No Rest for the Queery
I'm afraid of public restrooms. I'm not a germophobe; I'm an androgynous-looking lesbian.
Most of the time when I'm in the women's room, people think I'm in the wrong bathroom. Actually, they think they are in the wrong bathroom. If I had a nickel for every time a woman saw me at the sink and then walked back outside to check the sign on the door, I could buy a really fancy pink bow.
You'd think I'd have a comeback by now. It's been long enough. In second grade, I was recruited for the Cub Scouts. I've gone from being asked "Are you a boy or a girl?" by my third-grade peers to the third-graders I tutor. But I still haven't come up with a snappy one-liner, not that I'd have much opportunity to use it. While I do get the occasional "Dude, this is the women's room" from the drunk girl swaying over the sink, mostly it's just stares and doubletakes. Judging by how often people look me up and down on my way to the stalls, it seems as though the one thing soccer moms, grandmothers, and 8-year-old girls can agree on is that I am unbelievably attractive.
But the real problem is not that I look too masculine to feel comfortable in the women's room, it's that I don't look feminine enough to use the men's room. I realize this sounds counterintuitive, but hear me out. You know when you're in a gas station and there are two bathrooms-- both locked single toilets, but labeled "men's" and "women's" anyway just so our society doesn't crumble--and there are three or four women in line but the men's room is open? If I was confident that I would be seen simply as a woman asserting her right to pee in the empty, arbitrarily labeled men’s room, I wouldn't hesitate to do it. But I am unsure of what I would look like. A man? A woman? A woman that looks like a man? A woman that looks like a man looking like a woman overthinking her gender presentation?
I don't know if this obnoxious tendency to overanalyze is the egg or the chicken of the fact that I am forced to think about my gender identity at least seven times a day. (I have a small bladder.)
But it's hard not to obsess about gender in our gender-obsessed culture. Sometimes just for fun I'll go on a search for the archetypal man and woman. I see signs for them everywhere-- in restaurants, malls, airports-- square shouldered and lacking extremities. But I never find them. Following the signs, I always end up at a restroom. Am I the only one who thinks it would make more sense to represent the concept of "bathroom" with a picture of a toilet? It's clear that in our culture the functional use of the room is secondary to how we sort ourselves when we get there.
This societal obsession with dichotomies really takes the rest factor out of restrooms for the rest of us-- the inevitable remainders when society is divided by two. So until evolution starts selecting for a gender binary, sorting us neatly into those who wear skirts at 45 degree angles and those who appear to wear no pants at all, we need to find a better way to accommodate everyone, even people like me-- genderqueers with small bladders. I think we should add a third restroom option labeled "freak." I can't take credit for this idea-- like most of my brilliant thoughts, I stole it from an angry homophobic blogger. But really, I'd love to use that restroom. And you know it's only a matter of time before all the women start using it just to avoid the lines. Then I'll finally have my chance to look at them as they're washing their hands, gasp audibly, and look back at the clearly-marked door before announcing in a loud voice, "I thought this was the freaks' room."
