Folks, folks, folks, breaking news. I have JUST realized the clear and present danger inherent in men entering women’s restrooms, because IT HAS HAPPENED TO ME:
Yesterday I went to see an Avatar 2 matinee and popped out to the Ladies partway through (3.25 hour runtime with no intermission?? oookay Hollywood), and there was an elderly man with a cane walking slowly towards the restrooms, singing to himself a bit. I went into the women’s restroom and suddenly heard the same singing nearby, so this dialogue occurred:
Me (sticking my head out of my stall and looking around): Excuse me hon, but this is the Ladies restroom…?
Him: Oh shit! I’m in the wrong room! Sorry!
Me: It’s okay sir, no problem, have a nice day!
Exit confused gentleman, and after finishing my business, exit me. No further action of any kind was taken on the matter, as far as I know.
Obviously, this horrifying incident has now convinced me that the Republican policy on gender-designated public spaces of having loud paranoid conniptions and aggressively policing gender identity to a fare-the-well is the only way to protect women from such catastrophically traumatic experiences.
I BRAVELY surmounted the UNCONSCIONABLE affront that this deplorable incident inflicted on me, so yes, am okay.
And look, to be serious, I’m not discounting or dismissing the genuine alarm that many women not unreasonably feel at the prospect of a man appearing unexpectedly in a women-designated restroom. Much less the genuine trauma experienced by women who were actually attacked by male intruders in such a situation.
My point is just that this sort of temporarily disconcerting minor incident is bound to happen occasionally, no matter how much conservatives get their knickers in a twist over issues of gender identity. And even deliberate intrusions and assaults are, unfortunately, also statistically inevitable to some (hopefully much smaller) extent, irrespective of how much gender policing transphobic people try to do.
So let’s just let people use the restrooms of their own identified gender, and rely on normal common sense to sort out the 99.99% of such potentially disconcerting incidents in which nobody is doing or intending any harm. For the other 0.01%, of course, we still need to fall back on screaming for the cops.
I think I told the story where I was at a concert once and was using the restroom. There was very little privacy in there, just a bunch of urinals with no walks and a few stalls and some hand wash stations in the middle. Two women came in, clearly drunk and laughing, and announced they were sick of waiting for the women’s room line.
At first I was confused and embarrassed and thought I had to leave. Then I thought, fuck it, I gotta pee and if a couple ladies get an eyeful for a bit I don’t give a crap. And I did my business and left, no problem.
That was sort of an extreme situation but ever since then I figured I really don’t care who I’m in a bathroom with.
In a move LGTBTQ+ advocates said could be used to further target transgender Texans, Attorney General Ken Paxton in June sought to collect a list of people who changed their gender on their state driver’s license, the Washington Post reports.
According to the bombshell story posted Wednesday, Paxton’s office asked the Texas Department of Public Safety to provide information on people who changed their sex on state documents over the past two years. “We won’t need [driver’s license or identification numbers] at first but may need to have them later if we are required to manually look up documents," according to correspondence sent but the AG’s office.
Luckily (supposedly) he was foiled:
“A verbal request was received,” DPS spokesman Travis Considine told the Post via email. “Ultimately, our team advised the AG’s office the data requested neither exists nor could be accurately produced. Thus, no data of any kind was provided.”
Unexpected plot twist that makes this story kind of irrelevant.
I just don’t see your run of the mill bathroom bill supporter getting worked up about a man who plausibly enters the women’s room by accident, immediately apologizes, and immediately leaves.
I was expecting you to write that it was actually a woman, you shrugged (or maybe apologized, it must be annoying for men and women who don’t pass), and went on with your life.
Eta: I’d imagine the realistic transphobic fantasy is more like, she refuses to leave and you are so uncomfortable with her presence that you can’t use the toilet yourself. Or if you have a confrontational personality you confront her because her decision to use the bathroom ruins your bathroom experience. (Fat chance such a person would articulate the reason though)
Which is fine, I’m not claiming it was a particularly good joke.
I doubt it’s possible to articulate any particular coherent scenario that represents what transphobes are “really” upset about. IMHO, all they’re doing is just emotionally invoking that inadvertent stab of nervousness and fear that any woman can momentarily feel about the perception of MAN IN WRONG PLACE WARNING WARNING, and illogically projecting it onto transgender people.
They do the same with the inadvertent feeling of threat and revulsion experienced by many heterosexual men in homophobic societies about the concept of possibly being sexually attracted to a woman who turns out to have a penis, aka WARNING WARNING DICK DETECTED ABORT AROUSAL AM I GAY AM I GAY AM I GAY. (Note that I’m not in any way suggesting that the only reason for (some) heterosexual men to not be attracted to transgender women is internalized homophobic anxiety. Just that internalized homophobic anxiety tends to make the difference between “Uh, actually, thank you very much ma’am but no thanks” and “AAAAAGGGHHH KILL THE MONSTER NOW”.)
Rational thinking in any form is not what’s getting the transphobes so upset, and it’s not what they’re employing to try to get other people upset about transgender issues.
I think the transphobic response to your story would be that the system worked. Non-female was expelled from female only space before any harm could have been done. Whew! you dodged the bullet on that one. But consider the alternative scenario where the elderly man in question was not a whistler. You might have done your business unaware that there was an exposed penis just one stall away from you. That is the horror they are trying to avoid.
“The vitriol against trans people is not happening in a vacuum,” Berg said in a statement. “It is not just a way of scoring political points by exacerbating the culture wars. It has real world implications.”
At 16, Berg-Brousseau made news headlines for his testimony against an anti-trans bathroom bill in Kentucky. Republican state legislators praised his courage and eloquence, and then voted to advance the legislation anyway
“On a daily basis at his job, Henry would be aware of the hateful and vile anti-trans messaging being circulated around this country and focused at his workplace,” his mother said in a news release. “This hate building across the country weighed on him. In one of our last conversations he wondered if he was safe walking down the street.”
