Peeing in protest
I’ve been peeing for a long time, as long as I can remember, and I’ve been using the women’s toilet for well over a decade at this point. It’s deeply familiar. I also know how to stay safe there. I do my best to make myself small, though my 5’11 frame makes it harder to conform to expected diminution. I move quickly, deftly, I don’t hesitate or linger. And I never speak. My voice isn’t deep or gravelly but it’s one of the main ways I feel different to the people around me. I’ve had some ridiculous experiences of women talking directly to me in the toilet, seeing me visibly as any other, admittedly tall, woman. And I do my best to gesture a response, a shrug, pretend I’ve lost my voice, or attempt to answer by tapping out morse code with my nail on the bathroom mirror.
I don’t think my voice would reveal my transness, indeed I’ve spoken to lots of people and outside of the bathroom no one looks at me strangely. I think my fear is honestly mostly irrational, but being irrational is just a Wednesday at this point and I’m not about to roll the dice on speaking when the context has become so dangerous. The world has become so acutely aware of trans people that I feel suddenly very visible everywhere I go, and never more so than when washing my hands. Washing my hands has become an act of protest. Existing has become a protest.
On Sunday I was out singing karaoke and my friends and I took a break to go pee. Girls and boys are remarkably different in toilets mostly in how we perceive the sociality of the space. Men often wash their hands in total silence. Women speak, compliment each other, offer a listening ear. And my friend spoke to me.
I had let my guard down. We were having fun. I forgot myself. I spoke aloud.
A woman standing outside a cubicle while her child was inside immediately noticed me, and I saw the tell-tale scrutiny that comes from clockage. She looked at me, spotted my height, quickly eyed my features, and smiled. I know, shocking right? Smiled?! In my direction?!? What kind of clandestine transphobia is this??
It is, dear reader, entirely possible she thought I was gorgeous, or just that I was tall, or spotted that my hair had exploded outward like a dying sun. Paranoia comes with the territory and indeed it’s possible that her entirely benign action is being woefully misinterpreted by a trans woman too familiar with risk. It’s also possible that this woman is writing her own blog about how this tall ethereal woman with incredible hair was looking at her quizzically in the toilet, and that she should mind her own business, the beautiful weirdo.
At this point I do think it would be unwise to ask.
But I find myself ever more self-conscious. I find myself perfecting my makeup, getting the fit right, paying attention to the colours and shapes I choose, to what looks feminising on my admittedly pretty feminine form. The effort is frankly a little embarrassing. And I know life is too short. I know my life is far too short to care so much about what other people think of me, to care how pretty I look. But I do care. I care so deeply. As though I can earn my womanhood with beauty. As though I can only hide within the safety of attractiveness.
No one expects a beautiful woman to be trans.
This is the predictably upsetting consequence of the public’s changing attitudes towards the trans population. The public statements from authoritative figures. The talking heads online spinning in circles repeating the same refrain everywhere they turn that trans women are no women at all. Each time I hear it, I objectify myself a little more. I look in the mirror and see the unnoticeable blemish, the wrinkle that is as much a sign of all the good jokes told and laughs shared as it is of life’s entropy, the adam’s apple that I refuse to have surgically reduced and that commenters online have literally told me is large enough to hang a coat on, the creak of my voice as it opens to its first sound. I feel like there’s too much of me, that I’m squeezed into my clothes, a simple flexion from my secret masculine Mr Hyde bursting and tearing into view, only barely disguised by my considerable efforts.
I feel monstrous.
And this kind woman’s smile suddenly carries a huge weight, and I suspect if she did identify me as trans, she knows it too. She has the power in that moment to out me, to draw everyone’s attention to me, to complain about me. In that moment, beneath this stranger’s foot lies my whole world, my dreams, myself. When she treads, will she do so softly, or will she end it all? Without any intention a look crosses my face. My eyes plead.
After this kind woman smiled at me, a totally benign expression mutated by my fear into barely concealed horror, I went back to karaoke. I’m good at singing in a deep register, so I sang in a deeper register. We all laughed together, all sang together, and with my sister we sang Suddenly Seymour almost in each other’s arms. We hugged after. I felt whole.
Today I headed to my therapist’s office. I wore a red knee-length flowing dress with long fluted sleeves, my eyeshadow burnt orange with a gently winged liner. I don’t usually dress up for my therapist, but now I wear my femininity like armour. In place of a long braid wild red hair. In place of a sword my mascara. I walked to a public toilet en route, peeked my head at the signage. A cleaner nearby saw my hesitation.