Last night my kid vanished into the bathroom. When she returned, she told me how she was sitting on the toilet just thinking and how home bathrooms are safe. You can lock the door and rest your tush somewhat comfortably on that ceramic, plastic or padded donut. I have to agree that home bathrooms are a nice safe space, except when your cat assaults you with his stinky, poop because he will always go to the bathroom when you do..
I have had a long standing nightmare of having to poop in public. Inevitably nothing comes out smoothly, or I need to use rolls and rolls of toilet paper, or the door won’t shut completely, or someone is next to me staring over the stall. All of these scenarios cause anxiety as I try to be covert, inevitably resulting in embarrassment and shame of my human needs. My gender fluid child can already feel the dread of public bathrooms. So much so that she’ll hold it when a single stall room isn’t available to her, making herself sick in the interim. She also limits her water intake to avoid having to go to the bathroom anywhere but at home.
Now let’s talk about how the restroom can speak to having agency in our lives. Our body tells us we have a need and we go to a place to relieve that need. Alone. Privately. Why is it private? Because it involves parts of us that have been deemed private. While we all pee and poop – these activities require us to expose our private parts. Which is why we need safe spaces. While genitals might assign a sex at birth, they don’t define our gender, yet from day 1 – the vagina holders are deemed women/girls and the penis holders men/boys. I may know I’m a man, but in a public restroom, I feel like I have to prove it. I can’t whip out my dick for show and tell, though. As a trans man, I certainly don’t feel welcome in the women’s bathroom either. Where do I go to feel safe out in the wild?
I was recently supposed to fly to Dallas on an adventure trip. I had a panic attack about traveling, with the main reason having to do with being perceived incorrectly and not belonging anywhere – especially the bathroom. Belonging has long been a source of safety and in a society that doesn’t provide space for nuance it is really hard to find belonging. I ended up not going on this trip because I didn’t have the spoons to deal with masking or a (mis) gendered perception of me. (For the record, the only all gender bathroom at DFW is in terminal C.) For me, agency includes the ability to choose the right bathroom for me and to be left the fuck alone to take care of a very human act.
There was a time in the early 2000s when I was in a women’s bathroom at the San Francisco airport. This old lady with a walker had to back up (beep, beep, beep), when she saw me exiting, to make sure she was going into the right bathroom. That wasn’t my first experience of feeling unseen in the world. I have a long history of being misperceived or being told who I am, or how my body will react to something.
Whew! Bathroom talk brings up a lot for me. I think we’re taught from a young age that bathrooms have an unspoken membership. If you enter the right bathroom, you immediately belong, as long as you fit the “image.” Thankfully, I feel stronger than I did in February and am ready to try the men’s room – with a mask on to start, of course. I’ll let you know how it goes.
