his is about more than policing convicts, it’s about policing the boundaries of masculinity and reinforcing homophobia. Kimmel states: “Homophobia is more than the irrational fear of homosexuals…[it] is the fear of other men – that other men will unmask us, emasculate us, reveal to us and the world that we do not measure up, are not real men.”
The pink and blue shoe keychains might not seem like a big deal, and indeed most people don’t think twice about them. But imagine how much harder it could be for some trans and intersex people to negotiate a restroom ritual like this. Gender-neutral washrooms are a big step towards fixing this issue, but so is realizing that blue-pink colour coding is just the tip of the iceberg of things we use to arbitrarily divide “masculine” from “feminine”.