Visible Man: Which bathroom do you use?
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Jamison Green offers a man's POV on life in the trans lane. Opinion,
advice and information from an internationally respected leader of the FTM community.
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I spent the first 40 years of my life being interpreted as one of those "masculine-appearing women" who tend to have social difficulty when attempting to use public toilet facilities. Women tended to scream, or at least do a double take, when they saw me walk into a public restroom designated "Ladies." Sometimes, if other women came in after me or were chatting as they repaired their faces in the mirror, I would hide in my stall until they were gone rather than risk a confrontation. Friends waiting for me outside would complain, "You take the longest time in there!"
Starting my transition to a male body in 1988, I retained some of that androgyny for several years, so I was not surprised when I would give classroom presentations in the early 1990s that people would ask me "Which bathroom do you use?" I thought they were simply reflecting their perception of me as "between" sexes. By 1992, that question was very infrequent. But in 1994, when I was sufficiently masculinized that no one ever indicated gender uncertainty about me, that question came up once more in a classroom situation. A young man asked first what my chromosomes were (I don't know: they've never been analyzed); then he asked what my given female name was (I don't share that, as a rule); and then he asked, "What bathroom do you use?" I gave him one of those "What could you possibly mean?" looks, and responded, "I use the men's room. Do you think women want to have someone who looks like me in the women's room with them?"
He nodded thoughtfully, and I realized that some people have a very difficult time letting go of the idea that we ARE our bodies only, and the original shape of the genitals on those bodies is our primary defining characteristic. Once this young man knew that I had changed my body, he kept looking for other markers (chromosomes, given name, bathroom selection) that would fix me in the camp of origin, as if the social convention that women use women's restrooms would compel me to continue to use women's restrooms because I had been "born a woman." I wasn't sure he knew clearly what he believed about transsexualism, or whether he could articulate how his beliefs were changing as a result of having his assumptions about appearance and bodies challenged (the way only trans and intersexed people can challenge them), but I was pretty sure he felt his world had been shaken up.
When he tacitly accepted my physical appearance as a man, combined with courtesy toward women, as good enough reasons to use the men's room, I surmised that he was trying very hard to find an essentialism-of-the-body rationale for social behavior. He was probably in the biology-is-destiny camp, as many people are, even if they aren't aware of it until those beliefs are challenged in a way they can experience viscerally, and he was struggling mentally to permit my changed body to replace my body of origin because the evidence of the body he saw before him was compellingly "really" male.
Bathrooms are the bane of our existence. All people must relieve themselves, and we have developed the convention of the bathroom to both acknowledge this fact and expedite the process. Bathrooms are ubiquitous. They are necessary and, where transpeople are concerned, bathrooms are contested territory.
For something we'd rather not discuss in polite society, bathrooms command a great deal of public attention. We expect quite a lot from public restrooms: running water, soap, paper products, sanitary conditions, privacy and safety. We are all vulnerable with our pants down, or with our zippers open and our backs to the room so we can't see who just walked in. At least inside a stall there is an approximation of privacy. Safety is highly desirable in women's rooms, which are often thought of as something like a "free zone" where women can escape from men. Women don't want their safety zone violated, and this is a problem for people, trans or not, who don't (for whatever reason) appear sufficiently feminine to pass the glance test. If one doesn't possess the right look or body language, it only takes a fraction of a second to be judged not woman enough.
Men's public restrooms do not always afford either privacy or safety, and it doesn't seem like men, as a group, want to deal with that. Men just want to get in, get out and forget about it. Never mind that there are often no doors on the stalls or that many men's rooms are notorious for pickups, drug deals, or muggings. In men's defense, though, it's also true that not all men's rooms are dirty or smelly, and not all men are in there to take advantage of each other. Most men just want to relieve themselves, but they also rarely complain about substandard public facilities on their own behalf. On the whole, men don't seem as worried about having their space invaded by transpeople as women do, and this is usually connected to the issue of women's safety and the presumption that the dangerous people are the ones with (or who used to have) penises.
I had a great experience several years ago in a museum in Sweden. I followed the graphic "male | female" signs looking for the men's room, went around a corner expecting to find the familiar two doors, but without going through any actual doors I abruptly found myself inside a restroom facility with a long row of sinks on one side and a long row of full-length doors on the other. There was a woman washing her hands at a sink, and I stopped short, wondering how I had stumbled into the "wrong" toilet. Then a man came from one of the cabinet (stall) doors and went to a sink. Neither of them flinched to see the other. They just washed their hands. I had to laugh at myself for my reaction. I went to one of the stalls, and was delighted to find there were no huge cracks that anyone could peer through. The walls were solid between stalls, so no one could climb over or under them. There was privacy by design, and safety by agreement.
Unisex restrooms! Nobody panics, nobody acts stupid: It's a public place to take care of particular, common business. A transperson's dream! Nobody judges you to see if you belong, if you're in the "right" place. You're a person; it's a public toilet facility. No big deal. When one thinks about such an arrangement being installed in the United States, one realizes just how much we need to grow up and learn about respectful public behavior before we could adjust to such acceptance of our common humanity. Next month I'll write about a new effort to establish unisex restrooms in San Francisco.
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