Five Reasons I Won’t Share Washrooms with Cisgender People
ONE: cisgender people often claim the right to comment on the bodies of others.
Once, I was less jaded—before my gender was debated when I tried to take a pee during the very first week of my P-fucking-hD. A staff member chased me into the women’s room and asked what I thought I was doing. Smarter me would have retorted, “what–you want a number?” Back to class I went.
If anti-trans bathroom laws and campaigns have blossomed over the last decade, their buds have long bothered us.[1] In their 1996 track “Wrong Bathroom,” queer San Francisco punk band Tribe 8 (1991-2005) describes the challenges of pit stops while on tour. Trans people have been pissing and shitting all over spatial categories, long before the current news cycle would have people believe we spend most of our time on the toilet.[2] And while most transphobic bathroom bill supporters premise their campaigns on the protection of innocent young girls, let me —and Tribe 8—tell you that women in women’s washrooms enforce gender norms with the best of them. Tribe 8’s rhyme captures the very common scene succinctly: “Excuse me sir! / Over by the stall! / Wrong fucking bathroom! / The men’s is down the hall!”[3] In the surveys she collected for Queering Bathrooms, Sheila Cavanagh reports that trans people tend to be policed in bathrooms not only for appearance, but for many things. Her respondents describe cisgender people commenting on matters ranging from the sound of one’s urinary stream to the direction of one’s feet when sitting on the toilet.[4] In short, cisgender people do not understand boundaries.
TWO: cisgender people are not hygienic.
Have you seen the messes left behind in a public washroom after cisgender people have used it? I have narrowly dodged cis men’s urine splashed about in the manner of a dog marking territory. I have missed by a whisker others’ menstrual blood, and have watched people of both cis genders parade past the sink and back into their dirty worlds. Oh, the loogies I have heard hocked from deep in the lungs of men. A blue puck of urinal soap can do little when a man has decided to shit directly in a urinal. Need I mention the many massive shits I have witnessed in sad bowls clouded by nary a square of toilet paper? At my prairie YMCA—where, as a person assigned “Female” at birth and who had had zero hormonal/surgical interventions, I was subject to constant comments in the women’s locker room, complaints to the front desk, and eventually a genital quiz arranged by staff—I once watched a woman in a bathing suit spread her legs a bit, squat, and urinate directly into a drain. Cisgender hygiene hit the skids long ago.[5]
People whose livelihood it is to clean these spaces of heteronormative filth—often women, often BIPOC, and not for handsome paychecks—could surely tell you the impact of these norms better than I can. Still, when one is configured culturally as a type of social dirt that renders the washroom unsafe, we might as well underline who is doing the real dirtying (and the cleaning). As Covid-19 (and the varying mis/managements thereof) has devastated the habits of public space, we see something quite interesting happening: now that the hygienic practices of these spaces are a risk to cis people (and not just to trans people, disabled people, those who clean the spaces, racialized people profiled therein, etc.) washrooms are suddenly closed, protocols changed, or cleanliness practices utterly remade almost instantly. As is often the case when we discuss the design and policing of public space, the question that arises is: whose lives do we value?[6]
Figure 1. Author flushes a urinal in the men's room of Diller Scofidio + Renfro's now-defunct Brasserie space in midtown Manhattan, 2009. Photograph by Carmen Ellison.
THREE: cisgender people have insufficient training in public intimacy.
Queer and trans people (and in different and overlapping ways, disabled people and people of color) have learned to prize the tenuous connections we make with others in public. LGBTQ advocates who believe in assimilation and the politics of respectability will tell you that it would never cross the mind of a trans person to consider a public washroom a sexy place. Fine. But whatever you’ve heard, the queer history of bathrooms is at least partly one of fucking. Having to fuck in public, and/or wanting to, are still legacies of the pernicious cis habit that lies behind Reason #1: we are, historically and regularly, denied the privacy even of our bodies and homes. We have a visceral stake in what theorists call “counterpublics”.[7] (figure 1). Cisgender people who have not had occasion to learn such histories are not exactly qualified to pull their pants down in public, or to have an opinion about trans people or otherwise queer-looking people doing the same. Cisgender people’s presence in our washrooms forces us to adopt spatial behaviors consistent with the lowest common denominator with regards to connection and vulnerability.
FOUR: cisgender people rape and otherwise assault others in washrooms.
When I read parents’ crocodile tears about the dangers their children would face in public washrooms also used by hypothetical trans people, words from a queer children’s entertainment icon ring in my head in the least flippant way possible: “I know what you are, but what am I?”
Figure 2. Curious graffiti in Edmonton, Alberta, 2008. Photograph by Theodore Kerr.
FIVE: cisgender people’s bathroom graffiti leave much to be desired.
A limerick or two about constipation can entertain. But how dare you presume to know what anyone else would consider a “good time”? And don’t tell me to call anybody when clearly texting is now the main purpose for a cellular phone. In a bar in Edmonton, a wise tautology written in lower-case with a black sharpie informed me: “fags are gay” (figure 2). The character played by show-creator Josh Thomas in Please Like Me is taken in by Security for turning a pre-existing graffito swastika into a house with two gay dads, a scenario that seems all too real to me in its uneven treatment of queer aesthetic intervention with the regular, expected ones.
POST-SCRIPT: this call to action is a choose-your-own adventure with three different endings.
The first would have you understand the above via the tone of “The Heterosexual Questionnaire,” a much-circulated 1977 document that aims to put straight people in the shoes of gay people with questions such as, “What do you think caused your heterosexuality?” No, “not all [cis people]” fit the descriptions above.[8] Surely the purpose of this piece, then, is to show cisgender people how terrible it feels when people spatially “other” you and interpret your body through vectors of danger and judgment.
The second would ask: what if every word was written earnestly? What if cisgender norms of sociality and emotion are a public washroom menace, both to trans people and to cis people? Who could write such a thing? Not me—some of my best friends are cis. But if it were true—what would you build (figure 3)?
Figure 3. All Gender Restroom Sign, Washington D.C., Capital TransPride Parade, May 20, 2017, hosted by The Studio Theatre. Photograph by Ted Eytan, courtesy Flickr, under Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 2.0.
The third ending asks a related question: what kind of architectural criticism would you write, read, or otherwise help to generate? You see, this article was originally solicited for a special issue on “Othering” from the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE). Reassured by the guest editors that the “Opinion” section of the journal could accommodate creative and provocative writing in style and content, I wrote this piece to flip the script on the question of “danger” in public washrooms. The piece was met with enthusiasm by the guest editors, after which we undertook two rounds of minor edits. Yet, the executive editor of the journal felt the piece was too controversial; its language needed to be toned down for the readership of JAE. I declined to undertake such edits, as I felt instead that the journal should be denied the appearance of having been open to and engaged with transgender scholarship in a capacious way. And, of course, the irony of being Othered from the special issue on Othering is not lost on me.
The publication trajectory of the piece perhaps tells us more about the state of transgender in architecture as the piece itself. For whom does architectural criticism exist and who is regarded as a potential writer of it? A trans poet so fed up with xenophobia that they might curse in order to get through, viscerally, to the reader? Sex workers? Taxi drivers? Jordy Rosenberg’s indictment of respectability politics in his essay, “The Daddy Dialect,” comes to mind here:
An unstated presumption saturating much public discourse is that we are meant to cling to “reasonableness” at moments of manifest insanity… [but] the resistance to fascism goes nowhere if its main arena is the echo chamber of the Whole Foods parking lot. …And it definitely does not go anywhere when sotto-voced from the ass-end of a Prius.[9]
The classism—and political ineffectiveness—Rosenberg identifies in JAE-like demands that oppressed people speak in tones of enlightened civility is also, of course, racist. As Indigenous health scholar Chelsea Bond writes in “The Audacity of Anger,” “black women are not allowed to be angry, yet at the same time we can never be cast as anything but the ‘angry black woman’… Such is the gaslighting of black women in the colony.”[10] Until the gatekeepers of architectural criticism rethink the social outcomes of their preferred styles, tones, and prioritized readers, an issue on Othering is window-dressing at best and a farce at worst.
Speaking of the literary genre of farce, the poet and literature prof in me would perhaps end with a wish: that those creating architectural culture (1) read more widely, (2) write more weirdly, and (3) don’t waste transgender people’s time. We’re holding in our shit and piss and we are tired.
NOTES
[1] In 2020, there is certainly no shortage of media about “transgender bathroom bills” and the like. If you are very new to this topic, read this story in Rolling Stone to get a few sample stories about what lavatory life is like for gender nonconforming people: Nico Lang, “What It’s Like to Use a Public Bathroom While Trans,” Rolling Stone, 31 March 2016.
[2] One early trans-created resource is the Sylvia Rivera Law Project’s “Toilet Training,” an online video about trans washroom access (in the NY state context) for which a “companion guide for activists and educators” has since been created. The video is here: https://vimeo.com/85470055 The guide is here: https://srlp.org/files/2010%20toolkit.pdf.
[3] This is a point at which I wish the discourses of butch dykes, transmen, and transwomen could converge: whoever is seen as insufficiently feminine is believed to be a man, and seen as an agent of violence. Butch queer women who have (or have not) become men of various kinds tend to have plenty of experience with being hurt because of their/our ostensibly incorrect ways of being women.
[4] Sheila Cavanagh, Queering Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality, and the Hygienic Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010). See especially Chapter Three: “Seeing Gender: Panopticism and the Mirrorical Return” and Chapter Four: “Acoustic Mirrors: Vocal and Urinary Dis/Symmetries.”
[5] For a practical account of why cis complaints about trans hygiene do not make sense, see Christine Overall, “Public Toilets: Sex Segregation Revisited,“ Ethics and the Environment 12.2 (Fall 2007): 71-91. For a longer response to Overall’s (perhaps unwitting) shoring up of hygienic norms, see my Transgender Architectonics: the Shape of Change in Modernist Space (London: Routledge 2015).
[6] Thank you to Zeynep Kezer for encouraging me to think about the relation of public washroom hygiene norms to the racial and classed elements of Covid-19.
[7] For a few of the greatest queer takes on histories of public sex and public speech, and their influences of definitions of the public and the counterpublic, see Allan Bérubé, “The History of Gay Bathhouses,” Policing Public Sex: Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism, ed. Ephen Glenn Colter and Dangerous Bedfellows (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1996), 187-220; Patrick Califia, Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex (Pittsburgh, PA: Cleis Press, 1994); Samuel Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Susan Stryker, “Dungeon Intimacies: the Poetics of Transsexual Sadomasochism,” Parallax 14.1 (2008): 36-47; Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant, “Sex in Public,” The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (New York: Routledge, 1999).
[8] What counts as a cis person anyhow? I define it broadly and in a way inspired by Jane Ward, whose book Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men (New York: New York University Press, 2015) suggests that even men who have sex with men ought to be taken at their word that they are straight, inasmuch as what matters most are the ideas and values reproduced by one’s sex and speech acts. Just as Ward suggests that “straight white men can perform homosexual contact in heterosexual ways,” I propose that what makes someone “cisgender” in a bathroom is not so easily known, or escaped by its enactor.
[9] Jordy Rosenberg, “The Daddy Dialect,” The Los Angeles Review of Books, 11 Mar 2018.
[10] Chelsea Bond, “The Audacity of Anger,” The Guardian. 31 Jan 2018. For more on tone policing as racist, see Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), and Therí Alyce Pickens, Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).
