When Your Rights Interfere with My Privacy: Transgender Toilets, Bashful Bladders and the Law

Several years ago our local Carmike Cinemas expanded. We suddenly had far more movie choices, but if you watched a flick at the far end of the theatre, you were in for quite a hike back to the main restrooms in the lobby. If you were a man.

But for women, who often have to pee more frequently than men, for quite a number of reasons, the engineers placed one restroom at the end of the new addition. Men who need the loo have to either hold it until their movie is finished, or return to the lobby.



Or at least they did until last Friday.

So imagine my surprise when, during the middle of a movie last year, I walked into the newer, ladies only, restroom and found a man standing there peeing in one of the stalls. (Yes, he left the stall door open.) This is a blow-by-blow account of what happened next.

Me: “What are you doing in here? This is a ladies room!”

Him: “Sorry, I didn’t know.”

Me: “There’s a sign on the door!”

Him: (Beats a hasty retreat before furious woman notifies management.)

Me: (Sits down on commode but feels totally weirded out, for fear another man might walk in.)

Now, you should know that this public restroom is situated at the long end of a dark hallway, and it’s rare to even find another woman inside. Plus, if you needed to yell for help, the chances of being heard are slim to none, given that the lobby is so far away and the volume is so high in the adjacent auditoriums. So women like me might be a little more nervous using this restroom.

What is a “woman like me?” Well, I’m a rape survivor, and my rapist was a man—which makes me like at least 19.3 percent of all American women. Women who will not be comfortable finding a man inside the ladies room. Women who will be afraid to use the bathroom in public, if they think men will be using it, too.

Maybe that’s because women have to get undressed to do their business. Unlike men, if all they need to do is take a leak. We literally have to unfasten and pull down our pants, or lift our skirts and/or pull down our pantyhose, before we can pee. So imagine how it would feel to be a survivor of rape, and sit in a stall exposed in this way—when in walks a man.

This is not about fearing people who are different from me, even though men and woman are biologically different. (At least we are at birth. After that, with today’s sex-change operations and everything else, anything goes.) This is not about the rights of transgender people, some of whom I know personally.

This is about privacy. And my right to have it. This is about being about to perform a basic bodily function that many Americans have trouble performing in the safety of a public bathroom stall, for various reasons, even on a good day.

As a child, when I reached a certain age, I developed something called modesty. I still remember my dad commenting on it to my mom, because I began covering myself when I bathed and wanted my bedroom door closed when I undressed. I was ten. He was my father, but I didn’t want him seeing my girl parts.

I think most children, certainly many of them elementary school age, would feel the same way. “No boys allowed,” little girls tell little boys who, in jest, try to come into the girls’ room at school. (And this doesn’t even touch on the locker rooms, where showering naked with students who are the same gender can be traumatic for some kids.)

Almost my entire adult life, possibly as a result of being raped, I’ve had what is known as a bashful bladder. I have a hard enough time using the bathroom when other women are in the stall next to me, so who knows what would happen if I needed to go and a man was there.

And one of my three daughters was so uncomfortable using public bathroom facilities that the entire time she was growing up, she would rather risk getting a urinary tract infection, rather than pee whenever we were away from home.

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Now, for a confession. I have gone into a man’s restroom. Mostly by mistake. The second I realized my error, I turned around and quickly walked right back out—because I knew I was the wrong gender. But honestly, I had no desire to see strange men doing the private things we all do when we use the bathroom.

However, on occasion I have intentionally used the men’s room. I did so on my recent drive home from Florida to West Virginia, when I stopped at Starbucks and whoever was in the ladies room was taking too long. But I knew that those public toilets are for single use, and if the door was unlocked, chances were good that no man was inside in a compromising position. So not only would I not be uncomfortable, I wouldn’t embarrass some poor man on the pot. (Unlike here, when I did just that.)

My most significant turn in the men’s room came in the early 1980s, when the Beach Boys performed on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. I was nearly nine months pregnant and the line to the ladies room was far too long for my poor bladder. So the three men in my family barricaded the entrance to the men’s room and gave me some privacy to pee. And started a trend, since many other women quickly joined me there.

The country is in turmoil over President Obama’s transgender bathroom proclamation last week, and I can see why. Everyone has to pee. Everyone has a right to feel safe while performing such a natural bodily function. But when that person’s right interferes with my privacy, I’m not a fan. At all.

However, I also think there’s an easy solution: single stall, unisex bathrooms, outside and in clear view of the public, like San Francisco already has. Those things are so small, you’d be hard pressed to get more than one person inside. Then we will all feel safe. Problem solved. (Except for you parents with diapers to change. Sorry about that. Go find a park bench somewhere.)



Speaking of parents, for years now we’ve been afraid of sending our children alone into public restrooms. So we accompany them. Or, if there’s only one parent, and the child is the opposite sex, that parent will take the child into the parent’s gender-specific bathroom. It’s what we’ve grown to do, during the era of Sandusky and other predators. Transgender people, in and of themselves, are not predators! But as a parent, I’ve seen “dirty old men” lurking outside restrooms who probably were.

We can just keep doing that, and, for women like me, adults can accompany adults. Hey, I have no problem taking my adult brother, son or male friend into the ladies room with me. They can simply self-identify as transgender, even though they aren’t, so I feel safe when I’m trying to use the loo.

Of course, by then my bladder will be so bashful I won’t be able to.

* * * *

Boy, have I been busy! My seventh book, Shatter the Silence, a love story and the long-awaited sequel to my first memoir was released May 7. That’s on the heels of Tales of the Vintage Berry Wine Gang, a collection of my newspaper columns from 1988-91, which came out in April. Prior to those two books, Guilt by Matrimony was released last November. It’s about the murder of Aspen socialite Nancy Pfister.

My memoir, Sister of Silence, is about surviving domestic violence and how journalism helped free me; Cheatin’ Ain’t Easy, now in ebook format, is about the life of Preston County native, Eloise Morgan Milne; The Savage Murder of Skylar Neese (a New York Times bestseller, with coauthor Geoff Fuller) and Pretty Little Killers (also with Fuller), released July 8, 2014, and featured in the August 18 issue of People Magazine.

You can find these books either online or in print at a bookstore near you, at BenBella Books, Nellie Bly Books, Amazon, on iTunes and Barnes and Noble.

For an in-depth look at the damaging effects of the silence that surrounds abuse, please watch my live TEDx talk, given April 13, 2013, at Connecticut College.

Have a great day and remember, it’s whatever you want to make it!

~Daleen

Editor’s Note: Daleen Berry is a New York Times best-selling author and a recipient of the Pearl Buck Award in Writing for Social Change. She has won several other awards, for investigative journalism and her weekly newspaper columns, and her memoir, Sister of Silence, placed first in the West Virginia Writers’ Competition. Ms. Berry speaks about overcoming abuse through awareness, empowerment and goal attainment at conferences around the country. To read an excerpt of her memoir, please go to the Sister of Silence site. Check out the five-star review from ForeWord Reviews. Or find out why Kirkus Reviews called Ms. Berry “an engaging writer, her style fluid and easy to read, with welcome touches of humor and sustained tension throughout.”