The first criminal bathroom ban with a jail sentence has just taken effect overnight in Florida. Florida is now dangerous for transgender people to travel through, with arrests likely in coming days.
What’s your reasoning for sorting people into bathrooms based on their genitals?
I’m assuming you’re thinking it means someone is “done” with transition. It doesn’t work that way. A good portion of trans people don’t have genital surgery, both due to access issues but also simply not wanting surgery. And, then, depending on where you live, not having surgery may prevent you from updating your gender marker so you don’t have ID, either. (US citizens can change gender markers on passports/passport cards without surgery. Yes, this does mean you have people with different gender markers on different forms of ID.)
Signed, a transmasculine person who was harassed in women’s bathrooms pre-social transition (never mind medical!). (ETA: I mention this because it goes to show this is ultimately about policing women’s genders–I was seen as “woman-ing wrong” while living as a woman. I have also been harassed in a gender neutral bathroom, believe it or not.)
What’s your reasoning for sorting people into bathrooms based on their genitals?
Just the availability of different appliances and accomodations, same as like for kids (lower heights and smaller sizes), disabled people (ability to enter with and transfer from a wheelchair), dogs (piss post and self-cleaning grate), etc.
I would think everyone would want the best fitting solution for their needs… but maybe general male vs female is not something that should create a “physical” problem.
I have also been harassed in a gender neutral bathroom, believe it or not
I haven’t seen any of those, so if you don’t feel uncomfortable elaborating, I’d be glad to hear more (I have a hard time wrapping my mind around harassing anyone, much less in a bathroom).
I mean, the vast majority of people are able to sit to pee. Now, men’s bathrooms are chronically underprovisioned when it comes to stalls (there is a formula, and, yes, it assumes cis people, but OMG so many airports have too few stalls), and that’s annoying and a social interaction one has to learn to navigate, but hardly a big deal. The fact I can’t stand to pee has been awkward exactly once, and it was totally all in my head–I was on a train in Japan and didn’t speak Japanese. I totally hadn’t noticed that there was a separate urinal available (in addition to the “Japanese” toilet and the “western” toilet) and a Japanese woman pointed it out to me and I had to convey that, while I hadn’t noticed it, I wasn’t going to use it. (We’re skirting the boundary of “trans info I will not discuss online with cis people”, but not all genital surgery options for transmasculine people result in being able to stand to pee.)
When I was in grad school, there was a multiuser gender neutral bathroom in an adjacent building. If I had time and needed to use the bathroom, I’d go across the street to the union (which had a couple of single user ones) rather than climb five flights of stairs. This bathroom had been won after a good deal of lobbying and it was a re-signed women’s restroom. There was even a bright orange sign on the door telling you where the nearest gendered restrooms were. While it had two stalls, you could actually lock the door to the entire bathroom if you so desired (a fact also mentioned on the sign). Nonetheless, a woman who worked on the floor believed only people who met her standards of womanhood should use it. Instead of the usual “this is the women’s”, it was “the men’s is at the other end of the hall, you should use that”.
Eventually I discovered the unicorn of all bathrooms–a single user men’s room near a lecture hall that was somehow consistently clean. (If you are an apparently able-bodied person, single user all gender restrooms are fraught too, especially if they’re signed as “family restrooms”. You’re not disabled, where is your kid, etc, etc. The all gender restrooms at SFO have paper signs saying “anyone may use this restroom” that were clearly added because people were being hassled.)
Based on the difference in typical queues to men’s an women’s bathrooms, I’d say both are underprovisioned in stalls. Makes me wonder if an optimal solution would be like the case of single queues for shops… but then again, urinals are quicker to use when possible, so separate queues might still make more sense, hm.
“trans info I will not discuss online with cis people”
That’s fine, I bet anyone interested can check with Google.
Thank you for sharing the extra info. It’s a pity that people feel entitled to harass others, and that we haven’t found yet a general solution for such a basic issue.
If you haven’t guessed, I have many thoughts on airport bathrooms in particular. (You can totally chart my transition according to my relationship to airport bathrooms, by the way, which may be TMI. As a kid, I hated peeing on airplanes, to the point I once made it an entire trans-Atlantic flight without going to the bathroom. But in college, I was avoiding bathrooms in the airport because it was too fraught. I’m now back to disliking airplane toilets, but still reflexively catalogue and rate airport bathrooms.)
Terminal 1 at SFO has at least one set of restrooms where people are naturally funneled towards a multi-user all-gender one with proper isolated cubicles (even more so than in Europe–they’re little individual rooms) and common sinks, but they have gendered multi-user restrooms to the sides (imagine a |__| shape – the __ is the all-gender and then the gendered ones are on the |). That honestly seems like a setup no one can really object to. It probably takes a bit more space, but it was a fairly high traffic area and I had to wait like 10 seconds for a cubicle. I grew up in Chicago and O’Hare has massive bathrooms, so I’m constantly baffled by some of the tiny ones you find in airports. It’s an airport, more than four people need to use the bathroom at once!
Thank you for sharing the extra info.
I will seriously answer questions until the cows come home, for you or anyone else. I won’t discuss bottom surgery except in high-level generalities, but that’s honestly pretty much the only thing that’s consistently off-limits.
What’s your reasoning for sorting people into bathrooms based on their genitals?
I’m assuming you’re thinking it means someone is “done” with transition. It doesn’t work that way. A good portion of trans people don’t have genital surgery, both due to access issues but also simply not wanting surgery. And, then, depending on where you live, not having surgery may prevent you from updating your gender marker so you don’t have ID, either. (US citizens can change gender markers on passports/passport cards without surgery. Yes, this does mean you have people with different gender markers on different forms of ID.)
Signed, a transmasculine person who was harassed in women’s bathrooms pre-social transition (never mind medical!). (ETA: I mention this because it goes to show this is ultimately about policing women’s genders–I was seen as “woman-ing wrong” while living as a woman. I have also been harassed in a gender neutral bathroom, believe it or not.)
Just the availability of different appliances and accomodations, same as like for kids (lower heights and smaller sizes), disabled people (ability to enter with and transfer from a wheelchair), dogs (piss post and self-cleaning grate), etc.
I would think everyone would want the best fitting solution for their needs… but maybe general male vs female is not something that should create a “physical” problem.
I haven’t seen any of those, so if you don’t feel uncomfortable elaborating, I’d be glad to hear more (I have a hard time wrapping my mind around harassing anyone, much less in a bathroom).
I mean, the vast majority of people are able to sit to pee. Now, men’s bathrooms are chronically underprovisioned when it comes to stalls (there is a formula, and, yes, it assumes cis people, but OMG so many airports have too few stalls), and that’s annoying and a social interaction one has to learn to navigate, but hardly a big deal. The fact I can’t stand to pee has been awkward exactly once, and it was totally all in my head–I was on a train in Japan and didn’t speak Japanese. I totally hadn’t noticed that there was a separate urinal available (in addition to the “Japanese” toilet and the “western” toilet) and a Japanese woman pointed it out to me and I had to convey that, while I hadn’t noticed it, I wasn’t going to use it. (We’re skirting the boundary of “trans info I will not discuss online with cis people”, but not all genital surgery options for transmasculine people result in being able to stand to pee.)
When I was in grad school, there was a multiuser gender neutral bathroom in an adjacent building. If I had time and needed to use the bathroom, I’d go across the street to the union (which had a couple of single user ones) rather than climb five flights of stairs. This bathroom had been won after a good deal of lobbying and it was a re-signed women’s restroom. There was even a bright orange sign on the door telling you where the nearest gendered restrooms were. While it had two stalls, you could actually lock the door to the entire bathroom if you so desired (a fact also mentioned on the sign). Nonetheless, a woman who worked on the floor believed only people who met her standards of womanhood should use it. Instead of the usual “this is the women’s”, it was “the men’s is at the other end of the hall, you should use that”.
Eventually I discovered the unicorn of all bathrooms–a single user men’s room near a lecture hall that was somehow consistently clean. (If you are an apparently able-bodied person, single user all gender restrooms are fraught too, especially if they’re signed as “family restrooms”. You’re not disabled, where is your kid, etc, etc. The all gender restrooms at SFO have paper signs saying “anyone may use this restroom” that were clearly added because people were being hassled.)
Based on the difference in typical queues to men’s an women’s bathrooms, I’d say both are underprovisioned in stalls. Makes me wonder if an optimal solution would be like the case of single queues for shops… but then again, urinals are quicker to use when possible, so separate queues might still make more sense, hm.
That’s fine, I bet anyone interested can check with Google.
Thank you for sharing the extra info. It’s a pity that people feel entitled to harass others, and that we haven’t found yet a general solution for such a basic issue.
If you haven’t guessed, I have many thoughts on airport bathrooms in particular. (You can totally chart my transition according to my relationship to airport bathrooms, by the way, which may be TMI. As a kid, I hated peeing on airplanes, to the point I once made it an entire trans-Atlantic flight without going to the bathroom. But in college, I was avoiding bathrooms in the airport because it was too fraught. I’m now back to disliking airplane toilets, but still reflexively catalogue and rate airport bathrooms.)
Terminal 1 at SFO has at least one set of restrooms where people are naturally funneled towards a multi-user all-gender one with proper isolated cubicles (even more so than in Europe–they’re little individual rooms) and common sinks, but they have gendered multi-user restrooms to the sides (imagine a |__| shape – the __ is the all-gender and then the gendered ones are on the |). That honestly seems like a setup no one can really object to. It probably takes a bit more space, but it was a fairly high traffic area and I had to wait like 10 seconds for a cubicle. I grew up in Chicago and O’Hare has massive bathrooms, so I’m constantly baffled by some of the tiny ones you find in airports. It’s an airport, more than four people need to use the bathroom at once!
I will seriously answer questions until the cows come home, for you or anyone else. I won’t discuss bottom surgery except in high-level generalities, but that’s honestly pretty much the only thing that’s consistently off-limits.