Why Is It Important for Trans People To Go to the Bathroom?

Paranoia about sexual offenses legitimizes discrimination.

We, as transgender people, do not identify with the sex assigned to us at birth. Because I was born with a penis, they assigned a male sex as my gender stereotype. Assigning sex is a process that puts a deep-seated prejudice into practice: Genitals and sex are the same thing. But being born with certain genitals does not necessarily make you a woman or a man. For example, I’m a woman with a penis.

On the contrary, cisgender people are those who do identify with the sex assigned at birth and with it comes various privileges. Among them, they do not have to convince the whole world of their identity because their bodies don’t fit gender stereotypes about what a man or a woman should look like. Therefore, spaces assigned according to gender don’t cause anxiety or fear. Instead, transgender people live every day afraid of someone referring to us with a pronoun that doesn’t match our gender identity, of saying aloud a name with which we don’t identify, of the surprised looks that inspect our every inch from head to toe and, of course, of being raped or killed in an act of transphobic violence.

Public bathrooms segregated by gender (“men” and “women”) are spaces where transphobia is exacerbated. To go into a bathroom, there is a reminder with a skirt or pants to see if you are using the proper toilet or you look at the people coming and going to reaffirm that you aren’t going into the wrong one. When I go to the women’s bathroom, I get looks, hear comments, and could potentially be the victim of insults, harassment, or violence – why do I have to use the wrong bathroom? With all of this in mind, it’s impossible to use the restroom in peace.

As strategies to try to blend in and shield oneself against transphobia, transgender people regulate what we eat and drink, locate little-used bathrooms, time schedules in order to not cross paths with anyone else, and try not to make eye contact: We live hidden. In some cases, the restroom affects identity construction and we consider suspending or accelerating the construction of our own gender identity by taking more hormones, ceasing them altogether, expediting or cancelling surgeries. It’s all of this that adds to the chorus of voices telling you that looking trans is bad and it makes it harder to hear your own voice about how you want to see yourself in the mirror in order to be happy.

In recent months, the relationship between transgender people and public restrooms has entered the mainstream. A populist strategy in the United States, which seems to still be in style, places the issue in the center of the storm: sexual panic! In March, North Carolina passed a law requiring transgender people to use bathrooms that correspond with the sex assigned at birth. Under the argument that girls would be raped by men dressed as female, they exploited the buzz of sexual panic to allow them to pass the law.

This isn’t the first time paranoia about sexual offenses has been used to legitimize discrimination. Jim Crow laws required racial segregation of bathrooms for whites and African-Americans. After World War II, public restrooms were battlegrounds for civil rights struggles over racial integration in schools and workplaces. Conservatives used the argument of protecting white women from possible sexual assault by African-American men in order to deny rights.

Against this backdrop, different solutions have emerged so that transgender people can go to the bathroom in a more dignified way. The Obama administration sent a letter to all public schools that receive federal funds stating that transgender people may use the restroom corresponding with the gender they identify or schools could face lawsuits or lose federal funds. The Organization of American States appointed one of its bathrooms as gender neutral where anyone can enter regardless of the gender he/she expresses or identifies with and does not place any restriction on transgender people using the other restrooms. The example we like the most is that of private university Cooper Union in New York that decided to forego separating restrooms between men and women to instead convert them all into gender neutral bathrooms.

A re-evaluation is definitely in order. Whenever we see gender segregation, we must question it by paying special attention to prejudices that may lie behind its justification. Sexual panic can’t be used as a distraction because what happens in the bathroom is just a small part in the cycle of violence, exclusion, poverty, and death that surrounds the lives of the majority of transgender people.