SOLONS DISCOVER TRANSGENDERS IN PUBLIC BATHROOMS — l’horreur

Some lawmakers are terrified that transgenders who use restrooms designed for their adopted gender are nothing but wolves in sheep’s clothing.

First, a warning: The following discussion contains adult content and may not be appropriate for children or sensitive lawmakers.

I’m a male. What I know about ladies’ rooms is limited by my observation that often the lines seem inordinately long, maybe because urinals take up less space than stalls and so serve more clients in the same sized space.

What I know about the experience of a man dressed as a woman who utilizes a ladies’ room is even more limited. So I cannot speak to the feelings of a transgender forced into a restroom not freely chosen.

I can only speak from what my many years of frequenting public men’s rooms have suggested to me. Maybe that limited perspective explains why I have trouble understanding the current bathroom hysteria shown by some state legislative bodies.

From what I understand, people are usually gender specific, either by nature or by choice. Furthermore, I believe from what I have read, that those who choose their gender do so because their choice is natural and right to them. Having made the choice, they at last fit where they belong.

From those considerations, I derive two conclusions, 1. That transgenders are not freaks, and 2. That not being freaks, they sometimes have to pee, just like the rest of us.

Where they get to pee has become a practical problem for them, one that somehow has become a legal issue for all of us.

I’m just a lay person in these matters, but this how it shakes out for me.

A woman, who just happens to have a penis concealed under her dress, will look around in vain for a urinal in a ladies room. I am basing this speculation on a guess that those who design restrooms know that His and Hers are differently tooled. So, a transgender woman must resort to a closed stall, just as if she were a birthed woman.

Under these circumstances, a female (so birthed) patron is not likely to catch a horrified glimpse of an errant penis. Probably the closest contact she will have with the transgender woman will come when they happen to stand side to side before the mirror to touch up their make-up. Again, I don’t know this for a fact, but common sense suggests to me that by then each will have pulled up her panties.

Lawmakers say they are worried the innocence of little girls will be jeopardized by male intruders disguised as harmless women. I don’t like to generalize from anecdotal evidence, but if what I see in restaurants is any guide, women seem to go to the restroom a lot. So, it’s likely at least one woman will be in any given women’s room at any given time. Their presence should discourage miscreants. But when in doubt — and, Lord knows, I know it’s a bother — one can always accompany a child thought to be in danger.

In any event, and I don’t mean to alarm lawgivers, right now a straight man bent on sexual assault or voyeurism who can skillfully pass himself off as a woman, can enter a ladies’ restroom without setting off an alarm.

How often that happens, I don’t know. And I doubt if anyone knows. Apparently, if it happens, no one has noticed so no one has complained. Anyway, I would be surprised if there were not laws already on the books that address that situation.

Before signing on to the bill, a lawmaker might want to consider consequences that may come home to him. He should ask himself if he is prepared for the time when he will hear his little girl, returning to the table, ask, “Daddy, why was there a man in the women’s room?” I doubt that is a conversation most lawmakers are ready to have.

I assume that before toilets became a political issue earnestly debated in presidential campaigns, many transgender men visited ladies’ rooms without any disruption to the public tranquillity. Here again, no one noticed and therefore no one cared.

The few complaints Google yields come mainly from those who just flat out don’t like the idea of any man, even those who look like a woman, in ladies’ rooms. They say, it’s just not appropriate. They cry, Have we gone nuts!?

Appropriate or not, we haven’t heard many complaints up to now. That may be due to the fact that most transgenders in ladies’ rooms take great care to avoid notice. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they even squat in stalls. After all, high heels with toes pointing in the wrong direction might be a tell.

The restrictive legislation, of course, covers men’s rooms as well as ladies’. Here again, I’m sure transgenders have been using men’s rooms for some time without creating a stir. I think it goes without saying, a transgender man who might have a tampon concealed in his pocket, will find it unnecessary to ask a male bystander how to use urinals. Instead, he will go quietly into a stall, just as many birthed men do for a variety of reasons, and tend to his business in private.

I cannot make Google cough up any complaints about birthed females in men’s rooms. Usually a man pays little attention to what is going on in a closed stall. And, it’s not just because he couldn’t care less. He just wants to get out of the place without undue delay. That’s why men’s rooms are not well furnished for lingering.

Like women, he has his pre-exit rituals. He may pause at the mirror to wash his hands, comb his hair or adjust his tie; and, none the wiser, he may see in the mirror what seems to be just another man doing the same thing, clueless that his neighbor has just changed his tampon.

But if the law stands as passed, transgender women, though more comfortable in Hers, will have to use His. Most of them will also will head straight to a stall, even when there is an available space at a urinal. But maybe not all.

Sooner or later, a woman sporting man parts will show up elbow to elbow to the surprise of the man standing at the next urinal. At first alarmed, his flow may stop midstream, and his cheeks may redden; but once he figures out the situation the flow will refresh. He may even chuckle.

Even such bold transgender women are not likely to create a problem. Men’s restroom decorum posits that a man standing at a urinal must studiously survey the blank wall directly in front of him. It is a man’s moment of Zen, a time for a spiritual connection with the scatological.

A man standing at bank of urinals who glances downward sideways is inviolation of an unspoken code embedded in the DNA of all men. They know any such glance is sure to draw, at the very least, hostile eye-contact. Men rarely engage with strangers while standing at a urinal. I know I would zip it up fast if I heard from the next urinal over: “S’up, Dude”.

It may be a hard lesson for state lawmakers to learn that even transgenders must pee; and, barred from ladies’ rooms, they would prefer not to use street gutters and alleyways where children may pass by — which would also be against the law.

So, the transgender woman is up against a wall where she in her high heels, must pee next to, perhaps, even a male lawmaker. And that lawmaker, may find himself in situation of his own making, one he would have rather avoided.

Again, transgenders must pee somewhere. If they cannot pee where they blend in, they will have to pee where they are conspicuously ‘the other.’ People will probably adjust. But if there is a recipe for public disturbance, this is it. Have we gone nuts?

The geography of gender specific restrooms and the regularities of human behavior suggest what the evidence bears out: the problem, if there is one, will take care of itself, even without the aid of solicitous lawmakers. So why not leave things as they are? Sometimes the status quo is the best idea, or so my conservative friends tell me.

Restroom restriction laws address a problem that does not exist, so they must serve some other end. I, of course, have no wish to impugn the motives of august legislatures and governors. So, that they may entertain the notion that transexuals are ipso facto sexual perverts is not for me to say, nor that they have a hidden agenda to punish transgenders for being who they are. I would no more suggest that than Donald Trump would suggest that all Muslims are terrorists or all Mexicans are rapists.

I can say, however, these recent bathroom laws come from lawmakers who in most matters congenitally oppose governmental intrusion into our private lives. When we were little children our parents took our hand going into a public restroom. Now we are adults. Still, lawmakers, considering themselves in loco parentis, want us to take their hand before going potty.

They say they just want to keep things straight. But they cross-dress legislation in the garb of public safety so as to restrict a citizen’s access to public facilities, even those citizens who are transgender.

So, the question is presented, who here is the wolf in sheep’s clothing? The inconspicuous transgender with a full bladder, or the disingenuous lawmaker with an empty hand?