Dear Anonymous (A Restroom Rant)

This is a response to one of the comments on my last post, found HERE. The post itself will remain an ongoing monitor of the development of media surrounding the incident, while this post will represent my responses to the larger issue of access to appropriate public restroom facilities for transgender people.

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Dear Anonymous #4,
You said:
"This is a tricky issue if this person is a transgender. As a woman with a young daughter I would not want a transgender in the restroom and here is the reason. A man can easily dress as a woman just to get a chance to fondle a young girl in the privacy of a restroom. How are we to know? That's just it. We don't know.

I... I admit that I have to work very hard to keep my composure as I respond to you, as your comments invoked a great deal of sick-making anger in me, but I think you raise something that is SO SO SO important I can't just leave it be. Just let me figure out where to start... Ah yes...


I love children. I don't need to be a parent to care about their safety and want what's best for all kids. I have three younger brothers, one of which I had the privilege to see being born and all of whom I have had the pleasure of helping to raise. I am also a well-paid, trusted, and much-adored babysitter/nanny, have been since I was old enough to be left alone with children. I take that job very seriously, so much so that I make a point to keep my CPR and First Aid certifications up to date, and I almost never, EVER actually charge for my services. (Coming from the household I grew up in, I know how hard it can be to find a quality sitter when you need one, how preventative it can be to not be able to afford one. As a feminist I know that not being able to find or afford child care is one of the biggest challenges facing - especially single parent - families.)

I have cared for children of all ages, sexes, gender expressions, races, and degrees of physical and mental ability. I have wiped their bums, given them baths, slathered them all over with sun screen, as well as fed them, played with them, kissed away tears, and dressed them from total nudity to the sixth layer of protection from the elements.

I am transgender. Even "worse," I am a transsexual. (The difference being I have had at least one surgical procedure related to my gender dysphoria and have been injecting testosterone into my body as part of a Hormone Replacement Therapy Regime, as opposed to simply seeking validation for my identity purely through social acrobatics. This distinction is debatable and controversial but that's how I lay it out.)

I am also a human being. And sometimes I need to pee. Sometimes I need to sit. Sometimes I just need to wash my hands or check my appearance, and the bathroom is usually the best/only place to do that.

Which bathroom do you expect me to use?

Now, I am a man. A trans man. I was born female. I used to be a little girl. At 22 years old, I still retain some of the physical features which commonly mark a person as female, but I have gone through three years of hormone therapy and today I sport a beard and sideburns and a fairly deep voice and hairy arms and deliberately dress to let people know they should identify me as male.

Where do you expect me to do my business?

I use the men's room. I have since I was 16 years old. I use it in spite of the fact that every time I undo my belt I realize how vulnerable I am, and that any other person in that bathroom might now take advantage of me do to me exactly what is being done to the girl in that video, or worse. Apparently, my chances of getting the tar beaten out of me are equally likely no matter which restroom I use.

But let me turn away from myself and my own selfish needs, and those of other trans people, and address your concern for your children, which I completely empathize with.

I want you... to please, just THINK for a second, about how absurd your fear is. REALLY. Think about what goes on the bathroom. And having used both restrooms, I can vouch for the fact that except for some subtleties, things are basically the same on either side. You go in. You pick a receptacle. You enter its domain, and God willing it has a door which you shut behind you. You do your business, hopefully hygienically. You emerge, hopefully you wash your hands, and you leave.

If you are a child, you generally do all of this in the company of your parents, or said parental remains just outside and waits. Unless you have a damned incompetent or negligent parent. If you are with your child, what does it matter who is in there, you are there to see nothing goes awry, from the kid flushing him or herself down the toilet, to being kidnapped.

When I was a little girl, I can't tell you how many times I went into the men's room - escorted by my daddy - when the ladies' was full and there was a line and I HAD To GO. (Funny how just walking by the freezer section does that to a kid's bladder...) I'm pretty sure most of the men there were more embarrassed than I was to see me there. I never once got molested or even came near being touched or even breathed on by the men there.

My point being, we're talking about PUBLIC restrooms. Your fear of your child being molested in private is therefor unfounded. Your child should never be "alone" in there.

Let me point something else out to you. Your statement, heartfelt as it is, is so disgustingly full of sexism it makes me shake. You basically just pointed a finger at all men in the world and screamed CRIMINAL! PEDOPHILE! You insinuate that ONLY MEN are capable of molesting children. As if in the presence of ALL females (who have the right anatomy) your child is somehow totally safe. You're wrong. Women are just as capable of molesting children as men are.

Also, whether you intended to or not, you have implied that ALL MEN will, given the slightest opportunity, fondle any pretty little thing that walks their way. This makes it nearly impossible for men like me (and, for just one example, the guys over at the Good Men Project) to prove ourselves decent human beings. In your eyes, just by dint of our gender, we are criminals. How is that fair? Where's the justice?

Let me tell you something else, for your illumination. Men, as a group (not all individual men, but en masse), HATE pedophiles. I would almost argue that your children are safer in the men's room than in the ladies' because if the average man saw or even suspected another man of violating a child, he would not hesitate to intervene, often violently. Men in prison for abusing children often face the threat of LETHAL beatings at the hands of other men. I have no doubt that if, during my time as a little girl in the men's bathroom at the mall, I had said anything to the effect of "don't touch me daddy" half a dozen men would beat down the stall door to sanction him then and there.

Hey, if we're going to call up stereotypes and myths, we might as well call up the most likely scenarios! Admittedly, I have zero hard evidence for the proposal in the previous paragraph, but then, that's still more than you have for your assumptions, considering the amount of research evidence to the contrary of your biased assumptions that underlie your fears and excuses for reinforcing prejudices.

Speaking of which, I hardly think I need reiterate the statistic that THE VAST MAJORITY of rape and molestations, ESPECIALLY of children, are perpetrated by someone who the victim KNOWS, often knows intimately. That's family members and close family friends. Not random strangers in the bathroom.

Last of all, let me get to this line. "a man can easily dress as a woman"
You do not know what you are talking about. Please take a Saturday off sometime soon and go down to Station 4 on Cedar Springs, and watch the drag show there. Grab one of the queens and ask her how "easy" it is to dress as a woman, even just for blatantly entertainment purposes. I will even offer to babysit for you that night.

To me there is no issue, there is no trick. You are perpetuating a completely UNFOUNDED and HARMFUL fear that makes violence like THIS happen. If I get beaten up the next time I go to the bathroom, and no one helps me, my blood is on YOUR hands.

"How are we to know? That's just it. We don't know."
No. We don't know. We don't know when a person passes through the doors of the restroom if their intent is to piss, shit, wash their hands, snort a line of cocaine, fondle our children, or some combination of these.

But this is America, where we presume a person is innocent until proven guilty.


Imagine if I stood here and said "I think it's terrible how some people treat those colored folks, but you know, they ARE so dirty - don't they have the highest instances of AIDS? - do we really want them using our water fountains? You know they're so prone to violence, can we really allow them to sit on our side of the bus? Those black folks breed like rabbits, their sex drive is so high, we can't trust them to go to the same bathroom or swimming pool as us, they just can't help themselves. If a black man even LOOKS at a white woman going into the bathroom he's sure to realize she's vulnerable and go after her and rape her, we have to keep their bathrooms way apart from ours!"

Now replace every racial epithet with "trans" and you've got some of the primary arguments that keep people like me and this poor girl under the boot of oppression. Also my bladder hurts!


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Transphobia is related to, but not the same as homophobia. As we can plainly see, it has its deepest roots in internal and external gender-based violence, both misogynistic and misandristic in nature.

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Anon2
April 22, 2011 8:20 PM