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On Restrooms
At some point while I was still an undergraduate student, my university opened a handful of “all-gender restrooms” throughout the campus. These had multiple stalls, roughly the same design as a typical women’s restrooms. At first, I remember feeling like these weren’t for me — that I would be invading if I used them. Yet, because I had a class right next to one I gave into convenience and started using it. There was a strange sort of mundanity to being in the same restroom as women. I grew up with the knowledge that the women’s restroom is off limits, that something terrible would happen if I found oneself in there, and suddenly I was sitting on the toilet in a stall next to a woman presumably also sitting on a toilet and no calamity occurred after all — at least not to me. I couldn’t help but wonder if my presence made everyone else uncomfortable. Or maybe whatever quality I have that results in people always assuming I’m gay somehow made me “fit in”. Or maybe I’m overthinking things — it’s an all-gender restroom after all, not a “non-cis-male” restroom — maybe everyone using it embraced the ideal of the mundanity of even the most masculine man imaginable sharing a restroom with them.
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