Passing Moments: I got bathroom-policed... just not how I imagined I would

I know the trans bathroom debate is the most boring debate in any news media right now. It’s also deeply reductive to boil trans people’s needs and wishes down to which room they go in to pee. Finally, it distracts from any sensible discussion on trans rights that attempts to understand the motives and yearning behind gender transition in its many forms. That’s why I had stayed out of it - I felt writing a post about why trans people should go in the bathroom they want to go in would only serve to fuel a gender-critical/TERF talking point.

Why, then, am I writing about bathrooms this time? Because I got dragged into the debate through my own actions and the subsequent reactions of society. Let me explain.

Around a year ago, I started looking at ways I could make myself look and feel more feminine, even if at that time I didn’t feel ready to start on HRT. I wanted to be the best social-transitioner, and be able to get through any situation as a woman. I started looking not at what I wanted to wear and look like in my baby-queer “I wanted to have this as a teenager” mind, but instead how I wanted to present in order to look more realistically like a woman in the world we live in.

This meant accepting there are certain gendered behaviours which are not necessarily conducive to equality, and which may set back the cause of feminism. An example of this would be walking with a narrower gait, making softer footsteps. It meant growing my hair longer; not all cis women have long hair (there are some current examples of cis women who look amazing with short crops), but I knew that having well-kept long hair would soothe any dysphoria, while also helping it be more believable I was a woman. It also meant wearing clothes which, while potentially ambiguous in terms of who could wear them, would seem feminine-coded. I also had some feminising aesthetic face-work done, which I’ll discuss in a later post.

On this particular day, I wasn’t thinking of any of this. I was in my local shopping mall, buying breakfast cereal, oat milk, and a metric fuckton of blueberries. Having also run a few errands around the city, I was wearing blue tailored shorts, a plain white t-shirt tucked in, and some slip-on navy espadrilles. My hair was in a ponytail - the default when I’m in a hurry, and not a stylistic choice on this particular day.

I needed a pee. I couldn’t hold it until I got home, and my basic needs kicked in. I wasn’t wearing makeup, and in my mind I wasn’t ‘girlmoding’, so there was a more than 50% chance that I’d be called out for going in the women’s bathroom. I opted for what I felt was the safe option, the men’s bathroom. We’re forever being told we should go in the stall of our “biological sex” (not a thing in the way TERFs mean it, but whatever, I needed to go, philosophy to one side for two minutes). I strided into the men’s bathroom without a second thought, when a man called after me, “young lady! Hello?!”

I shut the cubicle door, not willing to risk the urinal. Catching my breath and composing myself, I realised what had just happened: I’d been bathroom-policed for the first time. It just had happened the opposite way to how I’d anticipated it happening. My physical and social cues, picked up in split seconds by the man standing at the wash-basin, had clearly pointed to me being a woman. It might have been the softened jawline, the smooth face, the tailored shorts, the tucked-in t-shirt, the ponytail, the espadrilles, or all of the above. It felt simultaneously frightening (what if he was outside the cubicle waiting for a conversation? What if he was about to follow JK Rowling’s advice and take a picture of me? What if he’d called mall security?) and oddly euphoric.

I’d spent so much mental energy going up to that day trying to look at least androgynous and, aspirationally, female, and without even making an outsized effort, I’d passed the tipping point where gendered cues could indicate “male”. In a small but not insignificant way, being reverse bathroom-policed showed that ‘boymode’ was no longer an option. I am now in a world where the base reading of my gender by strangers is “woman”. And I’m not sad about that. In fact, I’m excited by it. The loss of the safety of recourse to 'boymode' is a sign that transition is happening, whether I consciously push it to happen on a given day or not.

If you want, you can contact me by email or on Bluesky