There are many things about public restrooms that terrify me: The mouse that ran over my foot while I was seated in a stall in the Medway rest stop. Running out of toilet paper with no one nearby to hand me a new roll. Waiting in line after drinking too much coffee. People who don’t wash their hands after using the bathroom. Those Xlerator dryers that make your skin look like silly putty.
But peeing next to a transgender person does not scare me.
When were you last fearful for your personal safety? Was it when you got shoved against a locker in gym class for not being man enough? Was it when you looked over your shoulder after leaving your car because you were the only woman in the parking lot?
What if, every time you needed to use the bathroom — during the school day, the work day, on the road, or anywhere away from home — you had to run the risk of rage and retribution? What if you or your child had to hold your bladder for eight hours? Try it the next time you drive from Fort Kent to Kittery or sit down at your desk for a day at work. Discrimination hurts even more than a full bladder.
I grew up in an era of examples of how easily discrimination due to perceptions of gender and sexuality can make the difference between life and death. Here in Maine in the summer of 1984, Charlie Howard was thrown off a bridge after being harassed for being gay. I was 8 years old at the time, blissfully unaware that murder was taking place in the state where I would later come to live.
In 1993, as I came out in the relative safety of suburban Massachusetts, I enjoyed protection under that state’s Safe Schools Act — but that very same year, a 21-year-old transgender man, Brandon Teena, was assaulted, raped and murdered in Lincoln, Neb. In 1998, as I finished up four years at college, a young gay man my very own age was pistol-whipped, tortured and tied to a fence to die: Matthew Shepard, then a student at the University of Wyoming.
In the summer of 2008, I celebrated the ninth anniversary of being married to the woman I love. That same summer, Angie Zapata, a transgender woman in Greeley, Colo., was beaten to death by the man she was dating. Just last month in Forrest City, Ark., transgender woman Marcal Camero Tye was shot in the head and dragged behind a car. And on Sunday, April 24, Chrissy Pollis, a 22-year-old transgender woman, was beaten outside of the women’s restroom at a McDonald’s in suburban Baltimore while employees stood by and watched.
These things happen in urban cities and rural towns. They happen right here in Maine. They happen to gay people and transgender people; and, as many little boys and girls learn in the locker room, they can happen to anyone who winds up on the short end of the stick for not playing strictly by the gender rule book.
I have learned two lessons from these trying times: Watch your back, and never stand by silently.
LD 1046, “An Act To Amend the Application of the Maine Human Rights Act Regarding Public Accommodations,” would single out transgender people as undeserving of existing protections under the Maine Human Rights Act. Passing this bill would write gender definitions and discrimination into Maine law, taking away the privacy of people whose gender doesn’t fit neatly into pink or blue.
What happens to Mainers whose appearance doesn’t perfectly match the stick figure with skirt or trousers on the restroom door? Sorry, you’ll only get to use the bathroom if you look woman or man enough in the eyes of the school principal, the convenience store clerk, your coworkers, or your fellow patrons in the rest stops along I-95. And if holding your bladder is the only effect of this law, consider yourself lucky. History tells us otherwise: Gender discrimination does real damage in whatever guise it is cloaked.
Chances are, we have all shared a restroom facility with a transgendered person at some point in our lives. Chances are, we didn’t even notice. Personally, I’m not interested in checking what’s between the legs of my fellow bathroom patrons. So why should my state government intrude in this most personal act?
I say, let us all pee in peace. Keep Maine government out of the bathroom and leave the Maine Human Rights Act as it is and as it was intended to be — protecting all Mainers. It’s a matter of basic human rights, and too often, a matter of life and death.
Erica Quin-Easter is a business counselor, composer and writer living in Caribou.