Opinion

Sep 07, 2023

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By Lydia Polgreen

Opinion Columnist

A few years ago, I attended an advertising conference in the South of France. I was staying at a glitzy hotel on a glittering boulevard along the Côte d’Azur. I was in business attire, a navy pantsuit. On my way to a meeting, I ducked into the women's bathroom off the lobby. Then I heard heavy footsteps and a breathless voice saying, in French, "There's a man in the bathroom!"

"Monsieur, monsieur," another voice boomed. The door of my stall rattled as a fist pounded it from outside.

"I am a woman," I replied in French, using the most feminine intonation I could muster, frantically gathering the trousers pooled around my ankles to get out of the stall as quickly as possible.

The woman who had been pounding on the door, a security guard, seemed skeptical and waited until I left the stall just to make sure. Flustered as I was, I stepped out and flashed the friendliest smile I could manage, jutting out my hairless chin as proof that I belonged in this space despite the mannish cut of my suit and my close-cropped hairstyle. As a cisgender lesbian who is occasionally mistaken for a man, I have sometimes found bathrooms to be fraught spaces. But never to this extent. This was terrifying and humiliating.

I was reminded of this moment on Wednesday when the Florida governor and almost certain Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis signed several new bills directly targeting the freedom and dignity of queer people. Surrounded by smiling children, DeSantis scrawled his signature on a bunch of draconian new laws, including a far-reaching one that will require people in government-run buildings — including state universities, prisons and public schools — to use bathrooms associated with their sex assigned at birth. Anyone who fails to comply could face misdemeanor trespassing charges that could result in jail time.

When a law like this was passed in North Carolina in 2016, it prompted a furious outcry. Major companies announced they would halt plans to expand in the state. The N.B.A. and N.C.A.A. moved major events elsewhere. North Carolina faced billions in potential losses and ultimately repealed the measure.

Now, bathroom bills are back, part of a pitiless onslaught against trans bodies that gathers speed with each passing day. The new Florida bills target many aspects of trans people's lives, expanding the "Don't Say Gay" policies in school to older students, banning gender-affirming medical care for children and allowing the state to seize children from parents who allow them to receive such care. The laws also prohibit schools from recognizing a child's preferred name or pronouns.

The new bathroom law is particularly cruel and absurd. Politicians claim these measures seek to make bathrooms safer. But I have yet to see any of these legislators produce a shred of credible evidence that transgender people pose a safety threat to cisgender people in bathrooms.

What is clear is that they open up transgender people to harassment, intimidation and surveillance. Around 10 states have passed laws barring transgender children from using their chosen bathroom. So far this year there are more than 30 bills aimed at restricting bathroom use by trans people, according to the Human Rights Campaign, more than any other year on record. But none have gone as far as Florida, which is now the only state to criminalize using a bathroom that doesn't align with your sex at birth.

Bathrooms have long been porcelain crucibles for our deepest fears and anxieties. One hardly needs to crack open the collected works of Sigmund Freud to understand why they have been the sites of repression and humiliation in service of enforcing hierarchies.

Perhaps that is because few human experiences are truly universal, and the deep unease of needing a bathroom and not being able to find or use one is one of them. And there are few places where human beings feel more vulnerable: Bathrooms are a place where we expose our most tender parts and attend to the most private needs. So, it is no surprise that policing access to facilities to meet basic bodily needs has been an effective method of repression for a very long time.

"A lot of the things about gender and sexuality and identity that people get anxious about or don't want to talk about, they’ll project onto the space of the bathroom," said Sheila Cavanagh, a professor of sociology and a psychotherapist who has written extensively about the politicization of bathrooms.

During the civil rights movement, advocates for segregation made lurid (and absurd) claims that white girls could contract venereal diseases from toilet seats shared with Black girls. Bathrooms are a place where we enforce hierarchies of class, from the executive washrooms of old to the shameful barring of delivery workers from using restaurant bathrooms (a practice now banned in New York City). Drivers who deliver Amazon packages have reported having to urinate in bottles because of the intense time pressure the company put on them.

In the movie "The Help," which is about Black housekeepers and their white employers in Mississippi in the 1960s, a pivotal dispute is over the housekeeper having access to a bathroom used by the white family that employs her. She protests this affront to her dignity by serving her employer a chocolate pie with a scatological secret ingredient.

Women have been denied access to bathrooms as well. It wasn't until 1992 that the Senate decided to build a dedicated bathroom for women elected to the chamber. This ended decades of forcing female senators to run downstairs and queue up with hoi polloi at the public restroom.

In an article about the ultraconservative Regier family that is increasingly dominating Montana politics, I came across a startling anecdote about an early priority of Matt Regier, speaker of the State House. At one meeting he raised the question of how to manage the chamber's bathrooms with the arrival of a transgender legislator, Zooey Zephyr. Even to one fellow Republican, this seemed a strange area of focus, but it was decided, The Times reported, that a lock would be installed on the main door to the multistall women's bathroom to avoid the possibility of anyone having to share it with Zephyr.

Whatever its stated purpose, the Florida bill seems intended to terrify and humiliate transgender people.

The writer and activist Erin Reed wrote that the bill "effectively deputizes cisgender individuals as bathroom enforcers, tasking them with identifying and reporting suspected transgender people for arrest and subsequent gender investigation."

Imagine, Reed asks, if she was transiting through a Florida airport, a government facility that could be covered by the bill, and needed to pee. "As a post-op transgender woman who is consistently recognized as my correct gender, I can never safely use a male restroom," she wrote.

You don't have to look very hard on any social media platform to find horrifying examples of transgender and gender-nonconforming people being harassed in bathrooms. These videos are terrifying in their ubiquity and chilling in their cruelty. These new laws will make what happened to me look like child's play.

Since adolescence, I have been somewhere on the more masculine end of the tomboy spectrum. This has created plenty of awkwardness in my life. But what happened in France was something else. It was a sharp rebuke that sent an unforgettable message: Your appearance makes you suspect. The authorities have the right to inspect your body and evaluate your fitness to occupy this space.

It didn't matter that I was a guest at a five-star hotel, the editor of one of the biggest news websites in the world, an executive at a giant American corporation. Some random woman in a bathroom didn't think I belonged there, and I was subjected to humiliating scrutiny as a result.

When I think back now on that bathroom in France, I feel a little embarrassed at how I responded. My goal was to escape the situation as quickly as possible — a reasonable response to a horrible experience. And yet my method of escape — proving that I belonged and was blameless rather than rejecting scrutiny — felt deeply familiar.

It was the same impulse that I had silently learned, without ever being explicitly taught, as a young Black person in America, that when I was in a store I should keep my hands out of my pockets and avoid anything that looked like a furtive movement lest I be accused of theft. As most Black kids do, I had to learn to live with the knowledge that I was subject to enhanced surveillance because of the color of my skin. I have long since shed such reflexive fears with regard to my race. But old habits die hard, and in that bathroom they came roaring back with regard to gender.

There is a wonderful euphemism in Nigeria for needing to use the toilet: "I am going to ease myself," the felicitous phrase goes. What I love about that expression is that it artfully captures what one is seeking in the bathroom: relief, safety and above all, ease.

The rash of bills targets transgender people for scrutiny, surveillance and judgment, and that is reason enough to reject them as an affront to human dignity. But my experience tells me that these laws are really about something else: a step along the path to a rigid enforcement of gender norms, roles and presentation. It is about the routine humiliation and degradation of people who look or behave in ways a fanatical minority wants to punish. They will not stop until anyone who fails to meet their rigid definitions of identity forfeits the right to feel at ease.

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Lydia Polgreen has been a New York Times Opinion columnist since 2022. She spent a decade as a correspondent for The Times in Africa and Asia, winning Polk and Livingston Awards for her coverage of ethnic cleansing in Darfur and resource conflicts in West Africa. She also served as editor in chief of HuffPost. @lpolgreen

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