Hey, Cis! Wanna Buy Me A Bathroom?

I mean, there are also other options.

‘Nuff said.

I am, in fact, multiple years past my 50th birthday now. But I’m still a long ways from 60 and, more to the point, I am way younger than I ever thought I would be before I started to tell “uphill in the snow both ways” stories. I don’t mind turning into a curmudgeon, I just wish I could have made it to 65 before I started to transition.

But given the state of today’s nature, I am forced, forced mind you, to recount a conversation I had with a cissexual of no particular importance back in 1993.

The conversation went something like this:

Conpi: So you’re going to change bathrooms at work?

Young Crip Dyke: Uh, yeah, I guess.

Conpi: How’s that going to go over?

YCD: Does it matter?

Conpi: Of course it matters. What if someone feels uncomfortable?

YCD: So you think that no dudes will feel uncomfortable going to the bathroom with a woman?

Conpi: Maybe? I mean, sure, okay, some would. But I guess I’m saying have you thought about how this impacts other people?

YCD: Of course I have. You really think that you’ve considered this for all of 45 seconds and you’ve noticed a potential point of awkwardness I haven’t fretted over at least 20 times over the last few years?

Conpi: Look, I’m sorry. But, if you’ve thought about it, what are you going to do about it?

YCD: Why would I do anything?

Conpi: Because people were uncomfortable. Don’t you care?

YCD: Of course I care, but I’m not the one who owns the building. I’m not the one who slapped gender markers on the bathroom doors. I’m not the one who created the gendered systems under which our society operates. Do you want me to pee on the carpet in a corner?

Conpi: No! I just… people are going to feel uncomfortable.

YCD: Of course they will. Of course. No matter what happens, people are going to feel uncomfortable. The question isn’t whether or not cis people feel uncomfortable around trans people, the question is whose responsibility is it to fix that?

And that final question is really the crux of the issue. Keir Starmer, the leader of the UK’s supposedly centre-left Labour Party, has announced that trans women do not have a “right” to use women’s bathrooms even if, I say that again, even if they have legally changed their gender with a GRC.

To which I say — to the cringing concern of every trans person ever, but hear me out — FINE. You’re correct. We don’t have the right to use a women’s restroom.

But guess what? Neither do cis women. There is no right to piss in the US constitution, nor is there one in that mess of quasi-constitutional documents that, taken as a set, is supposed to serve the same function in the UK. There’s not even a right to piss in the Canadian constitution and that was written long after science had verified that well over 70% of all humans will urinate at some point in their lives.

So we’ve got no right to bathroom access. Cis women have no right to bathroom access. Cis men have no right to bathroom access. NO ONE has a right to bathroom access. And that’s okay. Let’s talk about that.

Forget about rights. There are practical concerns, given the medically verified percentage of people with kidneys, ureters, and bladders. A fairly large number of people in a population the size of Starmer’s UK or the USA or even a Podunk country like Canada are going to pee. Some of them on a more than weekly basis. If I could get a council of actuaries into my living room, they could probably even cook up a good estimate of pee passing per point of pop per day.

We can handle this any number of different ways.

First, we can permit no place for trans people to pee. Whatever they do, whenever their local actuary rings them up and tells them it’s time to squirt that wastewater until they're empty, they’ll have to break the law to do it. They go into one bathroom, but that’s against the law, and they’re arrested. They go into the other bathroom, and that’s against the law, and they’re arrested. They pee on the bus or the park grass or Polly’s petunias or the factory floor and that’s illegal and they’re arrested.

Which, fine, but you’re going to be arresting a lot of trans people and you’re going to have to raise taxes a lot to feed and house the illegally pissing trans folks. How much do you want to raise your taxes so that we can all kick it together in the most glamorous steel-and-concrete boarding house in history?

In another case, we could retrain everyone in an entire society that trans people peeing on the carpet is entirely normal. Dave in design can just dangle his Dickies and whiz on the wall, and we can all just accept that. It won’t be easy. People will take time to get used to the smell. But we can do that.

Hell, given that cis people don’t have any right to use a bathroom either, everyone can piss on the floor. It’ll be fine. In three or four generations no one will remember it ever being different.

We could also build trans only bathrooms. Dave and I can meet in the loo and he can give me makeup tips he learned when he was 11, and I can tell him funny urinal stories from my time in France, and when a cis woman opens the wrong door Dave can scream and I can call the cops and that sexually threatening pervert can go straight to fucking jail.

This is less expensive than jailing all the trannies, and I guarantee you that we’ll enjoy the novelty of getting your careless cis ass arrested for barging in the wrong door, but we’re going to lose a lot of restaurants and other small businesses who operate with low profitability and end up not being able to afford the bill from the bathroom installers. And taxes will still go up; government buildings will need additional bathrooms too, and there’s the bill for jailing those cis waffletaints who invade trans space. Maybe taxes will go up less, but maybe just as much or more, depending on how many cis folks fail to correctly read the brand new trans icons, whatever they turn out to look like.

Or, and I stress OR, we can find some way to live with each other using the bathrooms that we have while society slowly adds single occupancy bathrooms as buildings are built or remodelled over the next decades.

People keep banging on about the entitlement of trans people and how dare they think that they have actual RIGHTS and whatever.

But trans people aren’t responsible for how society is organized today. Cis people are. Cis people control the governments; cis people control the Fortune 500; cis people write textbooks; cis people even indoctrinate kids with weird ideological expectations like “that toilet cares what your junk looks like.”

Trans people did not do this. This is your fault, cissies.

So now the choices have to be made not by trans folks, but by you. That’s right. You have to get up off your ass and make a decision. Given that trans people exist, do you want to smell our pee all over the workplace? On the Ferris wheel? In the Waffle House booth? Do you want to bankrupt your favourite taco place? Do you want to raise your taxes to pay to keep us in lawyers and dry baloney sandwiches for life? Or do you want to get over yourselves so that we can have a hygienic society for the least possible cost during this weird transition period where people still act like a piece of porcelain is going to scream, “Eeek! A penis!” if the wrong person uses the wrong bathroom?

There are consequences here, is what I’m saying. And there are responsibilities here.

We don’t have to frame it as a question of ethics. Pretend for a moment that Mumsnet has won and trans people have no rights at all. You still have to decide whether or not you want the break room to smell like piss for the next forty years.

If you don’t want this to be a question of rights, okay, but then what is your waste solution?