The newest member of the University of Oklahoma College of Law faculty, Jessica Tueller, has argued that international law requires states to allow men in women’s prisons, bathrooms, and sports, dismissing many women’s concerns that such integration would reduce privacy and potentially facilitate assault.

Tueller is the author of “Sex/Gender Segregation: A Human Rights Violation, Not a Protection,” an article published in the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism in 2024.

The abstract for the article states, “This Article argues that human rights law should be interpreted to prohibit sex/gender segregation in all contexts, including education, employment, bathrooms, prisons, and sports, because of the gendered harms it produces.” The abstract acknowledges that allowing men to access women’s bathrooms and female prisons “would constitute a departure from the current approach” of most institutions but says that this “departure is needed because sex/gender segregation, no matter the context, perpetuates and reinforces gender stereotypes to the detriment of everyone, especially women and LGBTI persons.”

LGBTI is an abbreviation for “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender/Transexual and Intersexed.”

In a recent press release, OU officials announced that Tueller will join the faculty of the University of Oklahoma College of Law in the fall of 2025.

The release stated that Tueller “writes and teaches in the areas of family law; contracts; gender, sexuality, and the law; and international law.”

Jon Lee, associate dean for faculty development and research, said OU officials are “thrilled” to have Tueller join the law school faculty, citing her “impressive credentials and experience advocating for the rights of individuals and families.”

In her article advocating for the abolition of sex-specific prisons and bathrooms, Tueller wrote that the longstanding sex/gender segregation in law is the result in part of European jurists working from 1300 to 1800 who “reproduced and propagated their own culture’s insistence on the sex/gender binary (based on religious notions and ignoring existing evidence of gender diversity in Europe and elsewhere) and, relatedly, hierarchical sex/gender relations, as part of colonization.”

Tueller said continued opposition to allowing men in women’s bathrooms (and vice versa) is the product of “an alliance of conservative actors and radical feminists” who “promote the continuation of the law's binaristic, woman-specific approach to sex and gender while contesting the rights—and, at times, the existence—of LGBTI individuals.”

“Trans-exclusionary radical feminists, for example, have insisted that women’s oppression is rooted in biology and, following this, have argued in support of sex/gender segregation in sports, as well as in other contexts such as bathrooms and prisons,” Tueller wrote.

Tueller’s article stated that sex and gender are “socially constructed political, economic, and performative categories whose effects vary based on their intersection with other structures of power such as class and race.”

The incoming OU law professor also stated that those who continue to advocate for having women housed separately from men in the prison system “generally dismiss evidence that integrating prisons is not only possible but desirable.”

Tueller also argued that alternatives to separate men’s and women’s prisons need not be confined only to mixing those two population groups in prison.

“Arguments in support of other alternatives, such as prison abolition, should also be considered,” Tueller wrote.

Women who prefer to have sex-specific bathrooms for privacy reasons, including dealing with menstrual hygiene, are “neglecting menstruators who do not identify as women,” Tueller wrote.

The law professor also argued that general perceptions of biological differences are false.

“Another ostensibly biology- or anatomy-based argument for sex/gender-segregated restrooms, that men urinate standing up whereas women urinate sitting down, is also a cultural construct,” Tueller wrote. “Both men and women are able to urinate standing up or sitting down; they are merely socialized to prefer one posture over the other. To reflect this reality and to ensure restroom access for all, it might make more sense to divide restrooms into facilities for ‘standing up’ and ‘sitting down’ as opposed to facilities for ‘men’ and ‘women.’”

Prior to the Victorian era, Tueller approvingly noted, “both men and women regularly urinated publicly (i.e., on the street).”

Not allowing men into women’s bathrooms or women’s prisons is “gendered and heteronormative” and “obscures harms to individuals other than women as well as harms committed by women,” Tueller wrote.

Rather than reducing a potential male assailant’s access to female victims, Tueller wrote that women-only bathrooms “endanger women by isolating them and by giving a potential perpetrator an expectation of where they will be.”

Tueller previously worked as a clinical supervisor at the University Network for Human Rights and completed a Robina Fellowship at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

In the university’s press release, Tueller said she believes OU is the kind of place officials can grapple with “intellectual arguments.”

“The first academic conference I ever attended was hosted by OU Law and I was immediately enchanted,” Tueller said. “I had never imagined any faculty could be so enormously kind while also engaging deeply and critically with intellectual arguments. I am thrilled that I will get to be part of an institution that is as committed to building community among its faculty, staff, and students, as it is to rigorous teaching and scholarship.”

[Photo credit: Djinn Ali, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). For more stories about higher education in Oklahoma, visit AimHigherOK.com.]