Invasion of the Hermaphrodites!

by David Benjamin

“It was difficult for me to see the relationship between public morals and public toilets, as to me those facilities had been more a matter of convenience than of sex.”
—Christine Jorgensen

MADISON, Wis.—Come here once.

Follow me into the boys’ room.

I know, it’s a scary place—where dead-end kids go to sell drugs and smoke weed, where hoods start knife fights, where football players grab weaklings and shove their heads into toilets. But relax. We’re between classes. The lavatory’s deserted.

Look around.

As you can see, I face two initial choices here—No. 1 or No. 2. If it’s No. 1, I slip into a stall, latch the door and, thereafter, only me and God know what on earth I’m up to in there.

No, you can’t join me. We both know that some people, sometimes. share a toilet stall, in a sort of desperate effort to do secret stuff. But neither you nor I (I assume) are so inclined. Right?

Okay then. Now, most of the time, my reason (and yours) for venturing into this not very hygienic and funky-smelling space is good old No. 2, for which there are a) urinals along the wall there and b) stalls.

Incidentally, I’ve always been puzzled by grown men who eschew the urinals and prefer to pee in the semi-privacy of a toilet stall in a public rest room. I figure it has something to do with a guy’s relationship to Jocasta … oops. I mean, his mom.

But who am I to judge? Different strokes, oui?

Before we go on, let’s consider the polite vernacular for both male and female reproductive organs (also used for peeing): “privates.” We’re not talking generals or colonels, not captains, sergeants or even PFCs. Just “privates,” which is a term both humble and profoundly instructive.

Public lavatory protocol, particularly in men’s rooms, comes down to one inflexible—virtually tautological—tenet: Keep your privates to yourself.

My awareness of this rule, which never had to be articulated (I just knew), goes back to my initiation into group urination in second grade at St. Mary’s School. At recess time in the morning of my first day, I joined a bunch of boys herded together by Mrs. Poss and shooed into the boys lavatory. The urinals there were the classic, snow-white shoulder-to-floor white monoliths, with the drain at floor level and lots of tall porcelain to correct for bad aim. The pose I struck, instinctively, was to hunch forward, shielding my equipment with both hands, firing away as swiftly as possible, zipping up before backing away and never …

… ever …

… looking around, at any other kid, left or right.

Urinal design has evolved since then and most are minimalist wall-mounts or egg-shaped works of art (with puddles on the floor). But the protocol remains unaltered, observed even with difficulty at those intimidating stainless-steel troughs installed in ballparks and football stadia.

Of course, I’m not squeamish. In swimming-pool locker rooms and gym-class, I’ve witnessed male nudity, both front and rear, from head to toe, in vast variety. But, in all my years of public-space peeing, I’ve never intentionally or inadvertently—even when my cousin Danny tried to write his name in the snow—peeked at another guy’s privates, nor has anyone beheld mine. This is a men’s room stricture more rigid than John Wayne’s spine.

So, please, Mrs. Maron, explain to me: Why all this fuss?

The raving foofaraw stirred up in the last few years by transphobic hysterics like Maud Maron in New York about uni-gender, birth-gender, assigned-gender, all-gender public privies is hardly new. I was just a curious kid in the mid-1950s when the first true transgender pioneer, Christine Jorgensen, went through the surgical ordeal to change from man to woman. Predictably the tabloid press went into a tizzy about this hulking “ex-GI” prowling the ladies rooms of Manhattan and Massapequa.

To which, Ms. Jorgensen, who was a class act throughout her fifteen years of fame, cogently said, “There is very little sex in toilets.”

Indeed, a toilet, especially the public variety, is a place you want to get into and out of as fast as you can manage. Even the latrines where certain sorts of people tend to loiter—for reasons that have nothing to do with evacuation—are best hurried through, or never entered. I recall a bus station john in Chicago where I walked in, reconnoitered, made eye contact with one large, unsanitary guy and withdrew, choosing to curb my bladder ’til my eyes watered.

Curiously, until the latest surge of privy paranoia fomented by Ms. Maron’s legion of right-wing bigots, there were no explicit laws prohibiting men from the ladies room or vice versa. We didn’t need no stinkin’ laws. The sign on the door, which is sufficient, expresses a “norm,” a bow to modesty and sanctuary, with which just about everyone complies. But the door isn’t locked. Anybody—at the risk of embarrassment and the possibility of screaming—can go in there.

In the TV series, “NCIS,” for example, Ziva—a woman exemplary in her disdain for effete courtesies—barged regularly into the men’s room when Di Nozzo and McGee went there to hide from her. And in the movie Working Girl, two rest-room intrusions spice the plot. In the first, Melanie Griffith enters the men’s room with a phone message and ends up handing a fresh roll of Charmin to her boss. Later, in a hotel ladies room, Harrison Ford takes a leak, bursts from a stall and compliments the bride on the tastefulness of her wedding reception.

None of these scenes is either transgressive or scandalous. They’re funny, because they poke fun at an increasingly tenuous taboo. In many countries, men and women mingle close together in the WCs of restaurants, hotels, concert halls and department stores. The lavatory at Le Grand Colbert in Paris is especially cozy.

But no matter how close the quarters or mixed the crowd, protocol prevails. Once latched inside the stall, one’s privates remain inviolately confidential. The only way to determine whether the occupant is male or female, neither or both, is to invade the person’s privacy in a fashion that requires a finding of probable cause and a search warrant issued by a deranged and prurient judge.

I wonder if the transphobes of America would do this if they were allowed. Are they ready to draft those icky statutes and issue those warrants? I wonder who they’ll assign—certainly not themselves—to conduct the searches, yanking down pants and fumbling through undies in the hallway by the toilet door. Could they tell, for sure, which is girl, which is boy and which is somewhere in between? I wonder if they understand that the difference—and the confusion—between male and female doesn’t concentrate exclusively in one’s “privates.”

As Christine Jorgensen said, and personified, “There is no one hundred percent Adam or Eve.”