The first time I used the men’s room was at at a Target store in California. I stood outside the side-by-side restroom doors looking at the signs, large red circles with white one-dimensional figures. One, obviously a man: squared shoulders, wide stance. The other, a pyramid skirt, legs together, no visible space in-between. As though with a simple combination of circles, squares and triangles the full spectrum of human identity can be articulated.
The sturdy man. The demure woman. Those who stand to pee and those who sit.
I considered my options a full 30 seconds and went right, pushing open the men’s room door and immediately retreating into a toilet stall with a broken latch. Another man came in. I’d read that it’s advisable under such circumstances to sit a little longer, to leave the impression a guy was dropping a deuce. I waited. He left. I finished.
I survived.
It’s not always so easy.
When I stopped at a Love’s in Colorado, men were pouring in and out of the bathroom. They all looked like truckers and cowboys to me. Lots and lots of boots and caps.
My traveling companion, a woman who knows me as Will, didn’t want me in her bathroom. “It’s upsetting,” she says.
We walked toward the restrooms together. She went left into the women’s room. I turned right and kept on turning, passing the door and looping back into the merchandise area.
I couldn’t. She knew.
“Did you go?” she asked, when she came out.
“No.” I pulled my stocking cap down and put my hands in my pockets.
We pulled into an Arby’s down the road a few miles to try again. It was like traveling with a toddler. The toddler was me.
There were no men coming and going so I pushed the door open just as a man pulled it from the inside. He stepped to the side and held the door. “Come on in,” he said.
Consciously, he seemed unfazed. Subconsciously, I ascribed to him a gentleman’s reaction, to hold the door and step aside. Yes, I experience door-holding like a woman. What of it?
When we stopped at a Love’s in North Dakota, another day, another trip, my travel companions went right and I went left, into the women’s room. They don’t know me as Will. They wouldn’t want me in their bathroom.
Women were lined up inside the door. Teenagers and grandmothers. Lots and lots of hair and cellphones.
I took my spot, leaning a shoulder against the wall to wait. Each woman who came in hesitated, looked me up and down and in the same glance checked the woman beside me, sighed, and let her shoulders relax. Some turned to look at the sign, for good measure.
It is upsetting to find me in your bathroom, as it goes.
It is the great paradox of the Fox News-type fear of trans people in your bathrooms.
It is the hinterlands of middle existence when the shapes and signs leave no room for an in-between.