In a Weird Way, Gender-Neutral Bathrooms Might Not be Neutral
Maybe gender neutral bathrooms aren’t so neutral.
Women used to hassle me in the women’s room when I lived as butch. They behaved worse when I made my first steps to living as a man full-time, wearing ties and sports coats and cutting my hair short, but before hormones.
At over six feet tall, even without hormones, women read me as a man.
Anxiety seeped into my bones every time I used the women’s room in the 90s, a time when few gender-neutral bathrooms existed. Chicago-area coffee shops offered the only gender-neutral bathrooms.
Spacious and clean, I could relax in them and urinate, an unusual occurrence, as I used to get so anxious in women’s rooms I often couldn’t pee.
At some point I headed to the men’s room and never looked back.
Sitting to pee had me both curious and concerned to know if men would hassle me, too.
To date they have not.
I tried to use one of those stand-to-pee devices, which resulted in urine all over me and not in the bowl.
So I sit in the men’s stalls, glad with feelings of gratitude that men’s rooms have at least one stall with a door, usually the wheelchair stall.
How does our society manage to create public accommodations that put me at odds with another group of people seeking greater movement in the world?
Anyhow.
Would I have hated being required to use a gender-neutral bathroom in the 90s, especially after I began hormones and desperately wanted to be seen and live as a man?
Perhaps ,and yet I can’t discount the impact my height has as I moved through the world. The readiness to read me as a man, at 6 feet tall, came easily to people.
They wouldn’t have necessarily seen me as a transsexual, unless they thought I was M to F, and I’ve had that happen to me since.
Now I’m happy for the emergence of gender-neutral bathrooms. They reflect the greater complexity of, and openness to, more genders.
But what if I don’t want to use a gender-neutral bathroom, a place seen as safe for transgender people?
What if using the gender-neutral bathroom makes me feel discriminated against? I’m a man, therefore I use the men’s room, and being forced to use a gender-neutral bathroom feels like a punishment.
The punishment often gets directed at girls, who at some mysterious point, usually when puberty begins (though the haters only ever imply this), will make the other girls feel insecure, or worse, unsafe.
Gender-neutral bathrooms, often safe spaces for many gender-queer people, can seem like a debilitating punishment for other gender-queer people.
One-answer fits all results in an incorrect solution where they victim suffers the penalty.
The punishment to use a gender-neutral bathroom, if the person accused feels sanctioned by having to use one, should result from bad behavior, not gender identification.
If a girl who used to be a boy (or the adult version of that story) acts like a jerk in the bathroom, then discipline the person for her actions, not her identity.
Banishing them to a bathroom they aren’t comfortable using teaches the person not that they have a problem, but that they are the problem, which is a problem for our society.
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