bathrooms, independence, and watching your kid drive away

I just watched MadMax drive himself off to school--his first time driving since the surgery, second day back at school. The surgery was on his left knee, so his driving leg has been fine all along, but still he was radiating happiness and relief that he is independent of his mother's driving and attention once more. Yesterday, after two weeks out of school, he told his calculus teacher that he was probably the only senior in the building who was happy to be at school on Monday morning. I think the boredom has been at least as bad as the pain. Maybe worse.

It reminded me of watching our kids drive off alone for the first time after they got their license. They're both good, safe drivers. They'd done driver's ed, they'd driven hours with me or their dad keeping watch. But you can't help but worry, watching them drive off alone. So many things can go wrong, lots of them completely unrelated to their driving skills.

In other news....: We had an interesting conversation about gender and bathrooms over dinner last night, which made me think. I have to balance my immediate liberal-bias reaction about yet another fear-based assault on the rights of -- I was going to say "the trans community," but really, it's anybody. We react in fear and dismay when any of our cherished beliefs about race or gender or class are challenged -- I have to balance my immediate, genuine support of anyone whose right to be themselves is being challenged, against my (also genuine) reaction of ewwww to the idea of running into a visibly male person in the women's room.

Even in a dirty, unkempt public bathroom, the women's room has always had a slight air of sanctuary, a place where you could hike up your skirt and adjust your panty hose, or check your teeth in the mirror, or bum a tampon in an emergency--all the things we'd hesitate to do in front of men.

The only trans woman I'm aware of here locally is visibly trans, a big 6-foot-plus person, who nonetheless dresses elegantly and is always polite and, for lack of a better word, decorous. If I'm entirely honest with myself, I have to admit it would make me a little uncomfortable to run into her in the women's room at Target.

But that's the point. This is on me. It's my discomfort. How about her discomfort in having to deal with this issue at all? Like many in the trans community, she has probably spent far more energy than any of us can imagine organizing her day around not needing to use public bathrooms so she could avoid this exact scenario. We want to define anything that makes us uncomfortable as Wrong, and thus keep our cherished beliefs intact while shifting all responsibility for dealing with differences off on the people who are different.

That's just not acceptable to me anymore. Either we're going to do our best to make our culture accepting and tolerant of all kinds of people we deem strange, or we aren't. Presumably when a trans woman is attending to her bodily needs, she'll be well-concealed by a stall, just as I will be as I attend to mine. I'm willing to live with a little discomfort in order to try and make the world a safer place for everybody. People put up with my weirdnesses every single day, should I not return the favor?

The whole fear-and-panic thing about sexual predators in public bathrooms is completely unchanged by which gender is allowed to use which stalls. Years ago when our kids were young and gender identity was an invisible issue, a neighbor involved in law enforcement told us, "Don't ever let your kid go in a public bathroom alone. You have no idea."

This is simple when your opposite sex child is small, but there were several years when MadMax was in the 8-12 age range that I stood outside the men's room watching the seconds tick by on my watch until he came out again. More than once I was on the panicked verge of approaching a friendly-looking man to go in and see what was taking him so long (because it had been more than a minute and a half). (As if any man who is outside the bathroom is less dangerous than the ones that are in. Go figure. I was panicked.) I didn't want to scare him, but I wanted him to be aware. I can remember telling him, if anything seems strange, just come right back out. I confess I let him pee in the bushes a few times rather than go alone into a public bathroom in a deserted place.

In other words: This is not a new problem, and it is not a problem that has anything more to do with the trans community than it does with the cis community. Restricting people to the bathroom that matches the genitals they were born with is not going to solve this problem. Let's not confuse the issues here.

So, that's my .02, and that's probably all it's worth. You watch your kid walk into the public restroom, you watch your kid drive away. We can wrap them in bubble wrap and keep them at home, or we can live in the real world and manage its dangers as best we can. I hope we can keep from adding imaginary dangers to the real ones.