being told (by another trans person!!) that i should be using the men’s bathroom and not the women’s bathroom at this point in my transition because “most cis people would just look at you and think you’re a guy” is...so fucking surreal.
this is someone i literally met that day — what makes them think they know how people see and treat me in day to day life? do they really think i, a very out trans man who avoids being categorized as a woman as much as humanly possible, would be going into the women’s bathroom if that were true?
my stomach DROPS every time i have to use the bathroom in public because i hate having to go in there so much — if it were actually true that cis people would look at me and just see a man, i’d never do it again!
but guess what? i have to, because that’s not how cis people see me at all! so many trans people have it in their heads that the second a trans man goes on t, he passes perfectly and will never face transphobia or misogyny ever again, and it’s a total fucking lie but they believe it so strongly that they’re actually willing to shame us for keeping ourselves safe based on these preconceived notions that have no basis in reality.
i think a big part of the context that’s missing is that cis women not seeing us as other women anymore doesn’t mean cis men see us as men!
it’s very easy for me to see that the cis women i interact with don’t see me as “one of them” anymore — they may try to fit me into that box because they can tell i’m not a cis guy so they know i “should” be able to fit into it, but t has had enough of a noticeable effect that the cognitive dissonance is too much for them and they clearly can’t make themselves see me as a woman anymore.
but cis men don’t see me as “one of them” either! they clearly recognize the masculinity of my appearance, but they don’t ever really see it as maleness; they carry themselves differently around me than they do around cis women, but also differently than they do around each other. if me and my DDD chest were to walk into a men’s bathroom, my deep voice and dusting of facial hair isn’t going to help me — they’ll know i “don’t belong” there.
(not to mention, i’m still wearing a mask in public places, as we all should be because we’re in a fucking pandemic, so that dusting of facial hair and most of the other changes to my face are pulling no weight as far as how people see me anyway)
there are no gendered spaces that i can comfortably enter right now, and depending on how the rest of my transition goes, there might never be. so i have to pick the place that’s the least likely to get me hurt if someone’s gets mad at my presence, and that means going into the women’s room, because if we’re being honest, my 5’3 disabled self stands a much better chance against the average cis woman than i do against the average cis man, and that’s the kind of calculation i have to make every time i walk into a gendered space like a bathroom.
“but tumblr user transmascissues,” you may be saying, “what about the actual women in those bathrooms? they’ll feel unsafe if they see someone who doesn’t look like a woman in the bathroom with them!”
and to you i say, you know that’s literally just poorly recycled te/rf rhetoric, right? like you’re just parroting the moral panic about letting trans women (who cis people think “look like men”) into bathrooms because “think of the poor cis women!” it’s not suddenly a good argument to make just because you switched the target from trans women to trans men who are literally just there for our safety and probably hate it too.
do i hate the idea that my presence might make someone feel uncomfortable or unsafe? yes, absolutely! that’s one of my biggest fears about medically transitioning, because i’ve been made to feel unsafe by cis men and i would hate to make someone else feel that way! of course i hate it!
but at the end of the day, i also know that my presence there isn’t actually a danger to them because i know i’m not going to do anything bad to them. and i also know that there is a very real danger to me if i go in the men’s bathroom. so why would i subject myself to actual danger just to avoid making a hypothetical cis woman uncomfortable?
trans men’s lives are more important than cis women’s feelings. i do not have to put myself in real, actual, physical danger just because some cis women think hearing a lower voice in the same room as them is a threat. do i understand why they might think that? yeah! but that doesn’t mean i have to put my safety on the line because of it.
at the end of the day, i know for a fact that i do not pass well enough right now to be better off in a men’s bathroom than i am in the women’s. and i wish people — ESPECIALLY other trans people — weren’t so quick to encourage me and other trans men to make less safe decisions just because they personally perceive us as passing well enough.
there is no objective measure of how well someone passes; you can’t look at someone and say “yeah, you pass well enough to be safe in x place” because you can’t look at a person you’ve never met and just magically know how they’re treated in their daily life.
so if a trans man tells you they don’t pass well enough to safely go into the men’s spaces that you think they should be in? just believe them and drop it.
we know our lives better than you do. don’t make us feel even worse about something that we already probably feel like shit about.
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