Are you woman enough to go to the bathroom?

Get ready for the potty glow-up

Me, questioning if my lipstick meets restroom standards

I was standing in line for the women’s bathroom at a Santiago nightclub when the young woman grabbed me, yelling in Spanish. I was 21, with short hair and a baggy T-shirt, and she insisted my place was in the men’s room. I tried, in my broken Spanish, to explain that I was a woman, but she wouldn’t listen. She yanked me out of the line and I stood there, humiliated and wondering where I was going to pee.

That night comes rushing back whenever I read about a cis woman harassed in a woman’s bathroom for suspicion of being trans, which happens depressingly often. Here’s how these stories usually go: a random onlooker decides that a woman entering the bathroom isn’t feminine enough and, therefore, not a “real” woman and proceeds to enter the bathroom and harass her until she has no choice but to get out. Often, the harasser is a man.

But last month brought a twist: a trans man was allegedly arrested for using the women’s bathroom — the bathroom that matches his sex at birth and which, according to bathroom bans, he was supposed to use. The man, Luca Strobel, entered a South Carolina bar to drive home his friend, a woman who had been drinking. He first went to the men’s room but it only had urinals, which he couldn’t use. He then entered the women’s bathroom, only for the bar’s owner to barge in, look over the stall door at Strobel doing his business, push him and his friend out of the bathroom, and have a police officer arrest them both.

So, to recap current bathroom etiquette: trans women can’t use the women’s bathrooms; trans men can't use the women’s bathroom; and even cis women can’t always use the women’s bathroom. Which begs the question, who is the women’s bathroom actually for?

Nineteen states so far have passed bathroom bans that forbid trans people from using bathrooms aligning with their gender - allegedly to protect cis women from the entirely imaginary threat of trans women. But bathroom gender-policing happens in places without bans too including true-blue Boston, where last month a security guard removed Ansley Baker, a woman attending a Kentucky Derby party, from the women’s bathroom and demanded she show ID to prove her gender, “It was traumatizing, discriminatory, and dehumanizing. My partner and I are devastated,” Baker’s partner wrote online.

Such incidents are a small taste of what trans people go through daily. They also prove the futility of gender policing. There is no way to tell whether someone is trans just by looking at them. The attempt itself is performative, but the fallout is real. In March, a Florida Walmart fired Dani Davis, a 6'4" cis woman, after she complained about a man who entered the women’s bathroom to yell anti-trans slurs at her. In a different Walmart - this one in Arizona - two male sheriff's deputies confronted a Black 19-year-old cis woman in the bathroom, shining flashlights into her bathroom stall and demanding she get out.

Even our esteemed lawmakers are not immune. This January, after speaker Mike Johnson enacted a bathroom ban in Congress, Republican lawmakers Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace converged on an anonymous woman in the bathroom because they mistook her for Rep. Sarah McBride, the only out trans member of Congress. Bobert and Mace quickly retreated after discovering their mistake. Boebert promised, “I learned a lesson, and it won’t happen again.” On ‘Pod Save America,’ McBride said, “It sounded pretty hilarious from the reporters, but also, you laugh because you don't want to cry.”

McBride called the bans “a deeply unserious effort that has serious consequences for trans people, but for people who aren't trans as well. You don't look woman enough, you don't act woman enough? Then you're told that you don't belong, whether it's in the women's room, in a job or in public life. It is all connected, because it is about control of bodies, it is control of gender.”

The only iron-clad way to pass the bathroom test is to don the type of MAGA hyper-femininity Boebert espouses: high heels, long hair, fake lashes. The MAGA woman wears her sheath dress as armor, shielding her from the humiliation she is happy to inflict on others. This type of performance takes time, labor, and money. It’s constant work. So maybe the bans work precisely as intended: making femininity even more compulsory, expensive and exhausting. While we’re doing our 10-step skincare routine, styling our hair and massaging aching feet in preparation for a bathroom visit, maybe we won’t notice our rights being taken away.

Lauren Boebert is bathroom-ready! source

Because while lawmakers distract voters with sensational bathroom bans, they have been diligently chipping away at women’s reproductive rights and even their ability to get credit. Journalist Jessica Valenti nailed it when she wrote this month, “Texas Republicans are advancing an anti-trans bill that they’re calling the “Women’s Bill of Rights.” I’m not from Texas, but I’m willing to bet the women there are more interested in not dying from a septic miscarriage than being protected from trans women in bathrooms.”

There is evidence that this kind of smoke screen is becoming less effective. Democrat John W. Ewing Jr. recently defeated incumbent Jean Stothert in the Omaha mayoral election after Stothert released ads accusing her Democratic rival of supporting “boys in girls’ bathrooms and sports.” In response, the Nebraska Democratic Party posted: “Jean is focused on potties. John is focused on fixing potholes.” The focus on actual issues won Ewing the election and pointed a way ahead for Democrats and trans advocates. Republicans’ fixation on gender policing is off-putting, dangerous and completely untethered from Americans’ real concerns. Let’s hope more and more voters see bathroom bans for what they are: campaigns of harassment and discrimination directed at people who, like me all those years ago, simply want to use the bathroom.