I’m not good on gender/sexuality issues, okay? I admit it. I’m trying to get better about this stuff but half the time just keeping track of the pronouns and the prefixes and the abbreviations is so fucking exhausting that I just try and default to “leave everyone the hell alone” and try not to worry about it beyond that.
But… okay, the author of this article is being a prat, right? A word that I very carefully chose because as far as I can tell it’s gender-neutral while still being insulting? I want to take real problems seriously but I don’t think you get to simultaneously complain that 1) you use the ladies’ room because you feel safe in there and 2) you are constantly assaulted in the ladies’ room because you don’t look like a lady. Those shouldn’t both be true. And apparently this person identifies as trans, but is biologically female and not looking to transition, which is the part where my lack of knowledge screws me up because I thought “trans” meant you were biologically female but wanted to present as male (or vice versa) which… once you’ve made the decision to go out of your house looking like a man, should mean “just use the damn men’s room, nobody makes fucking eye contact in there anyway?” Right? I think?
(Men do not talk to each other in the men’s room. You could be a goddamned three-legged blue-skinned space alien with an echidna dick and so long as you didn’t try and peer over the damn stall dividers ain’t nobody gonna look at you. This is known!)
Somebody help me out here and let me know what I’m missing.
(EDIT: relevant detail: I have been a man with long hair, long enough and curly enough that I’ve been addressed as “ma’am” by people who weren’t approaching me from the right angle to see my beard. Never had a single second of trouble with anyone in a men’s room. I call bullshit on the “every long-haired male” line.)
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Okay, I just confirmed with my husband…he has very long hair and has never been assaulted or spoken to in a strange way or any such thing while in a public restroom. (Though he did look at me like perhaps I had become a crazy person when I asked.) Sorry I can’t help clear up any of the actual questions you had. 😉
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Ummm….I’m confused. What, exactly, is the question here?
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Someone is an asshole, I think, and I’m not sure if it’s the author of the article for overdramatizing a solvable problem or me for thinking the author is an asshole.
I’m confused too.
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You’re not confused. Humorous perhaps, but definitely not confused.
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I have no idea what the author of that article wants. All public toilets to be mixed gender? Women to stop thinking of her/him as a male, even though he/she wants to present as male to the public? I’m with you. Author should use the men’s if he/she is presenting so convincingly male as to be regularly assaulted in the women’s. There are stalls in the men’s and while I’ve been led to believe that most guys use them only for #2, it’s not like the men’s room has some kind of bathroom police. Unlike the women’s, where everyone belongs to the bathroom police force because most dudes over 5 who are in the women’s room are there for nefarious purposes.
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For the record, I piss in stalls all the time. There are certain styles of urinal that I flat-out refuse to use under any circumstances, and on the rare occasions where the bathroom is crowded I’m much more likely to just wait for a stall then to violate the one-urinal spacing rule.
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I don’t think you’re an asshole and I don’t think the author of that article is, either. I wish he had made it clearer why he feels using the men’s room is an issue, because it does seem to be the obvious solution so there must be some valid reason why it’s not an option.
As a cisgendered woman (i.e., I’m a woman who looks and identifies as a woman), I understand the fear that women have encountering someone who looks like a man in the women’s bathroom. Unisex single-use toilets would be great but impractical anywhere there are large numbers of people passing through, like airports. You couldn’t possibly have enough single-stall bathrooms to accommodate everyone.
I think all of these issues about gender confusion are, in fact, confusing and it’s going to take time for our society to sort them all out. In the meantime, a little understanding and the attempt to start an honest dialogue would seem to go a long way. I feel like that’s what you were trying to do with this article, so kudos to you for that.
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OK, so I am a person who identifies as a butch lesbian on the edge of transgender and I get called out repeatedly when I try to use a women’s bathroom. You can read my post “This is the Ladies Room” here: http://aboyandherdog.com/2014/04/16/butch-lesbians-in-the-ladies-bathroom/
Not all people who are transgender transition – whatever you want to call transition (social? legal? medical?). Really, it is what is between your ears, not what is between your legs, that makes you trans. If you are born female (like me) but always felt you are a boy/man (like me) – then you are trans – even if you are wearing a dress and presenting as female. You are still trans. Mostly I wear jeans and a T-shirt, and in the 3 second look that most people do, I read as male. But if you looked longer, you’d probably realize that I am female. But that would be after you screamed.
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I doubt I’d scream, but then I wouldn’t be in the ladies room with you in the first place. 🙂 Thanks for commenting; this was helpful.
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Le gasp. Shame on you, you privileged cis gendered man, for being so insensitive to the trials and tribulations of others 😉
While I won’t argue with the author’s feelings of not being safe – everyone’s feelings are valid, even if their reasons aren’t – I can’t help but screw up my mouth at the whininess of the article. The “woe is me” tone of someone who is enjoying a good amount of success in their life does not inspire a lot of sympathy or empathy from me.
And on a side note: echidna dicks be freaky as shit.
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Man. I have so many opinions that I’ll avoid on the transgender issue. I had a person on Tumblr chew me out because they wanted me to refer to them as ‘bunself’ instead of he, she, or it. Like… what? How do I even do that? They claimed to be trans* and said they had the right to their own pronoun but… talk about setting a movement backwards. You want people to take your plight seriously when you think you deserve a personalized pronoun? (This person even went so far to say they didn’t know what Gender Dysphoria IS — pretty much proving my point to them all together.) Man. Anyway.
Ultimately, I think people, regardless of gender identity, should stay to the biologically assigned gender when it comes to restrooms. The facilities are geared to the biological side of the gender anyway — tampon dispensers, urinals, etc.. Of course, if you feel more comfortable in the men’s room, I wouldn’t stop you from going in there. I think the issue for me is a more personal one — if a trans* man came into the woman’s restroom and it was legal for him to do so, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. But how would we be certain it was a trans* male? There are no doubt shitty people who would take advantage of a loophole in the law to pretend they were trans* and peep on women (or worse, god forbid). The same is true vice versa. I would feel way too uncomfortable if a biologically male person came into the woman’s restroom. Just because YOU know you’re transgender, doesn’t mean I know. If this makes any sense.
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Speaking of men’s room, John told me he couldn’t believe the guy next to him was using the latrine and texting. Nothing to do with genders, but that’s funny awful, right?? 🙂
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God yes.
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