Category Archives: Trans-Formative

An Open Letter to Rep. Nancy Mace on the Subject of Bathrooms

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Dear Representative Nancy Mace,

Room H-211 in the House of Representatives when it belonged to the speaker of the house. Later it became the parliamentarian’s office, and then the women’s restroom in 2011.*

I understand you want to prevent incoming Rep. Sarah McBride from using the bathroom. Specifically, the women’s bathroom, the one that was finally established next to the House floor in 2011, after nearly 100 years of women in the House who had to take a ten or fifteen minute break in order to reach the women’s room elsewhere in the building.

Since you presumably wouldn’t set up an entire bill to hurt people just out of malice, I gather you must genuinely fear for your safety.

So what are you afraid will happen to you if Representative McBride uses the same bathroom? That she will assault or harass you in some way? Why? Has she been accused of any sort of inappropriate behavior, that you know of? I can’t imagine her district would have elected her if she had had accusations of sexual assault hanging over her head. If she’d been a Republican, sure, but she ran as a Democrat. An openly transgender Democratic state senator, at that. She’d need to be squeaky clean to get elected to this position.

And why would you expect someone in her precarious position to harm one of her new colleagues, anyway? Surely that would lead directly to her ouster. And unless you think she campaigned for her position expressly to gain access to a bathroom of female Congresspeople to harass or assault exactly once, she has far too much at stake for that.

Okay, so maybe you’re not afraid of her saying or doing something to you. Are you afraid instead of her looking at you, or … thinking about you?

So, first, most people in bathrooms are thinking about going to the bathroom. If they think about other people, in my experience, it’s pretty much to worry about what others are thinking of them. In the case of trans people, it’s actually most likely to be whether they can pee in safety, not because of fear-mongering lies but because of actual statistics and actual experiences of being bullied and harassed.

Next, are you concerned that she’d be thinking about you in a sexual way, because she’s in a bathroom? That’s…very self-centered, really. I mean, anyone could be attracted to someone they encounter in a public space, but we don’t try to keep everyone out of public space because of that. Do you also want lesbians out of your bathroom? And bi women? What about straight women who happen to have the odd attraction they were supposed to repress? How are you to know what they’re thinking?

If you’re thinking about other people’s sexual thoughts about you while peeing, without any evidence, that sounds like a “you” problem. Maybe you should be removing yourself from the situation and not bothering them.

Or do you just find it annoying and inconvenient to think worrisome thoughts about her while you pee, and you would rather she go away and not get to pee just so you don’t have to have some uncomfortable thoughts for a few minutes occasionally?

Perhaps, along the lines of Rosanne’s immortal TV response to her sister Jackie on going to a gay bar (“What if they think I’m gay?” “Well, then you could just think they’re gay right back at them!”), you could choose to think mean things about her while you’re both in there, and maybe that would help you feel better.

Or you could choose to think generous things, like maybe how hard it must be to be challenged all the time just for wanting to pee! (Because don’t think she wouldn’t be challenged or harassed if she went to the men’s room.) And how you’ve never experienced this kind of challenge in all the years you’ve used public bathrooms.

If you think that you personally would be safer if Sarah McBride used the men’s room, you presumably also think Sarah McBride would be safer if she used the men’s room? Right? Because you wouldn’t want to put a colleague in danger, right? Honestly, if you think the men’s room is safer for female-presenting people than the women’s room, then perhaps you’re the one who should be using it?

Statistically, trans people are vastly more likely to be the recipients of assault or harassment than to be perpetrators. Whereas 92% of sexual assault perpetrators are men. Why would you ask someone who is most likely to be victimized to go to the place where people are most likely to be perpetrators?

Oh, wait! You’re in Congress. Maybe Congress could pass a law saying that harassing or assaulting people is illegal! Or … maybe it already is.

(Or maybe not, since Marjorie Taylor-Greene has already threatened Sarah McBride with violence…)

One more thing: just to be absolutely clear, are you saying you’re okay with trans men using the women’s bathroom? Even if you can’t tell they’re trans? Just male-presenting people using the women’s room because they’re legally obligated to after all these bathroom bills? Will you commit to making sure not to challenge them on their right to be in your bathroom? Because if you won’t, then you’re not being honest, possibly with yourself, about your plans for trans people or about your own discomfort.

Finally, and I realise this is not really relevant, but it just seems so striking … I was looking up Rep. McBride’s background, and…are you really going after someone who ten years ago was widowed just four days after getting married, because you don’t want her to go to the bathroom? It seems somehow extra petty.

Thank you for your time. Some resources below.
Jennifer Sheffield

– https://juliaserano.medium.com/transgender-people-bathrooms-and-sexual-predators-what-the-data-say-2f31ae2a7c06 (includes specific studies and sources, including the following one)
– https://thinkprogress.org/study-debunks-bathroom-safety-concerns-over-transgender-equality-af932113a4fa/
– https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/a-look-at-womens-advances-over-the-years-in-congress
– https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/women-in-the-house-get-a-restroom/2011/07/28/gIQAFgdwfI_story.html

*Note: The photo comes from this document, but since I found it on a search, and it’s a single chapter from a book, I’m not sure what the source actually is.

Anti-Trans Bathroom Bills, Part I

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Note: I wrote the following in 2021. I hadn’t polished it to the point where I was ready to post, but now that I’ve found it, I want it here as background. So I’m posting it now (June, 2023), with minor edits, and backdating to when it was originally written. I don’t actually know which bills were under discussion at the time, nor whether I had specific ones in mind.
____

stylized bathroom sign with desperate-looking figures

“Holding It In” (image purchased from theprintedprint on etsy.)

To anyone who approves of regulating which bathrooms trans kids can use, I want you to ask yourself this: are you, personally, okay with having your genitals (or your birth certificate) checked whenever you use a public bathroom?

Maybe this hasn’t occurred to you. After all, we already know that the point of these bills is not to check everybody who needs a bathroom; the point is to challenge — and publicize — the gender identity of very specific people who already have their gender identity challenged every day.

Many trans people are already so terrified of being challenged on their right to pee that they will wait until they’re desperate before using the bathroom. These bills will make it clear that people are legally allowed to stop them, even at that moment.

Many trans people already avoid using public bathrooms at all costs, even if they’re out all day. Often, that cost is paid in recurrent urinary tract infections and ongoing health problems. These bills will make that worse.

Cleverly, if these bills pass, then trans and gender-non-conforming people will be challenged no matter what they do.* People who switch to the bathroom they’re comfortable with may legally be challenged at any time. Meanwhile, trans people who pass as cisgender will be challenged (inaccurately) if they follow the new rules and use their assigned-at-birth restroom.**

They will be challenged, and, often, they will be cornered. This is not new.

There is a classic and horrifying trope in some books and movies where school bullies corner a trans or gender-bending kid in a bathroom or locker room and force them to pull their pants down so everyone can see. And this is now meant to be codified into law? I know we’ve seen since 2015 that many school bullies never grew up, but really? Adults want this to be the law?

And if these laws pass, then how are they to be enforced? Since you can’t tell by looking (or else there would be no need for proof), the only really equitable way would be for everyone who wants to use a bathroom to prove, on the spot, that they have the legal right to use it.

I’m guessing this would seem somehow unfair, maybe even discriminatory, to those who have used bathrooms themselves without any worries at all for years.

Ostensibly, parents want these laws in order to protect their kids from (made up) scary people who might look at them funny.*** The argument falls apart once you realise that they’re perfectly happy to have other people’s kids looked at instead, in systematic and prurient ways, by other kids, or by adults.

And if the call for proof doesn’t apply to everyone, then it would have to be done by challenges, on a case-by-case basis. And if THAT happens, then I sincerely hope that there will be people, in the places that enforce such laws, who stand by the bathrooms, ready to challenge everyone who comes by.****

_____
*Footnote in 2023: How prescient of me, though I had no idea the laws would be written that way explicitly…

**And also outed. Of course.

***Okay, they may claim that it’s to prevent attacks, but (1) trans people are already way more likely to be attacked in bathrooms than anyone else, and (2) attacking people is already illegal!

****(Though it would be nice if there were a way to avoid challenging closeted trans people.)

National Coming Out Day and Time Travel: A Belated Post

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(Note: Posted October 2019, updated in 2020.)

A folded scarf in long, crocheted, rainbow stripes.

My first crochet project, ca. 2003.

For the two weeks before I began writing it, I was expecting this post to be (1) a lot shorter and (2) centered on the fact that when I came out 30 years ago on October 10, the Jewish calendar — 19-year cycle notwithstanding — matched up with the same secular days as this year, with Erev Rosh Hashanah on September 29 and Yom Kippur on October 9. It seemed significant that the context for my sudden, startling revelation, coming the day after a fast as it did, should be echoed here 30 years later: Yom Kippur (10/9), Personal Coming Out Day (10/10), National Coming Out Day (10/11).

This is no longer my focus. It is still about dates, though. And about time.*

Things change dramatically over time. Sometimes it takes 30 years, and sometimes it takes two years, or a single day. When I had my sudden, startling revelation on October 10, 1989, I was on a safe, supportive college campus, and I knew at the time that October 11 would be National Coming Out Day and that October 12 would be my frosh hall’s Gay and Lesbian Awareness Workshop.** This was only the beginning of my questioning process, so I wasn’t coming out to anyone else yet. But at that point, I knew that the very next day I could stay quiet in a sea of supportive celebration. I knew that the day after that I could sit in a circle and declare myself a lesbian, and no one would know whether I was role-playing or not, and I could get questions answered without fear. I knew I was incredibly lucky.***

A year or so later, I was in the campus GLBA office and noticed a photo on the wall. It was a cluster of students with signs on the National Mall, and it was labeled, “March on Washington, October 11, 1987”. And I stared. I am good at dates, and I am good at patterns. I knew, unequivocally, in that moment, that National Coming Out Day was created to commemorate that march. And that that meant that National Coming Out Day was created in 1988, and that 1989 was only the second one ever. And I was stunned by how close I had come to missing that day of celebration and power and comfort that I had thought was already an institution.

This is not to say I had taken my safe space for granted. It was just astonishment at how quickly and abruptly — and arbitrarily — things can change. After all, there wasn’t any particular day set up to commemorate the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Rights that I did go to, on April 25, 1993. And yet the power of that march resonated later in powerful ways. I always thought, until five or ten years ago, that the national conversation about marriage equality started in 1994, when Hawai’i made its ruling that a marriage had to be able, based only on gender (not on actual fertility or intention), to produce children. But in fact, the 1993 march had a platform of demands, and one of the demands was an expansion of the definitions of family, including the recognition of domestic partnerships and legalization of same sex marriages.

Another thing that began in 1994 was the introduction of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) to Congress. Before this (from 1974), the focus had been promoting the Equality Act to expand the Civil Rights Act of 1964. ENDA has still not passed, despite being introduced (with gender identity added in 2009) to every Congress save one until 2014, when support wavered and efforts returned to the Equality Act, which this year passed the House but has not moved in the Senate. Instead, we now have the ACLU arguing employment discrimination cases in front of the Supreme Court, and an unfavorable Court at that.

I found myself surprised this week, however, to keep reading online comments framing these court cases as an unthinkable new disaster in this time, from people who were somehow stunned that it should become legal to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people in employment. And maybe those commenters live in the states where such rights are protected. The truth is, though, that there is no federal law against this discrimination, just years of painstaking work to establish scattered local and state protections. If the justices rule against us, those laws could be superseded, which indeed would be a devastating push backward. But if, by some chance, they vote in our favor, then we would gain federal protection that we have never had.

[Edited in 2020 to add: And they did rule in our favor! See Bostock vs. Clayton County.****]

It’s been very curious being around long enough to see how much the conversation and the climate have changed over 30 years. Watching and welcoming the emerging gender identity movement, particularly over the last decade, has felt new and fascinating and also strangely familiar. From young kids coming out and public activism to bathroom bills and ongoing violence to language change and new books and new accommodation, I keep feeling, yes, this is where we were back in the ‘90s: visibility and backlash and violence and change. And in the nineties I was told by people who lived through the rise of third wave feminism in the ’70s: this is the way it goes: visibility and backlash and change. And so we all keep going, being visible, speaking our truth, and making change.

I began this essay on October 11, and it’s now grown enough that I’m finishing it a week later, and thus I’ve gotten to see, spread around my Facebook feed, the dawning of a new Day: the second instance of International Pronouns Day, begun last year on the third Wednesday in October. This is only the second one ever.

And this reminded me of something important that did happen just after Yom Kippur this year. We shared our break-fast meal that evening with longtime family friends, and since there were people at the table who didn’t know each other, one of the family, in support of her sibling, suggested we go around and do names and pronouns.

Now, I’ve been including my pronouns in my email signature at work for the past year and a half, but, I realised as it neared my turn, this was the first time I’d ever done it out loud. And then I looked at my kid, for whom this ritual was also new, and watched to see what he’d say. And even though he had only “she” and “they” modeled before his turn, he gamely followed the pattern and said, “…and I use he/him pronouns.” And thus we move forward, one word or day or year at a time, toward safe space, toward recognizing human dignity, and toward comprehensive human rights.


——
*Though, to be fair, only about the most mundane type of time travel.

**The CoLeGA (Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Awareness, later renamed BiLeGA [and eventually, in 1999, BiLeGaTA]) Awareness workshop was my favorite of the required awareness workshops, and it was cleverly designed. Everyone would sit in a circle, with two student facilitators, and everyone had to say, in turn, “I am a lesbian” or “I am a gay man”. That was the only thing we were required to say out loud. (To be fair, there were a few students who refused to do the workshop at all, based on this.) What followed was a role-play, in which the facilitators would give prompts, such as, “Tell me about a time you felt discriminated against,” or “How does it feel to tell people?” and anyone who wanted could reply. If we didn’t identify as gay or lesbian (or bi), we were asked to draw on our experiences based on other identities, or to imagine what it would be like. For the second half, we wrote questions on pieces of paper that we didn’t want to ask aloud, and the facilitators read them out and answered them as best they could.

***Actually, I wasn’t quiet on National Coming Out Day; I was fairly loud and enthusiastic, and I’m pretty sure it was even my proposal (earlier in the week) that for our hall’s turn at the dorm’s Wednesday “wine and cheese” on October 11, we serve chocolate chip cookie dough and milk, both colored with pink food coloring. But I wasn’t loud for myself, quite yet.

****Note that this decision, similar to the provisions of ENDA, covers only employment, leading to renewed focus on the Equality Act, including in the Biden campaign: “Biden will make enactment of the Equality Act during his first 100 days as President a top legislative priority.”