or sexuality, and his using the women’s room had never been an issue before.
But on Saturday, it became one
Wild says she was followed into the bathroom entryway by a male security guard who chewed her out for taking her son inside. Ellis already was in a stall with his pants down, so there was no taking him out after that.
“I don’t know if he (the security guard) was going to say more or not, but a toilet flushed, so we were not alone and he was about to get caught in the women’s bathroom,” she said. “So he turned around and left, and I was like, ‘OK, well that was weird.’
“And then this woman came out of the stall . . . she’s suddenly like ‘He’s right, you know, he really shouldn’t be in here.’ And I was like ‘Well, thanks for your input on my parenting , ma’am, I’ll take that under consideration.’
“So then my mom comes in and as I’m getting Ellis’ hands washed . . . this woman comes in wearing a nametag with this very plastered on customer-service smile and she starts digging into me. . . . and it becomes clear to me that the security guard didn’t leave, he just went to get a woman. So she says “Ma’am I’m sorry, he can’t be in here, you have to leave, he can’t be in here.’ I was like ‘OK, he’s just waiting for my mom . . . I can’t make him leave right now, unless you want to have a behavior in the bathroom’ . . . and she’s saying ‘We have policies, we have policies.’”
Library Director Jaime Nix was apologetic and said it was “a customer-service learning moment for our staff.”
She said she hopes to talk with Wild about it, and the increased vigilance over the bathroom wasn’t because of the new law, but due to a recent uptick in restroom misbehavior at the library.
She suggested that Wild and her son should use the family restroom in the future.
Wild said she hadn’t thought to do that. She’d been using the women’s room at the library with her son for years without incident, and she thought the family restroom was more “for moms with small kids to change diapers or something.”
And what about other places, where there isn’t a family restroom?
“It’s not something I had even considered, which was stupid of me,” Wild said. “Do you want me to go into the men’s? I have way more awareness of that kind of thing than my son does. I would think it would be way more inappropriate for me to be in the men’s bathroom than it would be for him to be in the women’s room.”
So here we are.
You can add the developmentally disabled to the growing list of victims of Kansas prejudice, and this state’s bizarre fixation on who goes where.
This story was originally published May 24, 2023 at 5:12 AM.
