Tales of a Trans Woman In The Ladies Room.
The world is full of secret, magical places.
There’s a walled garden hidden in this bustling metropolis. Within this cloister the noise of traffic is strangely dulled. Should you lay on that grass your vision of an endless blue sky will be framed, not by the neighbouring skyscrapers, but by beatified faces rendered in overgrown bronze statues.
Did you ever find that convergence point of architectural lines in the corporate outdoor food court? Long demolished, this spot was present to all those folks hurrying to and from the office, but unseen. They never knew that if you stopped at a particular place and stamped a foot on the ground it’d reverberate out into the forecourt like a gunshot, startling pigeons and young professionals alike.
We pass through subtly preternatural public places constantly. Rarely do we notice. Pedestrian in every sense of the world, but no less magical. Should you look, should you be attuned to the subtleties of their mysteries, you’ll find they’re all around us.
Of all these places, the ladies’ room is by far my favourite.
Black Tile, White Grout. Grey Stone Walls. Gleaming Silvery Fittings.
Huddled in the toilet stall with this bright and bubbly stranger, I joked that this may be the first time I’d joined someone in a cubicle and there wasn’t any cocaine involved. Her eyes flashing at me with mirth she carefully unhitched her top. I watched her delicate, pained process of unbuttoning.
This was not sexual intimacy. It was intimacy of a different kind.
As her fingers worked the clasps of the beige medical support bra, she gazed down at glory of her week-old boob job. The underscore of stitches around nipples, the curved lines of purple bruising giving way to yellow. She gave me the tiniest of pained shimmies, impatience in her eyes. She was bursting to flaunt this body into the world, but right now the best she could manage was a conspiratorial flash to an anonymous trans woman she’d only minutes earlier met in the corridor.
Clearly, she was confident I’d see her as a fellow vanguard in the sisterhood of modifying your body, the sisterhood of meeting your own wants, not the wants of others. She gave me all the details, the logistics, the pricing, the difficulties, the recommendations. I won’t lie, I can’t remember a thing she said, I was far too bamboozled by her stark honesty and willingness to be so vulnerable with someone she’d only just met in queue for the toilet.
Red Velvet and Golden-Trimmed Powder Room.
The old ballroom had been saved from the developers wrecking ball, saved from the fate of becoming an egg-carton stack of apartments. Despite the sumptuous magnificence of this old dame, the venue had become home to blazing rock bands and dance parties. Restored to its former art nouveau glory, I’ve spent many an evening, jostled in the swell of queer bodies revelling in art-punk sexual free expression.
The powder room is a constant gaggle of magnificent girls.
Some sprawled on chaise lounge so low you practically fall onto it rather than sit while some will be perched on the bench or just primping their look in gilded antique mirrors. It’s awash in the unfettered glory of young women. Just standing among it feels faintly magical.
So, there I am, waiting for a free stall, clad in figure hugging hot pink. Broad, burly and tattooed in platform heels that put me on the closer-to-seven-foot-than-six-foot range. I’m thinking about how I’m so tall I don’t know how the hell I’m going to get myself down to the toilet to pee without having to take the boots off.
A group of girls snap me out of my thoughts, “Oh my gawd your shoes are aMAZing!”
I thanked them and without thinking I offhandedly informed them these platform boots have the perfect gap between the heel and sole, they’re just the right size for pinning a man’s wrists to the floor while you stand over him.
I’m particularly fond of making twenty-somethings squeal with scandalised delight. It’s good to remind them that ‘old’ doesn’t equal ‘dead’. They exit the powder room, snapping fingers and “Yaaas Queen”-ing my praise and disappear into the thump of dance party bass.
Harsh Down Lights. A Heterosexual Man Designed This Ladies’ Room.
The lights match the harsh words coming from two stalls over. “He’s not even paying for his drinks AND he’s getting all handsy? On the first date?!?” A woman is giving her friend an exasperated talking to about the events unfolding in the bar beyond our sanctuary. “But he’s cute AND he’s a dentist, which is good, right?” pleads back another voice.
I hear them washing hands and pop out of the stall, butch black suspenders the only shred of modesty over a white tee that might as well not be there it’s so transparent.
“Honey, if he has ‘dentist money’ he can buy his own drinks.”
Their brief moment of shock passes from realising they’re being visited be the trans-lesbian-fairy-godmother they never knew they had. The exasperated friend unfreezes, “Yes! See, even she gets it!” The details all unfold, how she met him, how she invited him along to an informal birthday drinks, how she has been on the shelf for so long and just damn well needs some attention right now.
And here it is again. The deepest vulnerability of her, the need to just goddamn get dicked-down, freely expressed to a stranger. Such is the magic of these places.
I end up joining their table for a time. I’m curious about this ‘boy’ and spend the next hour exchanging arched eyebrow glances with the exasperated friend while a dentist gets drunk on someone else’s dollar and fumbles his shot with the cute redhead.
Emerald Green Subway Tiles and a Godly Encounter.
Again, in queue and in my giant boots, goth queen slits in the billowing black dress. Slits that go all the way up so that when I walk, or even just stand contrapposto, cocked hip and leaning, the full length of these gams are borne into the night.
I catch the stocky butch lesbian beside me stealing a glance at my legs in the mirror. The blade of my hip is nearly up to her chest. She can’t help but look. God, I adore the confidence of butch lesbians. She shoots her shot, now gazing directly at my muscular thigh she flat out states, “I want to grind against you.”
And so, I let her.
Thank the gods for solid floor to ceiling cubicle walls and not just laminated chipboard stalls. The bolt on the door is thrown and I lean back, proffering a leg. She steps towards me, pressing herself around the meat of my mid-thigh. I gaze down in gothic regal glory, calm and kind, my nails tracing swirls on her cheeks as she rides against the bunching muscles, her fingers digging into my ivory flesh while she finds her own singular pleasure. I smile down at her, saintly and serene. When she’s satisfied, I plant a kiss on her forehead and push her back through the door into the real world, locking it after her.
Blessing bestowed. This queen is still dying to take a piss.
A Swirl of Pink Marble Like a Ripple of Boysenberry Ice Cream
A fellow doll, sweet and demure, cherry red lip and eyes so big you can’t help but think of cartoon forest wildlife when you look at her. Still in her twenties and only been taking hormones for seven months. God, it makes her practically an infant in our world. She’s been fretting about her lack of boob growth.
This calls for some double-mothering in the bathroom.
It winds up being me, this young trans woman and a queer cis gendered woman. The cis woman, a new acquaintance, is delighted to help out. Like me, she’s six foot, bespectacled and looks like a librarian in the queerest library you’ve ever visited in this plane of existence.
The bathroom door is locked. We get our tops off.
Towering over her, we show this young trans woman our breasts. Casually standing there with our tits out we tell her how long it took, we talk we talk about ‘tanner stages’ and growth rates. Her with her cis “natural” puberty, me with my trans “induced” puberty. We talk about tubular breast formation and ligament strength. We point out all the ways puberty can suck but reassure her that ‘slow is good’. We show her what’s in store for her if she’s patient.
Emboldened she mumbles, “Would… would you like to see mine?”
We practically explode with enthusiasm at the suggestion. She nervously disrobes and treats us to the delicate magnificence of a body just beginning to transform. The budding breasts are there, small and pert, but they are on the way. We ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ and tell her she is going to look so fucking good. She just needs to be patient and not rush. She needs to give her body time to adapt and grow.
We all hug, completely unconcerned if anyone is waiting to get into the bathroom. If they knew what was going on in here, that a cluster of women were celebrating and reassuring one of the sisters that her body is glorious and worth waiting for, they’d likely get their tits out too.
These Secret Gardens
Time and again these encounters conjure in my mind the images of ivy-covered walls dotted with blooms of unparalleled majesty. I can’t help but think of them as an oasis of reprieve, a place where you can grow, you can change, where you can be shielded from the sharp edges of the world, a secret garden.
Despite what the rhetoric about trans women in bathrooms would have you believe, these places are one of the few locations where feminine vulnerability is not routinely preyed upon. Your experience may differ, but in all the time I’ve been entering these spaces I’ve always found them to be kind and welcoming. The right to be there, to interact with other women will always feel like a blessing. Yes, there’s more going on in the discourse about our right to urinate in public bathrooms. This alone is a noble fight for a fundamental human right, but for me it’s more.
If I lost the right to enter that secret world, lost the right to shelter in it with those who show me unconditional kindness and compassion, I’d be losing one of the things that makes living this life tolerable.
–S
I can’t wait for more of these moments! I was in the ladies room for the very first time recently - my hairdresser took me there to cry about how I looked and an impending heartbreak, and amongst the sadness it was such a beautiful moment that I want to remember.