Let’s talk about toilets, shall we? Writing in The Daily Dose, Ingebord van Lieshout describes how “pee’d off” Dutch women are waging war for gender-neutral toilets.

It’s an issue throughout the world, where so-called “potty parity” doesn’t exist: if you use the ladies’, you can expect long queues at any kind of public event.

In The Atlantic, Hoe Pinsker asks a simple question: the long lines for women’s bathrooms could be eliminated. Why haven’t they been?

Sexism is part of it, of course, but a lot of it is money. Regulations only stipulate the minimum number of toilets for men and women that need to be provided; beyond that it’s usually a financial decision, and that decision is still largely in the hands of male architects and other male stake-holders.

As Pinkster notes, all kinds of studies take place to analyse issues such as how long people will have to wait for a lift. But “it’s rare for developers to undertake any sort of timing study for bathrooms, even though it’s not clear that waiting for a toilet is any less important than waiting for an elevator.” And it’s difficult to add extra toilets to places that have already been built.

One option is to designate more bathrooms as gender-neutral, an option we already use in places where there isn’t much space – such as aeroplanes, small cafés and everybody’s bloody house. If we did more of that, fewer women would be queuing for so long.

If the bigots would stop howling about trans people we might be able to recognise the many pluses of gender neutral toilets, which The Guardian described in late 2017.

making existing WCs gender-neutral requires little more than changing the signs on the door. And it perfectly equalises the waiting times for men and women.

The difference is dramatic.

Suppose that we have a male and a female multi-stall toilet with six stalls each. We have 150 males and 150 females answering the call of nature over a one-hour period. Then the average waiting time for men is roughly 27sec and for women roughly 7min 40sec. This seems close to what we see in toilets in West End theatres. If we make them gender-neutral, then the average waiting time will go to 36 seconds – a small increase for men but a substantial decrease for women.

There are other benefits too. Male bathrooms often don’t have baby changing facilities, or sanitary facilities for people who were assigned female at birth but who identify as male or non-binary. They can be more useful for disabled people whose carers are of a different gender. And they are cheap.

And yet there are still some vocal people who’d rather make  women stand cross-legged past the point of discomfort than allow gender-neutral toilets. For example, this month a member of an anti-trans pressure group has written to East Renfrewshire, Angus, Dundee and Edinburgh councils (and of course, to the newspapers covering those areas) decrying gender-neutral toilets in primary schools, because of course primary school children are dangerous predators. Elsewhere, anti-trans activists demand trans people are excluded from toilets, propaganda that’s led to anti-trans bigots abusing women who don’t look “female enough” because they have short hair or aren’t conventionally pretty. That’s just taking the piss.

Every few months, a new bunch of ageing transsexuals will write a letter to The Guardian or they’ll write an open letter on the internet in which they moan about the “transgender umbrella” and how it’s just too broad. Various different people have been writing the same thing since about 1973, and while the names sometimes differ the song hasn’t really changed: look at all these pervs and weirdos claiming to be like us! They’re not proper transsexuals like we are! They make us sick! We refuse to be associated with them! Let’s throw them under the bus!

I’d do a parody of it, but Natalie Reed already did a great job seven years ago.

You know, I’m sick of all this “umbrella term” nonsense. Why should I be associated with a bunch of freaks like drag queens, “butch trans dykes” and non-op transgenders? I’m a real transsexual, a real woman. I fought hard in order to be able to be accepted as a woman, and having a bunch of people who aren’t even interested in getting surgery, or wearing skirts, or doing guys, going ahead and jumping into our “community” and making us look bad is just undoing all of what us real transsexuals, who are really women, fought to attain. I’m sorry, but male means penis and female means vagina. You just need to accept that. It’s common sense. Yes, there are women like me who are born trapped in men’s bodies, who get surgery to have vaginas and therefore become women, but you can’t just say “I’m a woman” and have your “self-identification” magically make your penis no longer a penis. It’s crazy and ridiculous, and you make us women who were simply born with a physical defect and sought to have it corrected look crazy and ridiculous too. I don’t care what you transgenderists want to do with your weird perverted fetishes and such, but don’t go dragging us real women who are really transsexual down with you.

These are the people who join hands with rabid anti-trans bigots and who actively campaign against trans rights. Reed rightly describes them as “the capos and Quislings of the trans community, passing on information to the guards of the gender prison in exchange for an extra cookie on their lunch tray.”

This is important, because legal rights depend on definitions. Under UK law, I am protected from discrimination; if you punch me, it’s a hate crime. But that has only applied since I decided to undergo some form of transition from male to female. Before that decision I was still trans, but I wasn’t trans enough in the eyes of the law.

The most recent example of the “we’re true trans and everyone else can get stuffed” is in the form of a blog demanding the charity Stonewall stops fighting for transgender rights (no link, because arseholes). Not all transgender rights, though. Just the rights of people who aren’t exactly like the people writing the blog post.

Not everybody who’s under the trans umbrella will take hormones, change their name or undergo surgery. But the people who would fire us, evict us or beat us up don’t care. Nobody asks to see your Gender Recognition Certificate before deciding whether to punch you.

I’m one of the so-called “true transsexuals” these clowns claim to be: I’ve got the medical diagnosis and the 12-weekly needle in the buttocks to prove it. But I don’t feel that I’m any more valid than someone who’s non-binary, or who decides that the risks of social, hormonal transition aren’t worth it, or anybody else of whom the desiccated gatekeepers disapprove.

Reed again:

Concepts such as “The Transgender Community” or “LGBT”/”The Queer Community” are not meant to be overarching ideas of who and what we are. It isn’t meant to blur distinctions. The Transgender Umbrella doesn’t mean we don’t acknowledge that cross-dresser is different from transsexual is different from drag queen is different from genderqueer, no more than using “Queer” is to imagine that gay men and trans women are the same thing. These are political coalitions.

You see, we may understand those nuances and differences. We know the difference between intersex and genderqueer, cross-dressing and drag, trans man and butch lesbian… but the haters don’t. They don’t really care. They see a big icky rabble of icky queers and they want us gone, no matter how exactly we differ from their heteronormative, cisnormative expectations.

We’re all different, but we all have one thing in common: we’re under attack.

These kinds of internecine divisions, hoping to somehow move forward in cultural acceptance by ridding yourselves of the unseemly lower classes of whatever, do absolutely nothing for progress. What they do is reinforce the scaffolding on which the oppression was based (for instance, the idea that certain kinds of gender are more valid or “real” than others). Whatever extra cookie you may get on your tray when lunch is served in the prison, you’re still stuck in that prison, still dependent on the guards, and will remain so until we cooperate effectively and build a tunnel.

If the only way to save yourself is to use other people as a human shield, you’re not worth saving.

You might not be aware of this, but the anti-trans stance of English (and more recently, Scottish) newspapers is greeted with bafflement in the rest of the world. The New York Times tries to explain English anti-trans activism for its readers.

I think most of us have had the classic anxiety dream where we’re standing up in front of people and we’re either naked or in our underwear. I pretty much lived it today – although, you’ll be pleased to read, I was neither naked nor dressed only in my underwear.

I was at Stirling University, where I’d been asked by a friend to deliver a guest lecture about internet things. To say I was nervous about it would be a major understatement. I barely slept last night. I don’t stand up in front of people very often, I haven’t addressed a room full of strangers for many years and I haven’t delivered such a long presentation in 21 years.

Not only am I desperately out of practice, but I also have the added anxiety-inducing fact of being trans.

Imagine the anxiety dream, but instead of doing it naked you’re doing it in a frock (if you’re male-bodied; if you’re female, imagine being in one of those horrible, scratchy hallowe’en costumes: anything you’d expect to get an odd reaction in a professional setting).

Presenting male wasn’t an option, partly because it would have been a cop-out and partly because I’d been specifically asked as part of a policy of having more inclusive speakers – not just the same rotating cast of straight, white, cisgender men.

It was fine, of course. Better than fine. The students were a genuinely nice bunch, nobody seemed in the slightest bit perturbed by the disconnect between my voice and my presentation – a disconnect that was bigger than usual today because God has a sense of humour and I have a cold that’s lowered my already-deep voice half an octave below its usual floor – and once the initial terror subsided, I found myself enjoying it. Not so much that I’m going to start volunteering to do tons more, but enough to make me think I made the right decision by saying yes.

I was speaking to my lecturer friend before the lecture, setting the world to rights, and I said (in a different context) that progress is often something you only really see in the rear view mirror: it’s only when you look back that you can see how far you’ve travelled. For me, today was a great example of that.

There were lots of things about being a parent I didn’t expect. Fear was one of them. Almost overnight I became hyper-aware of the world’s many dangers, bursting into tears at newspaper reports of terrible things. It felt as if a layer of my skin had been peeled off, exposing me to things I’d previously been protected from.

That’s universal, of course. You want to protect your child from all the pain in the world, from all its horror, and you can’t. And that realisation makes you realise just how much pain and horror the world contains.

It gets more frightening still when your child is different in any way. It’s unfair, but life is often much smoother for children who conform, who don’t stand out in any way. If your child isn’t one of those children, they tend to get a rougher ride. And that continues into adulthood.

It’s something you’re particularly aware of if you were a child who didn’t conform, because you know exactly what it’s like.

Writing for the always-excellent Autostraddle, Catherine Kelly shares her experience of being the parent of a trans child. Trans children can be quite visibly different from their peers, and to be their parent must be heartbreakingly difficult, especially in the current viciously anti-trans climate. But if the parent is also LGBTQ, that adds a whole extra level of shittiness to it all.

Shitty people “blame” bad parenting for kids being trans all the time, and straight cis parents have to deal with that horribleness, too. But we’ve even had kind of cool people “blame” us for our kid being trans. Obviously, the reasoning goes, we were too proud and weren’t considering what kind of influence we were having on our child, and now she’s forced to be trans. She was never allowed to “explore” if she’s cis.

“Cis” is short for “cisgender”: it means people whose gender identity isn’t at odds with their body. It’s to “trans” what “straight” is to “gay” or “bi”.

Straight parents are told this all the time, that they did something bad and hurt their kids by making them trans. But we in specific are being told our identities are bad, and it’s our identities that hurt our kid.

This is incredibly common on social media and increasingly in print media too. It’s the right-wing evangelical argument that nobody is trans; parents are somehow forcing their kids to be trans for reasons nobody can adequately explain.

Kelly’s article is honest, so isn’t an easy read. It also discusses something I haven’t seen written about before in the context of parenthood: internalised transphobia, homophobia and sexism.

Internalised transphobia/homophobia is what happens when you’re LGBTQ and grow up in a culture that hates, fears and mocks LGBTQ people. I have it: it’s one of the biggest barriers to self-acceptance and happiness, because there’s always a little voice telling you you’re sick.

And if you’re a parent of an LGBTQ kid, that voice talks about your child too.

Kelly:

However, for so many of us, we realized we were LGBTQ after we are already homophobic, heterosexist, and cissexist. It’s a weird thing to go through, to have to rekindle a love for ourselves while living in a world that hates us, especially after we participated in that hate once, too. We’re doing our best to help our child avoid that particular internalization, but her parents didn’t.

I’ve mostly vanquished that voice in my head that says I’m not good enough because I’m not straight, but that doesn’t mean it’s gone.

This is the latest version of the Genderbread Person, an attempt to clear up the differences between gender identity, sexual/romantic attraction and anatomical sex – differences that many self-appointed experts seem unwilling or unable to understand. The reason there are multiple versions is because it’s under constant review to make it as clear and understandable as possible.

The diagram (PDF version and more details available from here) works pretty well without the key, I think: identity is who you are, attraction is who you love/fancy, expression is how you present yourself and sex is what body you have. But the key goes into a bit more detail.

For what it’s worth, my genderbread person has a gender identity and gender expression that are significantly more female than male, my anatomical sex is more male than female (but it’s becoming more female due to HRT), my sex assigned at birth was male and my sexual/romantic attraction is towards women and femininity.

As the diagram’s creator, Sam Killermann, explains:

Look around. Listen inside yourself. Think about everything you’ve learned, been told, or absorbed. Maybe you wouldn’t name these components “identity,” “expression,” “sex,” and “attraction,” but you no doubt recognize their existence.

You feel a certain way, inside. You have a personality, preferences, predispositions. You also look certain ways, dress certain ways, and your body is built in certain ways. You’ve likely noticed many of the ways that society (and your peers, and likely yourself) puts many of those aspects of yourself through a gendered litmus test: pink or blue? And you can surely name ways you, or someone you care about, has felt pressure, discomfort, ease, friction, and/or liberation in light of that.

…That’s what the Genderbread Person is helping us to understand. It’s trying to map all of those amorphous feelings, noticings, and pressures to simple language and visuals.

I think Sam’s done a good job.