Using the women’s bathroom for the first time

Trans women are women

This post is part of a series of “rediscovered” posts that were written at a moment in time and then rather unhelpfully, forgotten about.  Have you ever, “I could swear I did that?”  Well, this is a case of that.  It should have been published in late May, still within the magical cocoon of my 99 day boat ride through the physical and spiritual aspects of a sex change.

As a trans woman I have lived the debate of access to women’s spaces for quite a long while.  For me, the debate is over.  I mean that on a personal level, but not on a general level.  As society we are navigating complexity.

Over dinner a few nights ago a female parent of some present noted that when she was growing up in the 1970’s that it was far more common to have unisex bathrooms.  She recounted how natural it was to have bathrooms with stalls, sometimes each stall having both urinal and toilet.  And how natural it was to come across a man washing his hands after.

She described this as non-threatening, and if anything, kind of normalizing.  Her own view was that the separation of the sexes was not and has not been healthy.

We were not talking about locker rooms/changing rooms/shelters.  You will not find in me someone who advocates for shared spaces, particularly in relation to women.  Nearly every woman in existence experiences unwanted and inappropriate attention from men somewhere along the line.  I don’t mean to single out the female experience, especially as a former pretty boy who experienced way too much unwanted and inappropriate touch and worse growing up (and yes, once is too much).  I also don’t mean to imply that women are not incapable of abuse, but the near universal truth is that some portion of men are predators.

Nobody wants them anywhere.

And women need spaces where they can feel and be safe.  This is a basic right, and sadly, is more essential given that the fundamental structure of patriarchal society is a kind of socio-existential assault on women.  

As a person in transition, I did not regard me simply calling myself transgender enough.  Was I transgender woman once I came out?  Yes.  Did that make me feel entitled to access women’s spaces?  No.  It did not.

The grim reality for trans women is that we are even more likely to experience violence and harassment from men than cis women are.  People love to fXXk with us.  Some men feel entitled to do so.  And the period between when we come out and when transition takes us to a place where we are somewhere firmly across an invisible dividing line between male and female, is when we are most at risk.  I have certainly understood that, even lived it, even if I am blessed in that nothing really bad has happened to me during my transition.

I kept using the men’s room, at least when there was no gender-neutral choice.  Even if I was tucked, looked good in a skirt, tottering on my heels.  People still misgender me now that I have had a sex change and there is nothing overtly male about me, my manner, my dress other than it is obvious that I used to be a man.

I wouldn’t have dreamed of using a woman’s changing room.  I didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable.

For me, there is a formal dividing line.  First, I became legally female.  My drivers license, passport, birth certificate all say female now.  For those of you who do not know, it is possible to take these steps pre-op.  To take these steps even without ever having an op.  This is correct and I am glad that it is correct, and very grateful that when I walked out of the hospital after a sex change operation, that I could do so already legally female.  And of course, being a post-op transsexual was the other one for me.

I would not ever access a woman’s space without these two elements in place—a vulva and an ID.  And now, there is no way I will go into a man’s space unless I am totally desperate and have no alternative.

But in my life I meet tons of people who are not as “committed” to a gender transition as I am who still refer to themselves as transgender.  And I don’t wish to make soup out of linguistics, or diminish their own potentially real fear of what it is like to be transgender, but these distinctions have mattered to me in my own life, my own transition.  I can also understand why many cis women in particular (cis men’s perspective on this is not welcome, as they really have no grounds for commenting on who can access women’s services, women’s spaces) might be uncomfortable with a loose definition.

We can make some changes as a society to make this more navigable for all.

First, trans women are women.

What is a trans woman?  Ouch.  I know I am.  And what would I ask for?  Are you on hormones or not?  To me this is the most important dividing line.  Most profoundly, hormones change our brains.  They alter our libido.  I stopped being a man the day I began HRT in earnest.  It took about 6 weeks for it to really kick in in noticeable ways, but there is no man-brain left in me.  What is left is a sense of comfort in social situations that is left after a lifetime of being in a position of natural power.

I know that I became woman when my brain kicked over.  But I was not about to impose me, my body, on women when I was still in a liminal space.  Many people still think I look like a man even though I have now left that liminal space.  I sympathise with those women who are uncomfortable that a person who has male genitalia might use the women’s room.  One of my mothers noted to me that when she was growing up, unisex restrooms were more common in public venues than they are today.

But I haven’t thought like a man since July of 2022, when I formally entered the care of an endocrinologist.  You might say that I was already not a man, and in many ways, as I look back at my life, how I felt, how I existed, the reality of gender dysphoria is powerful enough to call into question whether my wiring was ever naturally or completely male.  I am pretty sure that it was not.

And gosh, how I have fallen into being a sexual being as a woman.  It has come so naturally to me, because it was already how I was, how I wanted to be, how I wanted to connect, to express myself.

After hormones, a sex change is a pretty good, though I have known many trans women who live as women, but who have decided to keep their male bits.  In my personal life, even though I might come to love a trans woman, I would not want to lie with a trans woman who still possessed a penis.  You might call it hypocritical, or even weird, but I am more comfortable with a trans man who has kept her vulva than I am with the presence of the penis.  I don’t know why this is, other than knowing it is a profound preference.

And finally, the legal changes matter.  Not so much for others as for ourselves.  That’s how I feel about them.  Knowing that I belong there from all aspects.  And just because some jerk might deny me because they misgender me, will also only ever be some random man.  I have yet to feel this energy from women, any woman.  It could just be that women are better at reading energy.  

I was out last night with a friend I hadn’t seen in over 30 years.  We spoke of female super-powers and this was one of them.

All this to say that a few weeks ago I was out and about with a lady friend of mine and had to pee.  In all my life I had never been into a female designated bathroom.  I don’t like, have never liked using public restrooms anyway.  And here I was in the need, and queuing to pee.  As someone who has designed theme parks, hotels, spas, and other public spaces, as a man, I was not guilty of making female bathroom facilities equal to or of the same size as male ones…I always advocated for and got many more spaces for women than for men, based on real life experience.  That’s an aside because most of the world is hopelessly imbalanced.  So, I was standing on line.

When it came my turn I went into my stall, and in my desire to find some semblance of hygiene, searched out the toilet paper to wrap the toilet seat so that none of it would come into contact with me.  I yearn for Asian squatty toilets—so much better for you to stretch, so much better to evacuate in any way in this shape, and so much cleaner.  But here I was in the West, itching to pee.  And what I saw was a box with toilet paper poking out, and not really registering what it was, had opened it and discovered that it was not toilet paper but a box for something entirely different.

I had to laugh at my embarrassing mistake, and to make sure I did I told my friend how my first experience as a woman in a woman’s restroom went, and we had a good laugh.  For those of you who don’t know, there is a place women put hygiene products that isn’t in the toilet…and as a constant user of such products, it was beyond silly for me to make this mistake—and as someone who had read about just this mistake in a thread on embarrassing posts, I was doubly chastened.  There is no substitute for real experience.

Learning to be a woman as an adult is an adventure.