What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

jezebelgoldstone asked: 1st off, let me say that I've been following you for a long time and you are one of my favorite humans. I'm asking you this bc I can't find a good answer anywhere else: my mom and I are getting into Discourse re: trans bathroom issues. Not trans rights per se; her fear is creepy cis men claiming to identify as trans so they can harass women. I'm sorry if you've already posted about this and I missed it, and if you don't want to answer this then obvs that's fine. Any help/recs would be great. <3

A few points to make to your mother, in no particular order:

- Generally speaking, and with the notable exception of transphobes wanting to Make A Point about bathroom laws in the throes of public debate, cis guys dressing up as women to creep in bathrooms is a non-issue. I mean, at a basic level, it’s a very involved performance for no clear payoff. Any guy wanting to do this is going to have to dress in drag and go out in public - meaning, it has to be premeditated - and for the kind of misogynist, sexist, predatory assdouche who thinks creeping in women-only spaces is a good idea, being perceived as feminine, let alone actually mistaken for female, is the worst thing that can ever happen to them. The kind of gross politician you see talking about how he would’ve loved to go in the girl’s bathroom when he was at school, therefore all men are creeps? That man would never voluntarily dress in drag. His fantasy is of being invisible and/or unnoticed in a female space, but if anyone ever actually asked him to put on a dress and prove it, he wouldn’t, because Gender Roles.

- Even if this actually started happening, that wouldn’t invalidate the needs of trans men and women to use the goddamn bathroom in public. And the fact is, trans people are already using the correct bathrooms, passing unnoticed because - spoiler alert! - public bathrooms are fucking gross, literally nobody chooses to hang out in there. Any person of any gender who loiters in a public toilet to harass strangers should get evicted, period, but their behaviour should by no means prevent other people from using the bathroom. 

- I feel like the kind of guy who’s excited by the idea of invading women’s bathrooms really doesn’t understand how they work. Like, we’re not all squatting out in the open? You aren’t actually going to see any genitals the way you would at a urinal? We’re in individually locked stalls? What are you going to do, stand in that piss-and-bleach-scented square meter of space by the sink and ogle the women washing their hands? What part of this process is materially different to standing in line outside a shared bathroom at a house party? Like, bathrooms are not changing rooms? And yes, trans folks should get to use the changing rooms of their choice, too, but I feel like there’s this weird mental slippage that happens in these conversations wherein women’s bathrooms are universally pictured as changing rooms, which they’re not, in order to create a greater sense of panic about what some interloping dude might reasonably witness in the vast majority of instances under discussion.

- If the fear is genuinely about the prospect of bathroom harassment, then that’s explicitly what should be outlawed: making sexually inappropriate comments or advances to strangers in bathrooms. It’s a simple enough provision to make, and it doesn’t stop anyone from pissing where they need to. But the fear isn’t about cis men harassing ladies, is the thing - the fear is, “I might see someone who looks insufficiently feminine in a public bathroom and not be allowed to yell at them or tell them to leave, even if they’re clearly just there to take a dump”

- If you really want to protect women - if that is your actual argument: that all women deserve to feel safe from harassment - then you cannot hinge that argument on forcing trans women to use male bathrooms. What this argument really says is, “I care more about the remote possibility of cis women being importuned by skeevy cis men than I do about the very real and consistently documented problem of trans women being beaten, abused, harassed and/or raped for using the “wrong” (according to their assailant) bathroom”

I hope that helps!

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