[Music] so [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] the whole issue about gender seems well represented by the bathroom issue because it shows that those that are even being in perfect compliance with the signs on the door you may have trouble in the bathroom according to how you're perceived by the other people using that bathroom i had problems with restrooms before i began transitioning as a feminine gay male i was attacked more than once in bathrooms and we got into town around one in the morning we stopped in a coffee shop we uh went in the bathroom and before i knew it two guys one pushed me into the other one took a couple of swings at me and they blocked the door and said oh you're a little [ __ ] i made a lot of noise someone came in and prevented me from being hurt badly so it becomes more than just a matter of i want to use this bathroom or another bathroom in my case a an effeminate guy they felt they could get away with doing whatever they wanted to and they probably couldn't [Music] i was followed into the bathroom by a police officer who asked me to see my id i explained that i was in the right bathroom and that i was transgender person and i was just going to use the facilities and leave when we realized that the cop wasn't going to let me use the bathroom we just decided to leave and go somewhere else in the city to use the bathroom and the cop refused less we've pushed up us up against the wall and um called about five or six other cops who came in arrested us and dragged us across the floor this was a question of sort of women look are supposed to look a certain way and men are supposed to look a certain way and my client apparently didn't fit the fit the norm and that's what that's what caused the arrest in new york and in many other jurisdictions um there is no part of the criminal penal code that makes it illegal for a person to use the quote-unquote wrong bathroom even if you know you were considering the person as having the legal sex of their birth sex so um ultimately um even if you know the person is perceived using the wrong bathroom the police have no basis for questioning asking for id arresting etc and it appears to me that certainly many of our clients most transgender people don't know their rights around the bathroom but beyond that and i think more importantly even if you don't know your rights the police definitely don't know what the law is richard richard i'm in the bathroom oh well unisex studies show it helps men and women employees breed familiarity so long as they don't come in to just breed in large part when you try to talk to people about bathrooms and about the problems with gender segregated bathrooms because bathrooms and everything goes on in bathrooms our taboo in our society people will giggle they don't see that it's very serious they're not aware of the pervasive nature of the day-to-day discrimination harassment and humiliation that trans and gender variant people face in bathrooms [Music] there are symbols that people look for when they come into a space or you welcome in a space um some of that is language or there's signs in other languages you know a gay community has very popular either a pink triangle or a rainbow flag or something trans people look for a gender non-specific bathroom and and am i able to find it without asking for it am i able to find it without having scoped out the whole place you're trying to figure out in what language or what symbols been put on that door if that's going to be a safe space for you if that symbol doesn't conform to how you represent yourself it's just one more confrontation for people who don't conform to the little stick figures of of a person with a skirt and a person with i guess trousers uh there's that moment of realizing that you your identity doesn't fit the label it doesn't fit the signpost so you know when there's a door and a lock that it just says bathroom um serves the need the need is not for people to identify are you male or female in this world are you a man or a woman in this world but do you need to use the bathroom or not and that's what the signs should indicate not how do you identify but what do you need to do something i really encourage people to do to really see what the experience is like is that when you need to go to the bathroom in a public place try to use the bathroom of the other gender see what that feels like can you even walk in the door what are some strategies that you would use would you have someone come with you would you watch and make sure that no one was there first what would you do the other thing is if you can't go into that other bathroom find a gender non-specific bathroom what does that entail and that's really being able to experience what it's like for people of gender non-conforming experience who are harassed daily in bathrooms to be able to experience that as providers is really essential in beginning to start to dismantle that and to solve that in our agencies our clients consistently report severe problems in bathrooms everything from not being able to use the bathroom in the school they go to to being kicked out of a welfare office when they attempt to use the bathroom and they're there to apply for benefits so therefore they can't apply to being harassed or beaten up in a bathroom in a public rest stop or public park [Music] so i love new york because people are real you know right away if they like you you know if they don't well i found out that i'm not very well liked at this pier hey let me tell you the story it all happened one afternoon i walked into the women's restroom not too far from where we're standing now i walked into this restroom here it says women okay i'm a woman i'm standing in the mirror cramping getting cute honey when i hear it come out of the restroom i'm like they can't be talking about me what's going on outside lo and behold the officer comes up to the door of the women restrooms come out of the restroom no drag queens and transgenders allowed in the restroom i would definitely have to say the african-american transgendered when they go into the restroom they're the first ones approached because i mean i've witnessed it for myself they're the first ones being approached and harassed or obscenities being shouted at so i came out i'm like what the hell these girls were you know being harassed by the guards they wouldn't let the men that were yelling for the other ones to get out based on an assumption you're going to tell me i can't use the restroom because you think i'm not a female every transgender man every transgender woman that comes to this facility should be able to use the restroom [Music] people have a concern oftentimes that sexual violence will occur if men and women use bathrooms that are not segregated the question of women's vulnerability because of their gender is a much broader question bathroom safety is just one aspect of that i think that the thinking that gender segregated bathrooms keeps people from engaging in sexual assault against women doesn't really comport with what we know about sexual assault and what we know about rape and violence in our society against women for one thing i think sometimes it's promised on the idea that if men are in a bathroom with women they won't be able to help themselves and i think that's certainly a sexist and outdated idea about what rape is i think that we no longer believe that rape is excusable because men can help themselves women who have often themselves been the target of uh violence and assault need need safety when you mark a w or an m on a bathroom door it does not function as a lock if you create a woman's space and and and give the illusion of safety than if someone is a predator they certainly know where to look the real question if we're going to try and talk about safety um would not be a bathroom that was gendered but a bathroom that you completely controlled if what we were most concerned about was making sure that no one was vulnerable to attack then what we do is construct bathrooms where people had complete control over the space meaning you could open a door and walk in and close the door and lock it and you wouldn't share it with anybody else it's always interesting to me how it gets displaced into a question of assault because it puts one group of people that are oppressed against another group of people or they're oppressed and frankly to me they look like they should be allies and bathroom safety should be something that women most understand someone needing precisely because of the role it's often played in women's lives the issue of bathroom access becomes more complicated when people have intersecting visibly intersecting identities that become that also raise the level of scrutiny one might undergo so someone who's homeless um a person of color youth are already under a higher level of scrutiny in our culture and when you add a trans identity or gender different identity or gender clear identity to that it's just raising the bar one more notch and i think those individuals encounter the most scrutiny and i think the most challenges to their use of public facilities i've done a lot of thinking about disability access to veterans as well as trans access to bathrooms um and i'm struck by kind of the most frequent gender non-specific bathrooms are batman's mark but the icon of a wheelchair now that's the radical level i think it's really really really significant that one of the very few public spaces where the gender binary is broken it's broken by disability it becomes really difficult when you have someone who's like doesn't identify with the label on the door helping you and how do you deal with that situation are you ready an intervention like i've always would have done this thing where if i have somebody who identifies and say buy a boy or whenever i walk in first and say you know um there's a guy coming in here does anybody have any serious objections to them coming in and helping me go to the bathroom it makes everyone uncomfortable and it's just reminded that like you don't fit in to this like place you know to be gender non-specific doesn't just benefit trans people it gives everyone more bathroom options and it creates more toilets for more people and that's a good thing there are places where this becomes even more acute and and actually easier to solve in a sense than other places i i think that um most trans people work or go to school um and it's in those environments where they they're going to be using the bathroom on a regular basis there's a lot of awareness about gender at the younger ages and that they really respond to exercises we do that explore what what people say a real boy is supposed to do or what a real girl is [Applause] supposed [Music] often young people become targets of harassment very young and because schools are often neighborhood based and zone based once you become a target you don't ever lose that label and so you remain a target through middle school through high school i just didn't feel comfortable in my own skin especially like with the bathrooms like that's where like gender and how my gender identity was different came up because i felt like you know it didn't really come up in conversation during lunch or you know during other times when i could more easily avoid it young people often report skipping gym for those very same reasons i think locker rooms and bathrooms are particularly hyper gendered places just that i couldn't go into the locker room and i just didn't change for gym and if you didn't change and get into gym clubs for jim it's the same thing as not being there i think a lot of our student leaders in school still get a lot of harassment and locker rooms from um from their peers like are you looking at me or what are you checking me out so i had to go to washington irving it was a school that i went to a lot i went there for like three semesters ever since i was old enough to be in night school i was in night school i mean basically basically like bathroom access was just another thing that i had to deal with on top of everything it just made me it just gave me another reason to not come to school that would make my life easier you know if i was going to cut out because i wasn't happy with my life being trans and because i was getting harassed everywhere else anyway that you know like this is just one more thing that i didn't have to deal with if i wasn't here [Music] i was afraid that if i went to a boys bathroom i would get beat up i was afraid that if i went to a female bathroom that would that would put me down telling me what i'm doing here you know your guy you don't need to be in the female bathroom not only if it's not safe for me but it's embarrassing very very embarrassing especially people are looking and you know it to me it lowers my self-esteem down you know the bathroom issue really sticks out as a key barrier to them to going to school attending school feeling comfortable at school i've talked with a number of the clients about just how they feel they have to hide to go to the bathroom they don't feel comfortable and they'll hold it in all day um they'll be really duplicitous and cloak and dagger just to use the bathroom i'm not as asking for a special trend that i don't know you know i just want to be able to be comfortable in the bathroom using be safe they told me that i could use the bathroom in the lab but that bathroom was often closed so you know so nothing was really resolved you know so that's the reason i left the school because i was tired of them not doing anything about the bathroom issue and about me being safe in the school i identify as a butcher and i think anybody is different feels uncomfortable in bathrooms all first grade i went to the boys bathroom and no one corrected my behavior nobody really said anything and as a result i ended up using the boys bathroom all year long because that's where all the people that were dressed like me were going to the bathroom just made perfect sense second grade rolls around and i'm told that i need to go use the girls bathroom so i go to use the girls bathroom and the girls in the bathroom tell me i'm not supposed to be there i don't belong there i should leave so i showed them my underwear thinking that would convince them that i was a girl like what boy i mean i knew at the time no boy would wear girls underwear what boy wears girls underwear that should be convincing enough it wasn't convincing and they threw me out and i had i went back to my teacher and i cried she took me down to the bathroom and explained to the girls that i'd right to be there that i was a girl that it was okay that i was there i think the the young people who are most targeted are those who fit the least in society's norms i recall not using the bathroom very much that year that whole year i had stomach problems my mother had to put me on this high fiber diet and i had to be like all was all i'm just a mess and it was all because probably all because of this bathroom [Music] stuff one of the things that really concerns me is that i think that there's a lot of health consequences to what we see happening with our clients people are not using the bathrooms in their schools they're not being able to use the bathrooms at their offices and they can't use bathrooms publicly so what you see is people not using the bathroom when they need to and anecdotally i've definitely seen in trans communities that people have a lot of health problems related to that [Music] everyone knows that the healthy way to deal with going to bathrooms to use bathroom when you need to and when that is not possible for transgender people we see health problems in our community i did not go to college i dropped out of high school i'm sure that my gender problems were a part of the reason why i dropped out of high school as a result i've ended up with jobs like this still affects me this day you know it's never not affected me those three those are like formative years of learning and like growing and those are that's my bathroom experience you can see over time it's just depressing to be at work to be at school to have this pressing biological function and you're afraid someone's going to see you am i going to have to wait till there's nowhere in the hallway the entire situation this anxiety provoked the entire situation can it's damaging over time it's damaging [Music] well when i first started transitioning from male to female i wasn't i was pretty uncomfortable using restrooms in the college in fact i didn't want to go i certainly didn't want to go into men's room that would be ridiculous and i wasn't at all comfortable going into the women's restroom when this happens in a workplace there may be a very valuable valued employee but people are very confused by what's going on so i did a search of the campus and discovered in the nurse's office there were single stall bathrooms which are the you know for someone who's transgender those are the bathrooms that are the easiest to deal with it had a lot of inconveniences because you can only use it when the nurse's office was unlocked there are a lot of people who are transitioning gender who have a fairly extended period often of not appearing or not being perceived to be either gender then i reached a point where i became comfortable enough that i would go into the more public restrooms on campus and that seemed to work pretty well and then one of my colleagues who was in my department another professor went to the academic vice president and said i was going to the bathrooms and the academic vice president she says well where else is she supposed to go because there's so little understanding of uh gender diversity that um hr directors and managers and people who are working with transgender and other people are really at a loss to know what's going on [Music] unfortunately even in situations where we have good anti-discrimination laws that cover gender identity we see people losing in court when they go to challenge their rights to access a sex-segregated facility like a bathroom so you look at the case of julie goins um in minnesota and she was living in one of at the time only three states that had gender identity protection um in its anti-discrimination law i had my supervisor's boss come up to me and say that we need to go down to human resources because the human resources department wants to know which washroom i should use i'm just looking at them like what are you talking about when she challenged her inability to use a women's bathroom at her employer west publishing group she ultimately lost in court at the highest level in the minnesota state supreme court so overall we just sort of see that this is a source of enormous violence and discrimination and fear um in our clients lives and really restricts their ability to participate equally in employment education the use of public space um it just feels as though sort of it's one of these major obstacles in our clients lives that a lot of people don't even recognize as being a serious issue it's not something that's so fundamentally under discussed in our [Music] culture [Music] it is in an employer's best interest to have people feeling safe and secure and comfortable in the work environment and having a gender-neutral bathroom is often one of the sort of it's such a concrete piece of infrastructure that is welcoming for trans people that is one of the things that clients have pointed out is that we have to see gendered bathrooms here and how they feel they feel comfortable coming here using the bathroom my hope here is that people can learn from our experience we got together as an office we had the training sessions and then we also had discussions on alternatives we educated people and what we did was we have all gender bathrooms we have had we have had no problem and i can't see why every office doesn't do the same thing put it in another bathroom make people happy happy happy workers are productive workers and so um i don't think that there needs to be much of an argument around [Music] that