More Than Just a Bathroom Break: The Impact of Fear Mongering

bathrooms are just a nightmare unless my cat is on my lap

I still use the men’s bathroom at work as a default. There’s a universal washroom in the building as well that I use sometimes, but it’s frequently enough out of order that I’ve given up walking the stairs to see it’s status when I need to go.

So for me, it’s the common “train myself to only go at home” or use the men’s bathroom. I try my hardest to make sure I’m not seen. I check for feet in stalls and listen for doors opening before I leave. I don’t enjoy doing it and also can’t get myself to get to any other bathrooms very specifically at work.

There’s something about this space and it being one I existed in pre-transition. These are people I have known as deadname. People who still occasionally use that deadname, albeit accidentally. People who misgender me occasionally, again accidentally, but when I hear these things, in the back of my head I’m thinking of the ridiculous and hateful rhetoric around trans people in bathrooms.

That if you were born with a penis, you go to the pants bathroom forever and if you were born with a vulva you go to the dress bathroom forever, and any deviation makes you a monster ready to attack the innocent. I know none of this to be true. I know trans people are zero threat, but I see the anger and I see cis people reacting with fear to these words from politicians and hate groups and I head into the men’s bathroom unsure of what might happen if I don’t.

In public spaces I try my hardest to not use bathrooms at all. I go before I leave the house and if I can do anything to avoid it, hold everything until I’m back in someone’s house I know, or ideally in my own house with Woof invading my privacy and sitting on my lap.

I do have people who scout out bathrooms for me and people who offer to go with me, but in the end there are just too many stares and looks and worries from the cis people who do the scaring for me to risk using a bathroom.

The reason for writing this today is that yesterday I used the dresses bathroom on my own and survived. Now, it did end up being empty, but I didn’t know that and I went in anyway. It was my own little act of taking up space in a space that is mine. Fuck Pierre Poilievre or J.K. Rowling or any of the people who believe me peeing in a movie theatre bathroom and then rushing to my seat is dangerous.

It is on me to make this change at work too, I just want to shed light on the complexity of these things and what happens when you engage in ridiculous fear mongering bathroom conversations with friends or politicians.

I just want a space to go to the bathroom and touch up my lipstick. I want to take my time washing my hands. I want to be able to exit when other people are in the bathroom. I don’t want to need a bathroom partner to vouch for me just in case people are asking if I’m in the wrong bathroom.