Every day, there’s some article, some trending item, some YouTube video, about transgender people and restrooms. And there’s a law in North Carolina, part of which says, well, no, you can only go in the room corresponding to the equipment you were born with. Who wrote this law? Who’s posting these videos? Space aliens posing as humans? It’s the only answer I can fathom, because it honestly seems like these anti-transgender types have never actually been in a restroom before.
Well, I have. All my goddamn life. Every day, I am pissing and shitting. Often it is at home but often it is not. When ya gotta go, ya gotta go.
Some “people” (space aliens) are afraid that men, dressed as women, are going to go into women’s restrooms and assault little girls. Your daughter or granddaughter!
This logic is so ridiculously fucked up, so moronic, I don’t know where to begin. These “people” have certainly never met a transgender person. They aren’t cross-dressing pedophile rapists. They’re brave souls whose insides didn’t match their outsides. So they transition to the gender that makes sense. It can be a lonely, scary process, coping with the world around — friends, family, coworkers, strangers — who don’t understand, can’t grapple with it, who lash out in anger and prejudice. But they stay the course, to be the person they truly are.
And they don’t have the slightest goddamn interest in your son or daughter. It’s a zillion times more likely that some asshole in that bathroom will call them a “fag.” Or point and whisper to a friend, “Did you see that? I think that was a man.”
Or, quite likely, nothing will happen.
You see: Me, you, the transgender person, we’re all going in the restroom to urinate, defecate, or both. Often it is disgusting in there. Often, we are in kind of a rush. In either case, we just want to do our business and get the hell out. If there is a space alien in the next stall, squeezing waste product out of a thin slot, I don’t care, I honestly don’t care. It’s just another horrific smell in the fragrant bouquet.
Oh, and another thing: There are no kids in the restroom. If there are, they’re with a parent. If they’re not with a parent, then they’re peeing in the “little” urinal, or they’re taking a crap and using way too much paper, and then they’re leaving without washing their hands. Because kids are gross.
Do you want to scan some QR code before you go in the restroom? No, you don’t. You gotta get in there. And then you gotta get out. That’s all that matters, that’s all that ever mattered, it’s all that ever will matter.
So let trans people shit in peace.
It’s the one place where we all are truly equal.
Jack Silbert, curator