Accommodations

1970, the start of a new decade. I was in fifth grade, attending Sallas-Mahone Elementary in Valdosta GA.

We weren't exactly forbidden to use the bathrooms during classroom hours, but you couldn't just rise from your seat and go when you felt like it. You had to raise your hand and ask. Even without the possibility of the teacher asking "Can't you just hold it?" or "Why didn't you go during break?", the necessity of making a request was probably enough to ensure that we mostly used the facilities in the mornings before classes, after classes, or during lunch break.

What that meant was that you were going to be in the bathroom at the same time as a handful of the kids from your classroom. To be more precise, other male kids from your classroom, if you were designated male. As I was.

I've never cared for the expression "assigned male at birth". It always seems to me to imply that my mom's obstetrician said "it's a boy" when I was born, and everyone else just went with that. That he did the assigning and no one else did, they just deferred to his judgment. That's not how it was. The same set of physiological characteristics that led the physician attending my birth to declare me male were intermittently referenced as sufficient reason to assign me male throughout my life, and when they weren't directly being observed, they were assumed from other cues and clues. When I lowered my underwear to pee, the evidence was right there in front of me, and I didn't question it: I was male.

But I did not like being in there, in the boys' bathroom. I wasn't like them, the boys, and I knew it, and they knew it. I didn't like having to go in there with THEM and being exposed.

Do you recall fifth grade? Well, do you perhaps recall Beavis and Butthead? The very epitome of being potty-mouthed rests with fifth grade boys. Everything pertaining to bathroom functions, the body parts involved in those functions, and half-understood sexual matters that also involve the same body parts, were the most interesting and prurient source material possible for the raunchiest and crudest storytelling and discussions, often called "jokes" although I rarely understood what the humorous portion was supposed to be.

Those boys were invasive. Peering, commenting, using filthy language about all this stuff.

They found me prim and hilariously prissy and so I became a focus for their attention when I was in there.



I myself identify as a gender invert, not as a transgender transitioning (and/or presenting) as female. I'm not directly affected by the laws and policies and social discussions about sex segregated bathrooms and the presence of transgender people in them. A law or policy saying I can utlize the women's bathroom instead doesn't really address any of my current issues or social situations. I manifest and present as a male-bodied person and any greater comfort I might otherwise feel to not be in the men's toilets would be offset by worrying that my presence would be disturbing to women in the women's room. And I'm used to it, to using the men's room, and aside from that, adult men aren't as awful as a batch of fifth graders, so not only am I used to it, I've been through far worse than what I currently experience in there.


But yeah, I can relate.

It's not just symbolic. It's not just wanting to be regarded and treated like the rest of the folks of the gender with which one identifies. It's also direct and real. Being in the wrong segregated space can be severely uncomfortable.

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