HS Senior Used Boys Facilities for 3.5 Yrs, Now Expected to Pee With Girls
The absurd contradictions of bathroom bills stand exposed.
by Evan Urquhart
A CBS affiliate in St. Petersburg Florida has a story about the inevitable, and absurd, result of a recent court decision forcing trans students into the bathrooms associated with their birth sex. Toby Fennell, who is a senior at Cypress Creek High School, came out as a trans boy shortly before starting high school. He has only ever used men’s rooms at his school. Fennell told WTSP’s reporter that he uses the bathroom that allows him and the students around him the most comfort and safety possible. He said he’s “never ever had a problem using the bathroom” and he’s never heard of anyone else having a problem either.
Laws forcing trans people to use bathrooms according to their birth-assigned sex were destined to run into cases like this because many trans boys look and sound just like cisgender males (and the reverse is true for many transgender girls). Such boys are forced to choose between ignoring the law and hoping no one cares, or using a women’s only restroom where girls who percieve them as being in the wrong bathroom are likely to report them for breaking the rules. Fennell makes the same point thus:
Situations like these are the end result of transphobic propaganda that has refused to engage in good faith with the real world experience of trans people. In that real world, policies allowing trans youth to use bathrooms according to their gender identity were developed not merely out of empathy for trans people, but out of plain common sense. Cis-passing trans men who encounter these policies wind up in a double bind, as Fennell has. Often they’re tacitly expected to ignore the law so that its contradictions won’t be made clear, but this leaves them vulnerable to disciplinary or legal issues if anyone finds out they’re trans.
This is all the predictable result of the right wing basing policies on slogans and gotcha questions rather than grappling with the heart of the matter, which is that trans people not only exist, but often can’t be easily distinguished from others of the same gender. The propaganda has always been designed to cater to bigotry and preconcieved notions, with policies producing absurd results because they always avoided engaging with inconvenient facts in order to score cheap political points.
A note of caution, for any cisgender readers: Some people have proposed enshrining some kind of passing standard in the law, which would allow a masculine trans boy like Toby to use boys’ bathrooms but require a trans boy in early transition who doesn’t yet read as male to use the girls’. This approach can seem superficially appealing, but it fails in practice just as the standard based on biological sex does. That’s because not all people are percieved the same way by everyone. This includes cisgender people who are often mistaken for the opposite sex, and trans people who find they’re seen as a man by one person and a woman by the next. The bes solution that has been found is to simply allow people judge for themseves which bathroom works best (and to have gender neutral options that circumvent this whole thing).
Most trans people use the facilities where they’re the least likely to make others uncomfortable just for the practical reason that those are the facilities where they’re the least likely to be made uncomfortable themselves. Other ways of doing things tend to result in many more people feeling uncomfortable in restrooms, not less.