my huffpost essay: behind the scenes

How I got my trans bathroom essay published in HuffPost!

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.

My partner read the draft and we discussed my experience. He had been with me in the park that day but not in the bathroom or close enough to hear what had happened, so this was my second, more detailed attempt to share this experience with him. He asked me questions and suggested more aspects I could talk about. He agreed with me that this was a piece that could be shared with my newsletter or elsewhere.

I rewrote the piece, clarifying some parts based on my partner’s feedback.

I shared the essay with my writing group, four memoir writers who I really trust and give excellent feedback. We’ve been meeting almost every other week for a couple years now. Laurie, Eileen, Melanie, and Carmella asked me questions, shared which parts of the essay were confusing or needed more, and helped me see what was important and what was less important. I really appreciate these folks’ careful thoughtfulness in analyzing my story while respecting my complicated feelings about these real life events.

I revised the piece again. By this point, I was thinking this could be an essay I could submit to a magazine. My word count was too high, probably over 2k words. I removed some parts about enjoying traveling outdoors in nature and some of the details of the haircut.

I could have submitted the essay, then. But I didn’t feel like I was ready. This felt less about the prose and more about not being willing to have an objective conversation with an editor about these events yet, which still felt really personal to me.

Instead, I reached out to a therapist providing gender-affirming care and asked if I could have an intake appointment with them when I was back on the East Coast. I was feeling really weird about my body at that time, and troubled by people’s perception of my gendered appearance.

In my second appointment with my therapist, I unloaded this series of events and how unsettled I felt. My therapist was not surprised that something like this had happened to me with my short hair, and also said that this was absolutely not my fault. I had done nothing wrong, wearing my jacket and hat and cutting my hair short. There’s nothing wrong with looking a little masculine.

A couple months later, I arranged a work trade with an editor, Sophia, and asked her to edit my essay draft. She quickly got back to me with some very insightful edits and great writing advice that was thoughtful and educated about being gender non-conforming and trans.

I revised the essay based on Sophia’s feedback, adding a little more drama to the retelling, and sharing more of how those events made me feel internally. I also dug into the shame I felt around cutting my hair short, and where that came from.

The U.S. presidential election really threw me for a loop — I couldn’t write, couldn’t think, definitely couldn’t submit. I got back to my web, marketing, and design work before I got back to writing and content creation.

Eventually, I pushed myself past being frozen.

I pulled up my bathroom essay draft, and thought, this is a good essay. It has a narrative arc, drama, makes an important point to the reader, has character development, and tells a unique story that I haven’t read before. I should try to get this published. And I should start by submitting to big name magazines. Once they reject this, I can work my way down the list and find someone to publish it.

I was hoping to submit my essay to The Sun, HuffPost, and maybe The Atlantic. I worked on my cover letter to The Sun, then started looking for how to submit to HuffPost. I found Noah Michelson, Director of HuffPost Personal, and checked his recent work and social media posts. Noah co-hosts the podcast, Am I Doing It Wrong? Scrolling through the list of recent episodes, one caught my eye: Surviving a Trip to a Public Restroom. A bathroom episode! I immediately hit play.

The podcast episode is all about if we can stay safe from germs in public restrooms, and how icky they can be. I enjoyed listening to this episode very much and started off my pitch with a heartfelt compliment, “I loved the bathroom germs episode of your podcast—horrifying yet delightfully entertaining, thank you! I have a different slice of bathroom life to share with you today.” I submitted this essay at about 1.6k words.

I was expecting no response, honestly, as editors are extremely busy and have to field many pitches, and was shocked (and delighted) when Noah wrote back quickly with his thoughts on what I could add to the essay to make the story more relevant to the current politics of trans rights in bathrooms.

I really appreciated Noah’s insightful guidance on how to improve my piece. Taking a few days to think and write, I added 400 words about bathroom bills, digging deeper into the relevancy of my experience.

The next steps were to sign a contract, the piece received an edit and new headline, I was given a chance to preview the changes, and a publication date.

I was excited and nervous. While I’ve had published pieces before, none have been in such a widely read venue as HuffPost.

And I did get a big response. People feel strongly about people’s gender in bathrooms, on both sides of the issue, and did not hesitate to reach out and let me know.

I received comments similar to those I’ve received before: nothing shocked me that much or made me feel particularly unsafe. I felt in good company with other trans creators who have faced a similar backlash many times. Actually, I felt the most regretful about people in my community being drawn into the comment section faster than I could moderate the unpleasant, disrespectful responses.

I am grateful to you, my readers, for being so supportive, your kind words, and sharing your stories. I appreciate all of you so much!!

Take care,

Rey