Freak on a Urinary Leash: Trans People and Bathrooms

I found myself staring at a man’s balled fists the moment I left the toilet stall in that Sheetz. I can’t remember what he looked like, just those fists and the faintest hint of a wispy gray beard in the periphery of them.

“This is the Men’s. ”

That was the last time I ever used a men’s bathroom, I’d broken the rule I’d set for myself twice now.

It was a simple rule, really. Get in. Get out. Don’t make people uncomfortable. And yet, twice in the span of a week, I’d broken this rule and made people uncomfortable. Specifically, I’d made men uncomfortable with my presence in their bathroom.

That’s right. I, the trans woman, tried to do the right thing by continuing to use the men’s bathroom so I wouldn’t make any women uncomfortable. My body and the hormones had put me in an uncomfortable situation where if I wanted to keep my head on my shoulders I would need to start using the women’s. Just a few days prior, a man walked in as I was washing my hands. He looked around confused. Then he walked out again. Then back in. I apologized and grabbed a stack of tissue paper and told him the ladies’ room was out.

My experience in the ladies room was much different. They knew who I was and that I was trans, but the only discomfort in that room was my own when I didn’t know it was common to make conversation in the bathroom. That took some getting used to.

My experience as a trans woman going in bathrooms had, just 8 months or so into my transition, turned into a unique exploration of bathrooms as social infrastructure.

Peeing is important social infrastructure.

You might be surprised to find out that everyone pees. I know. I know. The sacrilege of it all. You might be more surprised to find out that public toilets are younger than the USA and have a long, storied role in determining the social freedom of people. The addition of public toilets, and who had access to them, wasn’t a matter of public or private safety but rather of who had the right to be in public at all — and for how long.

Timelines can be confusing, and history can disappear, the first public toilets we know of dated back to Ancient Greece, and they were for men and men alone who used sponges on a stick (which they shared) to wipe themselves after defecating and then placed the sponge back in a bucket of vinegar for sanitary reasons.

So how did women go to the bathroom while out and on the town, you might ask? Well, many chose to deliberately dehydrate themselves while out of the home so they wouldn’t have to pee at all. Those who were wealthy enough to afford a urinette, a device they’d pee into and empty out, used those where possible. Beyond that, you found a bush or a ditch to relieve yourself in hopefully out of view of anyone else. We all know how much modesty was preached in Europe in that era.

Oh, gosh, I did a time skip didn’t I?

You see, women did not have publicly accessible toilets until well until Queen Victoria’s reign (beginning in 1837). If you’re familiar with your timelines this means they also didn’t exist in the recently formed United States of America.

This combination of insistence on modesty (even showing your ankles was dangerously immodest back then) and lack of public infrastructure created what you might call a “urinary leash,” that limited how long women could be out in public and how far it was they could go even if they were out in public.

Of course, the United States took this leash a step further. The only available public toilets were at saloons (though calling those holes in the ground “toilets” was being quite generous) and of course women couldn’t go in saloons. That’s right, the very first public toilets in the United States were for the paying customers of the Saloons that were only truly available to white people with enough money to enter. Everyone else was on the leash.

The ladies rooms as you know them today start their story in 1851 at a public exhibition in the UK but didn’t see widespread adoption until WWII — because during the war those facilities were necessary for all the women who needed to work in manufacturing and so forth. This was a begrudging sort of inclusion born of economic necessity rather than any sense of inclusive altruism from our cultures.

Before they were absolutely necessary, nobody seemed to really care much for public toilets. You might be shocked to know that the model we have now of businesses providing those toilets for paying customers is a callback to the prohibition era when saloon closings made calls for public toilets more common. Ultimately, businesses won out and truly public toilets were rare and what ones did exist were closed down over time.

The story of these single sexed spaces, as folks like to call them, is not related at all to the safety or wellbeing of women in public. They are representative of the begrudging necessity of women in public under capitalism and the insistence of “modesty,” to this day. Even the design of women’s restrooms to this day is often slightly different and meant to more closely mirror the woman’s “natural environment,” (scare quotes) of the home.

The infrastructure doesn’t lie. Having multiple sets of bathrooms each with their own resources isn’t just expensive to do (nobody would do it if they weren’t legally required to by laws of the eras) but redundant, inefficient, and less safe (ironically). There are other cultural forces at play here and not a single one of them is respect for women.

How Trans People Clogged The Toilet Conversation

Trans people simply existing have a nasty habit of demonstrating the inequality in social infrastructure — and revealing the people who have a vested interest in protecting its status quo. This is true in all media, but especially in infrastructure that previously relied on presumed sex to distinguish what class of person you are and where you belong.

Back to my bathroom story in the present. Why was that man mad that I, a woman, had invaded the men’s room? Who knows. I wish I could have asked him what was going through his mind. Was he afraid I was indecent in going in there? That I’d dared to tread on men’s ground? Did he think I was just skipping the line to the women’s? Did I make him uncomfortable that he might see a nipple through the obscenely large cracks in the stall door? The mind ponders.

But he wasn’t interested in keeping me safe. That much I can tell you. He wanted to hurt me. I am really Tarantinoing this story today, sorry about that.

Instead of punching and beating me, he punched the hand dryer after he impotently tried to slam the bathroom door open before being stopped by the mechanism specifically designed to prevent doors from slamming.

These days, I go into the women’s restroom wherever I go. I relieve myself, wash my hands, and leave. Sometimes, I compliment other women on their clothes or hair and sometimes I encounter women with young children who smile and wave at me and then I harass my partners about wanting children. Not all trans women are afforded that opportunity — I know now that nobody looks at me and sees me as questionable, let alone trans.

But, alas, the powers that decide who belongs where have suggested that anyone born with a penis should use the men’s and anyone not born with one should use the women’s. And from that is born this graphic that truly irritates the shit out of me:

These sorts of graphics use bodies like mine to perform a gotcha rhetorically. They set up scenarios just like the one I was in with that elderly fist man, of course most would be jittery at a hyper feminine woman in the men’s and that masculine bearded dude in the women’s.

The thing is that this graphic, and all the ones like it, are simply not honest. Nobody is going to force those two people into different bathrooms. But, androgynous women who have short hair and wear jeans have absolutely been stopped for trying to go into the appropriate bathroom — especially by folks who want them to be single sex spaces.

This filter definitely applies to women of non-European descent, who have different features than the distinctly European features so craved by fashion magazines of years gone by.

The women’s room debate is creating a new kind of urinary leash between women who happily perform femininity in body and soul and everyone who doesn’t. Every woman entering a public women’s room in this environment is taking a serious risk that somebody, anybody, will not find them meek or dainty enough to belong there.

That’s a real risk. The internet is rife with examples of people posting pictures of famous women like Goldie Hawn or JK Rowling and folks immediately believing those women are trans and should be banned from most public life.

She who smelt it?

And therein is the rub, the conversation about who belongs in women’s rooms is not being lead by women but instead used to empower the same political parties descended from those who felt women had no place outside the home for any meaningful time. The ones who can’t reconcile that women have fine white hairs on their faces and everywhere else.

In this brave new world of JK Rowling & Co, you have to impress the men and their pet women with enough femininity to be beyond reproach so that nobody even questions if you belong. The woman in that graphic above will never be questioned when entering a bathroom, the only way to keep her out would be to, I don’t know, force her to wear a pink triangle or some other identifying feature.

But nobody would do that, right?

This world is a world of using the urinary leash for eugenicist purposes. Those with the right traits can safely leave their homes and use any bathroom they want. They will meet more people, go on more dates, and enjoy far more economic and social freedom than any other women.

Whether intentional or not, the result of bathroom bills and the logic behind them is a new class system between European beauty and conformism vs multi cultural, multi-ethnic, modern populations.

And like all bathrooms of years past, they are telling you who they think belongs in this brave new world of theirs. The most galling example of this is in the UK where trans folks are forced to use bathrooms that correspond to their proclaimed gender (for lack of a better term here) but may now be legally barred from using those bathrooms.

Everybody Poops: How to Make Bathrooms More Democratic

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you did want to create a safer, more modest, more democratic bathroom. You could do that cheaper than building two of them and way safer, too.

For all the talk of women’s restrooms being some haven of safety, they are anything but. Because they are divided by sex, there is less foot traffic into both bathrooms. That means if, hypothetically, some violent criminal was not magically stopped by the Women Only sign on the door that there are less people to stop that crime from taking place. Also the underlying assumption there is that even if there were other people, those poor meek women wouldn’t be able to stop that man.

Meanwhile, crimes of opportunity like those don’t usually take place in situations with increased foot traffic and safety features.

A more democratic bathroom would be much like you see today, a row of sinks with stalls along the walls, floor to ceiling. And you can easily reinforce such stalls to make them resistant to break-ins, making them safer in the case of shootings or other attempts at crime.

Such a bathroom reduces alienation between the genders and promotes the idea of equality. Men might finally learn to have more empathy for the experiences of people who have run out of tampons, etc., etc., but most importantly the bathroom becomes a human domain rather than a classed sorting system as we have now.

If we can’t pee together, we are not equal.

We should reject anyone who supports classed infrastructure of this sort that promotes the idea that one gender is weaker, frailer, and in need of protection and permission from the others in order to go outside.

We, all women, should reject JK Rowling & Co’s notion that single sex spaces are superior, safer, or sacred. They are hardly any of the above, they are vestiges of a bygone era in which women didn’t belong and they will be tools of creating an era where only the most classically beautiful, overtly feminine, women will be allowed to step outside their homes for any meaningful amount of time.

Bathrooms should not promote those narratives about women, they should be uncomfortably egalitarian experiences where we finally have the realization that everybody poops and everyone tries to remember the last time they ate corn. There’s no reason to divide that experience into classes and make everyone less safe and equal.

We should notice that not many folks are asking about who goes into the men’s room and question the discrepancy. This conversation is about who gets to decide who belongs in this world, and every person rooting for anti-trans bathroom legislation is asking you to turn that power over to conservative governments that have happily signaled that they will not stop with trans people.

The question isn’t “can we trust trans women in the bathroom,” it’s “why are we giving people who hate women the power to decide who’s allowed outside for long periods of time?”

Now, if y’all will excuse me, my legs have gone to sleep. I’ve been sitting in this Sheetz bathroom for way too long. We all know what that’s like, right? Stand up for what’s right once you get the feeling back in your legs from doomscrolling the internet. And don’t forget to courtesy flush the discrimination down where it belongs.

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