Survival Tips for Gender Non-Conforming People Traveling to North Carolina This Weekend

Figuring out how to use the bathroom without getting beat up or yelled at has become a stressful job for lots of people in this country – and not just transgender people. Laws like North Carolina’s notorious bathroom bill impact all kinds of people who just might not have the haircut or the clothes you'd expect from their gender.

Tamara Zakim is a tall, slim woman with short hair and a distinctly boyish fashion sense. She lives in the Bay Area, but this weekend she’s attending the wedding of two friends in the Smoky Mountains, in the far western, Appalachian part of North Carolina. Over Facebook, she confessed she was “really starting to sweat the bathroom situation.” A pit stop off the interstate between the Atlanta airport and her destination seemed like a potentially dangerous situation for someone whose gender identity is less than clear-cut.

Friends on Facebook responded to her plea for advice in two different ways. Her friends who are “gender-conforming,” meaning they look and dress how people of their biological gender are generally expected to look and dress, offered sympathy, disbelief, and outrage that Zakim even had to worry about such things. Their advice was generally along the lines of, “hold your head up high, smile, and act like you belong there and no one will give you trouble.”

One friend counseled her to “put an intention out there.”

“If you go into the situation with fear or anxiety, sometimes we draw exactly that which we want to avoid,” that friend said. “Go in with confidence, love and a feeling of 'nothing is wrong here' and you won't have any problems!”

Uh, no. Zakim said she often gets harassed in public bathrooms even in the San Francisco Bay Area, no matter “what intention I'm manifesting, or how big the smile is on my face.” She says she’s been grabbed and yelled at and people have knocked on the door of her stall asking, "Why are you in here?"

“Rest stops, malls, and airports are the worst,” she said.

Lots more concrete advice came from Zakim’s Facebook friends whose presentation of gender is a little more complicated. Holding your head high, they knew, was no guarantee of an uneventful trip to the bathroom. “They just want us to be free and happy,” said one, noting the optimistic comments from the other side. “But, we just trying to make it through the bathroom!”

All they're trying to do is use the bathroom of the gender on their birth certificate -- just as North Carolina's law requires -- but they still can't avoid uncomfortable confrontations.

Several admitted they avoid public bathrooms as much as possible.

“Carry a bottle, lock your doors. Fill up with gas and fly to your destination!” wrote one friend who clearly gets it. “Praying for you.”

Zakim said was leaning toward a tactic of drinking no fluids on the road. But her friends in the know shared some real survival skills for getting through bathroom trips in unknown territory when they just can't be avoided.

Many look for single-stall bathrooms. One noted that Starbucks was a good bet – they’re everywhere, and their bathrooms are usually single-occupancy.

Several friends said they try to go to the bathroom with other women and talk the whole time so others can hear their voices. Their companions would also try to call them loudly by their names. "It's awful," admitted one who finds it necessary to follow that game plan.

But Zakim is traveling alone, so the loud-talking-name-calling scheme won't work. “My plan is usually to put on a hat, look down, and use the men's bathroom,” said one female friend who also wears short hair and androgynous clothing choices. "I think people freak out less in there.”

Not everyone in North Carolina has suddenly become a self-appointed bathroom gender watchdog just because of the new law. Some noted that more North Carolinians oppose the law than support it.

“A lot of places have a quip or something by the bathroom door intended to shame the law, like ‘no birth certificate required for entry,’” Zakim’s friend said. “Look for those places.”

Others debated whether the route through South Carolina or though Tennessee would be preferable.

There is a Google map making the rounds with “safe bathrooms” marked on it. It’s a U.S. map but most of the toilet-paper-roll icons are in North Carolina, where people are most concerned. Most of the bathrooms marked “safe” on the map are in urban areas, but there are some in the Appalachian region, too.

Photo credit: Jess Andrews via Flickr.