My Facebook friend put a post on her Facebook page:

“I was in a restroom with a transgender woman today and guess what happened?

Nothing.

Not a damn thing.

Oh wait. As we were washing our hands I smiled and said hello and she did too.

Isn’t it amazing that all she did was pee and wash her hands?

No children were harmed in the making of this pee.”

My friend said that no one in the ladies’ room pointed to the transgender person and said anything about her being in the bathroom, nobody ran out in morally offended horror, no mothers threw themselves bodily between her and their children while backing out the door, nor did one single person hold their crossed-fingers up in front of them to cast off the devil.

On the other hand, I wondered how my friend knew it was a transgender woman.

I mean, did she check?

I realize that people in Houston and in North Carolina are terrified that “allowing transgender people to use public bathrooms based on their gender identity would expose women and girls to discomfort and possible molestation,” but the question remains:

How is anybody going to know the difference between a cisgender and transgender woman?

Maybe undercover “gender identity police” (GIP) will be stationed in the bathrooms of America? Or maybe before anyone goes into a bathroom their, uh, “gender” will be x-rayed much the way suitcases are x-rayed at the airport.

X-raying genitalia. Interesting concept.

Then, what if the alarm sounds?

“Excuse me, but I have to pat you down.”

Personally, I’m terrified of anyone coming into the ladies’ room—she may be better dressed than I am.

On the other hand, I actually did have a real, down-to-earth frightening experience in a ladies’ room once that wasn’t exactly healthy to me or to any children who might have happened to be with me.

It was in a ladies’ room in a parking garage in Santa Cruz, California.

All of the other stalls were empty and I was sitting on the toilet peeing when I heard a commotion. I looked under the door of my stall to see what I could see and what I saw was several pairs of men’s shoes walk by.

Then it dawned on me—there were men’s voices attached to those shoes! They all crowded into the handicapped stall next to mine and began negotiating with each other. Loudly.

Not realizing right away what was going on, I called out to them from behind my “safely” locked stall door.

“Excuse me, aren’t you guys in the wrong bathroom?”

“Just mind your own business lady and we’ll be out of here in a minute.”

Mind my own business. What a concept.

But then, that’s when it dawned on me what that rowdy bunch of guys was doing and why they were doing it in a ladies’ room. After all, who was going to stop them? Certainly not the state legislature.

A situation with the buying and selling of street drugs while I was the only other person around was definitely an incident that exposed me to “discomfort and possible molestation.”

I ran out of the ladies’ room with the drug dealers in it and went to the ticket counter of the parking garage to tell the guy there what happened.

“Oh, yeah, that happens in there all the time,” he said in an entirely blasé manner.

I guess it wasn’t like I was telling him that a really dangerous transgender person was in the ladies’ room.

“I’d like to report it to management,” I said.

“Oh, they know,” he responded. “They’ve known for ages.”

The funny thing is that nobody has passed a law or anything—not one single thing—to stop guys from dealing drugs in ladies’ rooms when, actually, to my way of thinking, the likelihood of being harmed or molested by a gang of drug dealers is a tad more dangerous and upsetting than standing next to a transgender person at the sink while you are both washing your hands.

But then, I’m not a Republican legislator, what do I know?

Author’s Note: Thanks to my friend Kat Kenner for inspiring this piece.

 

Author: Carmelene Siani

Editor: Catherine Monkman

Photo: Clostcase5/Deviantart