 |
| Jason Hosking/CORBIS |
The bar is crowded and music assaults your poor, inebriated ears. That last beer is nagging you not so quietly toward the bathroom, but there’s a painfully long line. The opposite sex’s door swings open, taunting you with its emptiness.
Would you use it if you knew you’d be alone? Would you if you knew you wouldn’t be? Or are you just going to stand there hopping up and down like a fool while there’s a perfectly good toilet with no one using it.
For many people who are transitioning to a new sex or simply don’t identify with the typical image of a man or a woman, what is the most automatic part of most people’s day can become the most complicated. One group aims to open the last door to gender and sexual equality, and it’s a bathroom stall.
“Toilet Theater” was a day-long social experiment posed by Genderqueer Chicago (GqC) to their friends and blog readers on Sept. 19 asking people to examine the functions of our gendered public spaces by using the opposite sex’s bathroom.
Co-founder of GqC Peter Noble, 26, of Rogers Park is female-born and goes by he. He says that while the theater was mostly subdued, the most important result was the thinking it sparked in the minds of those who participated.
“Most people didn’t have any incident at all or didn’t even encounter other people during their visit but it facilitated a conversation about feeling uncomfortable in a space that was designated for one gender or another. Feeling that titillating fear or heart racing that nobody who hadn’t experienced that before knew was something that some people experience on a daily basis.”
Just as there are many kinds of personal identity, there are several flavors of gender identity and not many of them fit neatly in to the box of a cartoon human with or without a little skirt. While most people might be familiar with “queer” as a term for people with alternative sexualities, “genderqueer” refers to an individual who, regardless of sexual orientation, may not subscribe to the typical presentation of male or female.
“It’s obviously enough of a problem that our new building has two gender-neutral, single stall restrooms for those who are not comfortable in a gendered space,” said Danny Kopelson, director of communications for The Center on Halsted, an LGBT resource and community center in Lakeview. “Many of us are still questioning ourselves here.”
Genderqueer Chicago, which is more of a support space among friends than an activist group, wanted to address the issue without becoming a victim of politics. The idea was originally to stage confrontations like the kind that happen every day. They opted instead to simply ask people, many of whom didn’t identify as any kind of queer, to use the opposite space and gauge their reactions.
“I’ve had a handful of people tell me that they don’t even look anymore which restroom they’re going into if it’s just a locked door. That was kind of cool. I did have some people who were confronted though and are now on the cause because they think no one should have to deal with that,” said Noble.
Sosin and Noble said that most men said they don’t mind if a woman were to enter their space, but women are still uncomfortable with men in theirs.
“I think we’ve failed to see that women’s struggles, gay struggles, and trans struggles are all bound by the problem of gender and the way that it boxes us in. And a lot of us while we’re mocked or bullied as children, it’s not because of who we’re dating or sleeping with (because we’re children), it’s because of gender,” said Sosin. “I think for a lot of women we grow up knowing of the threat of violence on the basis of gender. For us to separate the safety of women and the safety of gay or trans people is silly. I think that’s the statement that something like this is hopefully doing.”
According to Sosin, Genderqueer isn’t asking to convert the whole world to Ally McBeal-like unisex bathrooms, simply for safe spaces for people with alternative gender identities to perform the most basic of human functions.
“It’s amazing to me that we’ve made so much visible and clear progress. Trans, gender, queer, whatever. But there’s still not places to pee. It’s not a radical request and it’s not politics.”
And it’s just a toilet.
