This picture is floating around Facebook right now, with a fairly shitty caption on it, using it as a visual example of a cis woman standing up to a transgender woman trying to use “her” bathroom. The shitty caption is unauthorized by the artist and diverges from the original meaning of the art.
This panel is from artist Sanford Greene, in honor of a scene in Captain America: Civil War. The woman on the left is played by a cis woman, Florence Kasumba, who just happens to not fit heteronormative female beauty standards. She’s tall, with a shaved head and a muscular body. She is strong and beautiful and feminine.
The meme with the shitty added caption, which I will not dignify with a link in this article or a repost, just adds to my growing anxiety as a cis woman who also does not fit heteronormative beauty standards. I am very tall for a woman, 6'1". That is taller than the average man. I have short hair. I dress in jeans and men’s tee shirts sometimes. Other times I wear dresses. I usually do what I want in this regard without consequence.
I don’t question my gender. I feel very comfortable in my own skin. I have short hair because I like the way it looks on me. I dress the way I do because I like that particular fashion and how it looks on my body, limited of course by the fact that many women’s clothes don’t fit my long frame, and jeans and tee shirts are comfortable and convenient.
Never in my life have I questioned the safety of these choices until now. It seems that daily I hear stories of women being thrown out of restrooms because they “look like a man” or, more terrifying to me, women being followed into restrooms by men who perceive them as a threat and want to enforce their own misguided sense of morality.
My anxiety has been slowly building over the last couple months reading reports, watching videos of women who are wounded, physically and emotionally, by strangers who hate them out of fear and ignorance. I can only imagine how the trans community feels. It makes my heart hurt. My fear has made me so very conscious of my own choices and my own gender identity and how personal, raw and sensitive those concepts are.
The entire transgender bathroom debate began with the assertion that “men dressed as women will prey on children,” a argument that is as absurd as “gay marriage will make people want to marry their pets.” Social Conservatives really need to try and think more logically about their evidence, because both are fictional scenarios that just can’t be used, since they don’t ever happen.
Bathrooms aren’t safe for anyone but cis men these days. I don’t see anything being protected except the feelings and comfort of bigots. Maybe that offered protection from the dangers of public bathrooms doesn’t apply to me. I’m too tall and chubby. I don’t have long hair. I don’t dress feminine enough. My appearance is not acceptable, it is displeasing to their eye. My choices are an offense.
I have forfeit my right to exist in peace because I don’t have a small frame and long hair and I’m not wearing a dress. My happiness is irrelevant because I choose to not wear lipstick, and my eye makeup is too subtle, I don’t have enough cleavage and it is hidden behind a green army jacket that maybe makes me look gay, and that’s enough for them to hate me.
All of the choices I’ve made for myself are wrong. I’m obviously confused. I should go find the nearest dress shop. I should grow my hair out starting today.
Holy shit, how did we even get here?
I am not afraid of transgender women assaulting me while I wash my hands or sit in a locked stall. I wish that those trying their hardest to be the Bathroom Police, to create a kind of vigilante Justice League to keep toilets safe for widows and orphans, would stop pretending this was ever about protecting people in public spaces. In the past few months, I’ve been more afraid of men than ever.
I am terrified that a man, driven by some kind of misguided white knight syndrome polluted by bigotry, will be cruel and confrontational or possibly violent with me just for wanting to use the bathroom in the same room as his little girl or his mother or his wife.
When I go to pee at the mall, I have visions of a father following me, cornering me in a dead end of white tile and porcelain, and slamming me against the wall, telling me that I am disgusting and trying to prey on his wife or his child — simply because I look like his pre-manufactured vision of what transgender women look like.
I am afraid of a boyfriend or husband, who saw the altered version of the cartoon above, feeling like he needs to intervene to keep his short, thin, long-haired and bigoted girlfriend safe from me. You see, she tried to block me from going into the bathroom and I took one arm, larger than her leg, and gently pushed her out of my way. I made the wrong choice to not turn around and find another place to pee. None of my choices are right. I am confused.
No, I’m not confused. I’m angry. Move or be moved.