Before transitioning, I was one of those people who actively avoided using public restrooms. However, after starting on estradiol, I found my one golden rule of avoiding public restrooms suddenly impossible to follow. Starting on HRT, there are a lot of side effects that people don’t really bring up: like how your skin is more delicate and bruises much easier, which I learned firsthand by walking into a bench like a dumbass and hitting my shin hard. Or needing to wear a hoodie when it’s 83 degrees outside.
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One side effect I’ve noticed is that my bladder capacity feels like a quarter of what it was previously. I can no longer hold it and I end up pushing people out of the way and getting bitchy when places have signs that say “no bathroom”. Asking other trans people, I learned I wasn’t the only one who had this problem when starting HRT. I also learned that because estradiol causes a decrease in muscle tone, especially around the pelvic floor muscles, it can affect bladder control. Additionally, if you take other HRT drugs such as spironolactone, it can increase urination frequency due to being a diuretic.
I’m lucky to have started medically transitioning a few days after moving to Seattle, Washington, where I’m able to use the women’s restroom as a transgender woman, mostly without incident. Still, across the nation in more conservative areas, transwomen aren’t safely—and in many instances, legally—allowed to use women’s facilities. Recently, one transgender woman was arrested in Florida just for washing her hands in a public women’s room.
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With this in mind, these bans should feel less like a non-issue and should be regarded as a greater form of exclusion towards trans people from public life. Imagine you are someone who has to pee every 20 minutes and you’re doing something out in public, but you can’t use the women’s restroom, and using the men’s room as an out trans woman is unsafe as well as degrading. Some people suggest using the “third space” or the gender neutral bathroom, but not every place has that.
With this in mind, you’d have no choice but to stay home, or if you were going to go outside, you’d have to make it very quick and could only travel a certain distance from home. I feel like it’s obvious at this point that it was never about “making women feel safe in bathrooms” and has always been to exclude a vulnerable group of people because they don’t fit into their narrow view of normalcy.
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