I Hate That I Care About These Anti-Trans Bathroom Bills

Trans people using the bathroom has been… well, I was going to write “a going concern since I came out in the early 2000s,” but that’s not entirely the case. It was very much a concern for me back then, particularly following the 2002 arrest of one of my friends in Grand Central, and it’s always been an issue in schools and other spaces where, like so much of today’s anti-trans panic, concern about children can be invoked as cover. But, at the risk of sounding very very old, I am kind of astonished by the level to which it has now become a thing.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that this is not a great time to be trans in America. I’ve always struggled to articulate how I feel about this–there’s a confusing way in which I tend not to panic about the new slates of bans and laws, because I came out at a time when many of the things they outlaw weren’t legal anyway. But I always follow this up with: it didn’t matter so much what the law said, because even if medical care or hormones or document changes weren’t protected by law, in my experience, no one in power knew or cared enough to actually stop you from doing them. Insurance wouldn’t cover hormones or surgery, but there could be ways around this. The letter I got from my doctor to change the gender marker on my documents was artfully vague enough to work. You could be fired or discriminated against–I was once rejected from a job in the very last phase after a background check revealed what it clearly revealed, and there was no recourse for this but to feel shitty about it–and the world was still the world, but as much as legal and medical neglect made things harder (and as much as I will never forgive Barney Frank for ENDA in 2007), I’ve always a little bit thought they made it easier, too. “Visibility was a mistake,” I sometimes joke crassly, even as the world spins–or, was spinning–forward into a level of protection and acceptance I honestly never thought possible, and, as much as I like to pretend I am a jaded old man, sometimes brings me to tears. 

This is a long-winded way to introduce how messed up I feel about the latest turn in anti-trans bathroom laws, in which South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace is trying to introduce the “Protect Women’s Private Spaces Act,” which would ban trans women–specifically, and I cannot believe I am writing this, incoming Representative Sarah McBride–from bathrooms in the Capitol. Today, Mace announced that she’s “doubling down” on this to extend the ban to all federal facilities; journalist Erin Reed writes that this would include “bathrooms in DCA and Dulles airports, national park bathrooms, museum bathrooms, and all federal building bathrooms.” Screenshots of the proposal would seem to include trans men in these bans, though of course–of course–it is trans women that Mace seems most concerned with.

As a trans man, it’s always hard for me to know what to say about this kind of thing. I have been on hormones for a little over 21 years; bathrooms are still a source of stress for me, but not nearly as much as they used to be, and at a distinctly different level than people who present to the world differently than I do. On a practical level, these kinds of bans are unlikely to affect me personally all that much. It’s hard for me to think about this without bringing complicated ideas about “passing” into the mix, a concept that has never been important to me but which I cannot pretend I do not benefit from. (My joke about this is usually, it isn’t so much that I “pass” as it is that no one knows what a trans man looks like; I move through the world generally assuming everyone knows I’m trans and am shocked when they don’t, though obviously that is a simplistic summary.)  

For other people, it’s hard to say what these bans would mean if they go into law. (Well, except for McBride I guess? Which is, I must again stress, mind-blowing.) Are regular people going to police bathrooms in this way? Is anyone going to take time out of their one and only life to enforce this? Part of me wants to not take these kinds of things seriously because it lends them legitimacy, but at the same time, they aren’t Tinkerbell; they don’t go away if I just ignore them.

For me–the only perspective from which I can confidently speak–these bans do what they are clearly intended to do, which is make me feel shitty and like I don’t belong. As unlikely as Florida’s trans bathroom bans are to affect me, they–along with other laws–have stopped me from visiting my aging parents who live in the state, which has become a regular, painful argument between us. The idea that I would feel unwelcome in the national parks–in, not to get religious but to get religious, places on this earth that belong to me as much as any other person in this world by virtue of being born into the world in the first place–is upsetting to me in a way that’s embarrassing because it means I care what Nancy Mace does, it means that she has the ability to affect me, and I do not want to give her that. 

This is how these people want trans people to feel, and I don’t want to let them win by feeling those ways. But hardening my heart against it also does what they want it to. It separates me from my emotions, it cuts off my connection to a core human part of myself and to part of being alive that–let’s get religious again–I believe God put me on this earth to experience in its fullness. I’m in that tumblr meme camp of “you cannot kill me in a way that matters” when it comes to these people, again because of my faith, but that doesn’t mean they can’t do their best to really fuck me up anyway. And I don’t want to give them the power to fuck me up! But then… well, here we are.

Who knows what will actually come of this garbage, which we can only hope is performative hate that will fizzle out before being replaced by whatever new horror. I do not care about this bill, but I also care about it a lot, more than I want to, and I hate that. I hate that I’m writing this, and that you’re reading it, but I also hate the idea that we wouldn’t write and read about it. What–sorry–a shit show.