I was out last Saturday night with my friends from work, and really had it hammered home to me how audacious some people can be when they encounter something that confuses them.
I avoid public toilets when I can, but it got to the point that I really needed to visit the loo or wet my pants, so I slipped discreetly into the Ladies', dashed into the nearest cubicle and had my wee. Mid-flow, I could hear girls outside the cubicle in a heated debate about my gender:
'Oh my God, has a boy gone in there?'
'Was it a boy?'
'Could it be a boy?'
'It looked like a boy.'
'What should we do?'
'I don't know. I just don't know.'
I could hear new people entering the loos and being sucked into the debate. I briefly considered staying in the cubicle for the rest of the night, but it was rather unpleasant in there, so I decided to buck up and exited, crossing quietly to the sink to wash my hands. As I turned on the tap, a girl approached me and said,
'Excuse me, are you a boy?'
I thought about launching into a monologue about my gender confusion and attempting a definition of the term 'transgender,' but the possibility of being beaten over the head with a sequined handbag seemed high, so I played it safe and said,
'No. I'm a girl.'
'Oh,' she said. 'That's all right then.'
What I really should have said, and desperately wish I had now, was 'Oh, well fine. Glad it's all right with you. I didn't realise you'd been appointed Guardian of the Toilet, Defender of Gender-Specific Space and Lord of All Sex-Appropriate Restroom Facilities.' That would've been good. I'll use that next time.
Unbelievably, she then asked,
'But you must be a lesbian, then?'
In hindsight, what I would've been a really good thing to say, was,
'I fail to see the relevance of your question. You do realise that lesbians urinate in the same way as heterosexual women?'
Instead I just fled.
It's ridiculous, though.
I'm meant to believe that this woman thought a young man had entered the women's toilets, walked through a crowd of women squirting hairspray and arguing about their boyfriends, used a cubicle, came back out into the crowd of women and all this time didn't realise that he wasn't in the men's room?
No. No no no. There's no way she could've believed that. She immediately knew that I was in some way Queer, and she didn't like it, and decided to make a scene about it.
It just gets on my nerves that occasionally, women in public toilets don't think, 'This might be my problem. It's something I don't quite understand - but perhaps I need to adapt my thinking slightly to cater to this new situation.' They automatically think, 'How dare this person not conform to my idea of how things are?! It's just not fair. I must challenge them!'
Why can't we all just GET ALONG???!
