One of the earliest clues Natalie was transgender was her admission to me how uncomfortable she was in men’s bathrooms. At the time she was presenting as a man, so why would using a urinal bother her? “It doesn’t feel right to use a urinal,” she’d say. “I wait for an empty stall,” she’d say. “It’s hard to explain,” she’d say.
Bathrooms are a problem for transgender people, sometimes even before they begin to transition.
A student once told me she was confronted in the girl’s bathroom by a femme who thought my student was a boy. The femme told her she had no right to be in the girls’ bathroom. My student came to my office and told me how humiliated and demeaned she felt. Where was she supposed to go? I told her she was supposed to go wherever the hell there was a toilet.
I wear men’s shoes sometimes, and occasionally wear wingtips to work. Once while wearing wingtips and using the restroom at work, a woman waited for me to come out of the stall. She was mildly surprised and relieved that I am indeed a woman. “I was certain a man was in here,” she said. What would she have done if I were a man? Or a trans woman? Why was she waiting for me, a stranger, in a public restroom? What is stranger: my wingtips or this woman’s need to wait and confront me when I was simply taking a pee?
The first time I ever used a gender-neutral bathroom was in some punk bar in St. Louis. I don’t remember the name of the bar, but I remember being both frightened and exhilarated to share a public restroom with men. The experience turned out to be anti-climactic. The only drama was when I had to ask a dude and a chick to stop snorting blow off the bathroom sink long enough to allow me to wash my hands.
The second time I used a gender-neutral bathroom was at a gay bar. The third, fourth, fifteenth, and 200 hundredth times I have used gender neutral bathrooms are a forgettable blur. They’re no big deal. Not really.
So why the bathroom hysteria by the conservatives? Why all the fear mongering? The people who have the most to fear are trans and gender nonconforming people. Where are they supposed to go when they need to go? And why do people think it’s okay to “police” a public restroom?
When I was in college, a creepy classmate asked me on a date, and when I said no, the creep harassed me all the way down the halls. To escape him, I ducked into the women’s bathroom. He followed me in. No amount of signage stops a creep from being a creep. I reported the creep to the authorities but my complaint got zero attention or traction. It was the same year one of my female classmates was stalked by a different college classmate creep. The school authorities didn’t help her either. Where were the conservervative “protectors” of women and restrooms then?
In March 2020, the same semester everything shut down because of the pandemic, one of my transmasculine students was writing a proposal asking the college to add more gender-neutral bathrooms on campus. My student told me he had to race across campus to the Student Center to use the only bathroom designed for him, people like him, trans people. “It’s really the handicapped bathroom,” he said. “It’s gender neutral, though, so that’s where we go.” I wondered why he couldn’t just use the men’s bathrooms. He looked at me like I was from a different planet. “Look at me,” he said. “I don’t want to have to fight,” he said. “I just want to take a piss in peace.” The pandemic upended his proposal. I’m not sure he sent it to the powers-that-be. If he did, I’m not sure if he received a response. Did his proposal get any attention? Did it get any traction?
Where does someone go when they’re told there is no place for them to go?
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