My essay about navigating public bathrooms as a trans, non-binary person was published in HuffPost on March 11, 2025, and is about a man harassing me in a women’s bathroom for looking too masculine after I cut my hair short.
I’m really excited for this piece to be very visible out in the world. It’s been quite the journey for this essay. I am very grateful for all the help I have received, and I wanted to share my whole process with you.
After a man harassed me in a public bathroom while I was on a road trip around California, I was rattled. I was very stressed at the time, and feeling intense gender dysphoria and uncertainty for days afterwards.
I have been accused of a lot of things over the past week, including that my story is fictional, that I’m attention-seeking, and that this experience can’t have been that traumatic if I’m writing about it “as if it were a novel.”
All effective bullying has a kernel of truth, I think. I was alone in the bathroom with this man. I never saw his face. I have no photos, videos, recordings, or eyewitness testimony to back up that this happened. I can tell you that this was my experience, but can I prove it? No.
All I can say is if I was writing fiction, I would have made it more compelling. And I’ll take it as a compliment that someone who is trying to insult me says I write like it’s a novel.
I’ve received many messages over the last week from people who have had similar experience being discriminated against and bullied in public bathrooms due to their gender non-conforming appearance. One woman who was bullied by women in the bathroom was a cancer patient who had lost her hair due to chemo. That’s so horrible.
I also want to be clear, I never said my experience was traumatic - I think the word is overused and while this experience stressed me out and I thought about it a lot, I wouldn’t say it caused me trauma.
Because I write this newsletter, Amplify Respect, about respect for trans people and trans rights, I journaled about what had happened to me in the bathroom. It was very clear to me this incident was about my gender non-conforming appearance, and that experience felt important to share to raise awareness that these things happen.
So I am definitely “attention-seeking.” For a good cause, though, I hope - not just to inflate my own ego but to raise awareness that trans and gender-nonconforming people deserve our respect and inclusion.
As I was writing down my experience, I quickly decided this was not going to be a newsletter update for that week. The experience felt too raw to me and I didn’t want to share and get community feedback yet. I needed to think about it myself for a while first.
A week or two later, sitting in a library, I returned to my notes, editing and revising into a draft. I was starting to see how this could be an essay: not only was it a dramatic story, I could use it to demonstrate how important it is to be respectful and considerate towards others.
