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That's it, I'm afraid. What a shame.
ARG.
"But there wasn't a man in there. There was a trans woman."
I think this would work better as, "But there wasn't a man in there. There was a woman who happened to be transgendered."
I think I've said it before, but I think it bears repeating. I like your writing, CatieCat. :)
I once linked to something on my blog:
"What is it you say? If the MTFs use the male restrooms they may be subjected to harassment, even, rape? Well, exactly how are females supposed to know which of these MTFs will not take that male characteristic/behavior with them when they start using female restrooms? Should we assume/believe that the male’s urge/behavior to rape women is going to disappear simply because his penis is removed? Incidentally, I don’t think as many men actually surgically transition as they would like people to believe. Therefore, the dick is still there in many cases, waiting, just waiting for a reason to penetrate something or somebody."
Yup. Just lurking there. Gotcha.
*bonk*
I really gotta get a carpenter to look at that head-shaped dent on my desk.
@Anna - I noticed with alarm the number of guards mentioned, too. FIVE? Wow.
I'll never understand why so many people are so invested in bathrooms of all things. There are stalls! We are not just whipping out our penises and magically peeing into (nonexistent) urinals in plain sight in the womens room!
By saying trans women should use the mens room, they're saying we're different, our needs are somehow less, or that we're just creating problems for all the cis people.
Sometimes it seems they expect us to just never leave the house, or to have bladders of steel, or not exist or something.
Talking to HR, they implied I'd have to use the unisex restroom (this one in fact) while working. This sort of thing makes me want to raaage :<
*sigh* better than being unemployed.
It's just another way for people with cis-privilege to marginalize and other us.
Roar! *bashes head through wall*
[/rant]
Edit: not that I have anything against unisex restrooms, they're often cleaner because most people seem to avoid them like the plague. But there's only one in the whole building.
If we really want to have the binary model for bathrooms couldn't it just be -- Wash hands, brush teeth, makeup mirror room, and another room labeled "Shitter". I mean... isn't it all the same? Everybody poops.
Because girls need a place to share SECRET GOSSIP without a romantic-comedy-character disguising himself to infiltrate and spy on them!
I dunno, I guess maybe urinals are cheaper than toilets?
I mean aren't all Ojibwa? What? You mean First Nations means multiple cultures on a single piece of rock? That could never happen.
*headdesk*
This has been another edition of Things Melissa McEwan and Phyllis Schlafly Don't Have in Common.
Yep, in the ENDA bill that's currently in the US House it looks like they even have an exception that would allow employers to force trans people to use the unisex restroom...
*sigh*
And "warning emails"? o.o
Yikes! That's terrible, and a gross invasion of privacy to boot.
Personally, I'd far rather have a transgendered person doing their thing in the stall next to me, than a cisgendered person talking on their cell phone while pooping.
But, then, I'm perfectly happy using unisex bathroom, and co-ed bathrooms, and have on occasion commandeered the men's bathroom when it's empty and there's a line for the women's.
It's just a toilet, people! Stop being a dog in the manger about it.
And how this particular woman was treated was absolutely deplorable.
That said, I'm not sure I buy your whole premise about rape. Maybe I've been asleep for the past 48 years, but I've never noticed that the reason women want male-free bathrooms is because of a fear of rape. A fear, maybe, of being ogled, or a need for privacy of the type afforded by segregated locker rooms, but not a fear of rape.
I think.
and as i've read shakesville and learned more about what it's actually like to be transgender.. i am ashamed of my previous thoughts. a small part of me is still afraid to meet someone transgender, but not because i view them as "other" anymore. it's because i'm terribly afraid that i will unintentionally be an ass. *^_^*
so, i'm not over the mountain yet. but thanks to your posts i am climbing it instead of staying in the valley. and i didn't even realize this was happening until a recent conversation with my dad. i have a new kitten named isabella, but we call her izzy for short. my dad joked, "izzy a boy or izzy a girl?" my immediate thought was, "what does that matter? a person is still a person." ^_^
thank you for being yourself and for sharing these things with us. *super hugs*
Unless I'm mistaken, the implicit threat of rape was central to the "bathroom bigotry" that was part and parcel of the narrative used to defeat the ERA.
CaitieCat, I too am thankful for the service your writing provides. Like Hoshi (paraphrase alert), I am ignorant and an unintentional ass more than I care to count.
Just ask deeky.
The idea that gender is a binary? That needs to go.
@ hoshi: I'm glad I could help. And bravely done, for admitting you'd had a different opinion before, and for re-examining it. :)
oh, and in regards to bathrooms... (have to type this with one hand now. aforementioned kitty insists that i hold her.) in the college i attended it was a BIG no no to have boys in the girls' bathroom. but if there was no option, protocol had to be followed.
first, a girl would check the bathroom for any females lurking within. if it was all clear they had to stand outside the door while the guy was inside. now it seems this only applied to use of the toilet, as my roomie discovered. her bf needed a shower, and even though she stood guard at the door she got demerits for it. (someone had complained.)
this strict vigilance enforced the belief that men/women could not share a stalled bathroom together. heck, i still remember how freaked i was one summer when a construction worker rushed into a different stall while i was doin' my business!
and now izzy has put her sleepy head on my chest. *big goofy grin*
This was my thought exactly. In my experience with public ladies' rooms, they are either single use, i.e., they have a locking full door and just one toilet, or they have locking stalls enclosing each toilet. So why would anyone care that someone who appeared to be a female went into a ladies room stall, went potty, came back out, washed her hands, and exited?
I don't get it.
@quixote: yeah, it would be kinda rude to scrutinize other people in the bathroom. And even if her feet were facing the "wrong" way, that doesn't mean anything. I often face the toilet or stand sideways when dealing with my menstrual needs.
My guess is that the complainant saw her going in, or saw her waiting for a stall or something, and misread her as a man (I don't use "read", because it's not "reading" me to think me a man: it's mis-reading me). This happens, sadly, all too often.
For an example of how it happens, there's a chillingly accurate scene in Better than Chocolate (an excellent lesbian-oriented film, and Canadian to boot) where a trans woman is assaulted by a lesbian in the bathroom of a queer bar. It always leaves me shaking to watch that scene, because of some of my own trauma history (which I'll leave for another day).
Makes me realize just how *many* reasons there are we need ENDA, and, well, just plain old lessons in manners for Maud's sake. That whole live-and-let-live concept.
To raise an interesting question: why the heck, in this day and age, are excretion facilities segregated by gender? What's wrong with just a row of cubicles, each with an altar to the porcelain gods of waste management, and doing things like raising and lowering the seat depending on whether one is a setter or a pointer? In each cubicle place one of those lovely little rectangular boxen for disposal of "sanitary wastes", put a condom dispenser and a "sanitary goods" dispenser on the wall next to one another (with an area to change nappies not too far away from that), and get someone to clean the place, replace the loo paper and refill the soap dispensers every so often.
(For those people who get all offended by the notion of peens and vajayjays[1] sharing the same room to pee, could they please explain how they manage to cope with what's a pretty standard occurrence anywhere parents take young children - namely mothers taking very young sons, or fathers taking very young daughters, into the facilities appropriate for the parent's gender rather than the child's.)
Yes, for an actual area for washing one's person I can see the sense in segregating things - so, for example, the swimming pools would be one place I *wouldn't* expect to have unisex excretion facilities (particularly given most women's one-piece swimsuits are designed so you have to pretty much strip in order to use said facilities). Our culture has an unfortunate preoccupation with the notion of nudity equalling sexual availability, so areas where nudity would be expected as a matter of course probably should be either segregated, or (for preference) constructed in such a manner that the gender identity of the person who is using them is not immediately obvious to all and sundry.
[1] Or even, heaven help us, penises and vaginas.
Honestly, I don't know of a trans* woman who HASN'T run afoul of someone playing potty patrol- not to mention that every.single.time a non-discrimination bill or ordinance comes up, the right wingers trot out the worn out trope of the 'bathroom bill' and 'perverts in the women's room after our womenz and childrenz'... I can't describe how humiliating this is.
Is there less of a chance of rape because no one in their right mind would go in there voluntarily? Or because it's out in the open? Or because it's virtually impossible to get two people in one at the same time?
So why is it so wrong to have public unisex bathrooms indoors?
It really is an English-language-culture preoccupation, in some ways (covering the UK, much of Canada and the US), this bizarre total body shame that means men and women can't be around one another at all while naked, unless it's an explicitly sexual situation.
@ Jenny Anne: (((you))) - I remember that humiliation too well. Goddess...the number of times I've been places with friends and had some jackass pushing the wrong pronoun or address. I'm so glad and fortunate that those days are pretty much behind me.
More generally, I can say this, too: one time I was in a problem with one of the bathroom bigots, someone giving me a hard time because I wasn't where I belonged. She and her friends started hassling me physically, shoving me, punching my arms and so on. And all I could think was, "I don't dare fight back - because if I so much as lay a finger on anyone, who are the police going to arrest?" My ID didn't match in those days, meaning if a police officer came, they would be almost certainly putting me in the boy-jail.
And really, who is going to be believed, in the mid-90s: the group of cis women, or the wild-eyed (with fear) trans woman?
I was lucky, on that occasion: two of the women I'd come to the bar with came in to find out why I'd been so long, and jumped in to help me get out safely.
Should you ever be, my friends, in a situation where this is being done to a trans person, please, please speak up. Say something. Take a cell phone picture. Get the badge numbers of security guards or police officers. You might be saving someone's life.
And, as an aside, the fuss over bathrooms seems so freakin' absurd. One of the least important things I can think of.
Feel free to e-mail me if you want a private sounding board, koach, k?
And Shihtzustaff, thanks! Our neighbours have made a pretty welcoming home here, I'm glad I can be here too. :)
That sort of post-action rationalization happens all the time.
And it reminds me of people, who, while otherwise are fairly progressive, still freak out and start off their stories with stuff like, "So today I saw a tranny" without even realizing that they are othering human beings. To them, it's like getting a free ticket to the circus. To them, it's no different than ogling the punk kid with 20 piercings and a bright green mohawk, and maybe they think that person is just doing it for attention, but mostly I think they are just enjoying the free "show" (and maybe judging that person for their choices too).
I think it's important that our laws recognize the need for shared bathrooms, but it's going to take a lot more effort in the public community at large. While many people are making great strides in same-sex marriage, the gender binary is still VERY much in play.
And... Caitie, love your posts and your contributions here.
while otherwise are fairly progressive
This is one of those lolsob phrases for me. It just comes up over and over again. Like Otherwise Progressive Person is nonetheless "surprisingly" misogynistic, or homophobic, or racist. I used to notice myself imagining a whole cluster of ideas when I discovered someone was "progressive" or "liberal", only to discover that this person was wildly different. Liberal, but transphobic. Progressive, but what did he just say about immigrants? I guess it was part of that whole voyage of discovery where I realize what an uncertain ground labels make. I'm not putting this well. But these days when someone says to me that they're a liberal or a democrat of whatever label I might have once viewed favorably, now I just have this reaction like "I'll believe it when I'm not recoiling in horror in a few minutes"... which I guess is sad.
I guess it's just important to recognize that people's views aren't binary either, that we fall in different places along a long spectrum. We can raise up teaspoons and keep fighting to educate and enlighten, ...but you can't force someone to learn or accept others, or even themselves if they don't want to. :(
sighsob
"Kid...shit rolls downhill. The higher up someone goes, the less shit they want to deal with, so they shove it down the hill. The only way to end up not wading in shit is to climb the hill yourself."
I don't think he meant it this way, but I tend to think of this as a pretty good analogy for privilege, and whether you want to take it up. Some people do, because they get tired of the shit pouring on their own heads, so they shove it downhill - this lets them feel good about themselves on some level, because they're not being shit on as much anymore. And hey, that's got to feel good, y'know? And then they just try not to think of the fact that that lump, downhill, covered in the shit they just pushed down, is actually another human being, who would like, ideally, not to be covered in shit either.
Does anyone actually think that the men's room is a better idea? Or is the idea just to make the person feel like they don't belong anywhere?
Sorry, just trying to put myself in the person's shoes and I never thought about how this type of thing might segregate people out of public life.
I have never, ever in my life felt threatened or frightened around trans folk.
Shit like this makes me so mad, so tired, so frightened for the world. Well, either way, transwomen can piss in the toilet with me any time.
I really don't care who's using which facilities, and I have certainly been known to use the empty men's room when waiting for the ladies' room would have meant having an accident.
And I'll confess that I've even exercised my gender privilege a few times to get to the front of the line in the ladies' room of a gay bar when I was one of maybe three women on site - the guys just laughed and let me jump the line. (Although after a couple of times, I just gave up and peed in the woods like everybody else.)
All that said, I've never had to live with that particular brand of every-day prejudice, and brava to those who speak up about it and make us examine our privilege, even in the bathroom. Excellent post, CaitieCat.
No Cathiecat, I'm not implying or suggesting in that comment that First Nations culture is monolithic. What I am saying is that as a persecuted minority group, you would expect more sensitivity to the plight of other minority groups.