Ladies Rooms I Have Loved Before

When we’re talking about transgender access to female safe spaces, we most frequently talk about what the trans-identified males want. So often, we hear “they just want to pee.” That’s nice, but the women’s room is more than that. What about what we want?

My very first miscarriage was in the ladies room of the dry cleaner where I worked. I hid out for what seemed like forever (probably only very long minutes), curious/terrified about what was going on.

Before this, my high school friends and I used to haunt our bulimic pal, making sure it was highly inconvenient for her to duck into the girls’ room within 20 minutes of a meal. After that time, she couldn’t just vomit it up, and we thought it likely she’d keep it down.

Twice, I’ve helped an older woman who’d fallen out of her wheelchair while trying to get onto the commode. Handicapped commodes are tall. Old women are often not. They sat bare-assed on the floor of the handicapped stall, yelping meekly until I chanced along, planted my heels and hauled them upward. I did my own business in another stall and waited to watch their wheels roll past the void under the door, so I knew they got out okay.

Somehow, I’ve never had sex in a public bathroom and now I figure I never will.

Recently, I had to wait for a single stall bathroom for a bit. When the door opened, it was a man I know. He hurried past me with his eyes down. When I got in there, there was a huge puddle of urine in front of the toilet. Why? The urinal is two feet away. Why did he pee all over the floor and seat instead? Seriously, why?

I’ve gritted my teeth to answer “Yes I’m okayyyyy!” when my mom was waiting for me and I was taking too long, pregnant, and of a burbly stomach.

I swiped all the little soaps from the airplane bathroom and used them to make a sculpture in art school.

Once, on a first date, I went to every tampon machine in the Art Institute of Chicago and they were all broken. How does that happen? In a panic, I began to formulate the lies I would tell to get us out of the museum, but perhaps not sound so insane I’d never see him again. Some sweetheart saw me talking to myself and pulled a tampon from her purse and offered it to me.

When I was new to perimenopause, I had no idea how to manage flooding. At a beautiful theater, newly rehabbed bathrooms, somehow I managed to catapult a truly shocking amount of blood and tissue onto the floor in front of me. I used handfuls of toilet paper to clean it up, but the grout was not great. Sorry, people.

My second miscarriage took place in one stall of the de Young art museum in Golden Gate Park. I would find out later that was my oldest daughter’s fraternal twin.

I’ve stood next to dozens of women at the sinks and eavesdropped on them talking about the men they were hiding from.

I’ve re-dressed two, maybe three women who’d passed out next to the toilets they just threw up in.

I’ve told dozens of women how great they look, how much I love their hair/outfit/jewelry/tattoo/performance in the band I just watched, as we waited for the line.

I’ve let two of my young daughters run around the locker room naked while I changed the diaper of #3 on the hard wooden bench. Daughter 4 was alone in the shower and I could basically assess each girl’s position just by mom-style echolocation.

The first time I heard one of my daughters swear, she was 3, and I was helping her navigate the port-a-potty at a farmers’ market. She looked into the hole, people. She looked into the hole. She said, under her breath, with the weary horror of a much older person, “God. Damn.”

When I was 13, a boy assaulted me in the campground swimming pool. He was learning disabled. My mother was furious I would bring it up. I went into the ladies’ locker room and cried.

Until someone abandoned an office, I perched my sore butt on the U shaped seat of a toilet to express milk four times a day that I stored in a cooler. The pump was battery powered. Sometimes I had to holler an explanation over the stall walls because it kind of sounds like a vibrator.

I’ve acted cool while my friends dragged me into the bathroom and talked to me while they peed. Not my thing, tbh, but not terrible.

At the YMCA, you had to press the flat, circular knob to start the shower water. It took a while to warm up, and then you only had seconds to get in there and wash your naked body, get your hair wet, and get that damn rubber swim cap on before it turned off again. I was 9.

No, I never passed out drunk in a public bathroom, but I have thrown up, gone to the sink to wash my hands, stared at my red and wilting face in the mirror, and then gone back to throw up some more.

A thousand times, I’ve gone with a pal to the ladies room to hear whatever it was they couldn’t say in public.

I have thrown out at least six pair of panties in bathroom garbage cans because bleeding is just… too dang much. Unpredictable.

Once I hand-expressed milk into the toilet because the meeting went an hour too long, I didn’t think I’d need my pump, and if I didn’t do it I would soak through the only shirt I had.

I lost “The Phantom Tollbooth” in a stall in a diner restaurant and still mourn it.

Sometimes I texted my mom. Sometimes I texted my friends.

Once in Ikea, I changed the diaper of my two-week-old infant eight times while my new mother-in-law waited outside. When I came out, she wondered why I didn’t know what I was doing.

How many times have I escaped from a creep to the ladies room? Dozens. Hundreds. Countless.

Once I talked to the attendant during a truly terrible play. She was great. The play wasn’t worth seeing Act 2. I hung out with her and tipped her $10 for the mints and Hershey’s Kisses.

How many times have I cleared out because someone else was obviously in the middle of an escape from some creep? Dozens. Hundreds. Countless.

I don’t have these memories of escalators, hallways, hotel rooms, galleries, foyers, alleys, elevators, bars, classrooms, or garages. I don’t think anybody does. Ladies rooms are safe spaces. They’re dignity, hygiene, health, trust, and safety. A trans woman might just want to pee, but a woman wants a lot more than that.