January 5, 2025
Sarah McBride, the first openly trans congresswoman, was recently sworn in. Before she even took office, her right to use the women’s bathroom in her workplace was threatened by another member of congress. In light of this, and many other impending threats to trans rights in the years to come, I want to share my unfiltered perspective on what it’s like to use the bathroom as a trans woman.
I’m not claiming this is how all trans people feel—it’s specifically my experience. And I’m well aware that the only reason this topic is even considered controversial is because it’s propped up by scapegoating and fabricated red herrings. I’m not writing to pile onto that conversation or keep fueling political distraction, but to let you know how scary it is to take a shit as a tgirl in 2025. Because I’m cursed to think about this shit all the damn time.
…
When I first started to medically transition, that is, to take estrogen, I knew it would be a long while before physical changes started to settle in. I’d come to terms with my own gender identity, but it was yet to match how I appeared to others externally. I could alter my wardrobe to be more feminine, but I never felt I looked quite right—I didn’t want to come across as a crossdresser (Often a self-identified man dressing as a woman). I’m not sure when I started using the women’s restroom, but at some point I knew I’d have to. Early transition is full of disconcerting gray-areas. When would I appear woman enough or trans enough to earn my place in the proper public toilet?
There’s unfounded hysteria around the possibility of trans women harming cis women in public bathrooms, but not only is that exceedingly rare (If not nonexistent!), the opposite threat is far more realistic (If not ever-present). From early on until now, almost three years in, I’ve worried about being judged for not being in the proper space—for making others feel uncomfortable, when quizzically I am the one who is overwhelmingly uncomfortable.
Before even entering the bathroom, I’m afraid someone will catch a glimpse of something manly about me, perhaps hear my voice, and try to direct me to the men’s. It just happened recently. I was dressed entirely fem, out somewhere with my boyfriend, and asked for the bathroom code. When I tried to input the code and it kept beeping incorrect, an employee blushed and gave the code to the women’s. I don’t blame them for making a subconscious assumption, but damn it hurts. Such an occurrence could be dangerous in a place less generally accepting than San Francisco. And this was a single-stall bathroom, where I wouldn’t even have to worry about others once inside.
When it comes to multi-stall facilities, I always feel like I’m intruding. I tell myself that people are there to do their private business and no one cares about me, but I still don’t want to be found out. Or if people have already decided I’m not cis, I want to set a good example for other trans women by staying completely in my lane and not inadvertently spooking anyone in any way. I don’t make eye contact. I try to shift my face away in the mirror and hide behind my hair. Sometimes I reapply lipstick to assure others that I didn’t walk into the wrong place. I never dare speak, and I never stay a second more than I have to.
Even in the supposed safety of a stall, I’m worried I’ll be discovered. Someone will spy dick through the gap between the door. My pee stream will sound unnatural, even though I’m sitting down. My feet will face the wrong direction for a split second too long. Any number of hyper-specific, subconsciously gendered actions could be misinterpreted and throw someone off. And even if I manage to follow all the scripts, like a dog can smell fear, I’ll be unmasked for simply feeling unwelcome, and that internal discomfort will be read and acted upon.
Then comes the what-ifs. It hasn’t happened yet, but I’ve heard stories. What happens if someone has a problem with me in the bathroom? Do I stand up for myself? Do I apologize for causing them to feel threatened? Play dumb? Quickly walk out?
There’s no avoiding any of this. I haven’t used the men’s bathroom for years, and I can’t imagine how awkward I’d feel in there if I was ever forced to use it. It simply would not be right. In more conservative states I’ve hesitated before choosing a bathroom at, say, a gas station. Maybe in the future there will be legal consequences for choosing a bathroom on federal property. My identification documents all say I’m a woman, so I’m legally acknowledged, but there’s policy up for adoption with language around “biological sex”, “birth sex”, etc. How far would someone go to dig up personal information about me or any other trans person that might fit their definitions of sex and gender? Could there be future genital inspections? What would happen if I got a pussy?
There’s far more to say about all this, and a lot that’s already been said. I’ll share some links for further reading below. Hope you learned something new, gained a bit of empathy, and/or this resonates in a way that makes you feel less alone. Stay safe out there, and go piss girl.
- The First Trans Member of Congress Expected Pushback Like Mace’s Bathroom Rule Philip Elliott, November 2024
- Speaker Johnson restricts use of Capitol bathrooms by transgender people Maegan Vazquez & Mariana Alfaro, November 2024
- Cis Woman Mistaken as Transgender Records Being Berated in Bathroom Christopher Wiggins, May 2023
- Transgender Butler County man says group beat him up over restroom use Amber Jayanth, July 2022
- For Trans Kids, Bathroom Choice Matters WebMD, June 2022
- Transgender People, Bathrooms, and Sexual Predators: What the Data Say Julia Serano, June 2021
- Debunking the Bathroom Bill Myth GLAAD, April 2017
- Have another good link? Send it!
December 30, 2024
Here’s a photo of me at Kalalau Beach. I was going to write about the hike, but instead ended up recapping past goals in honor of New Year’s Eve.
Fuck me, it’s been a while. A whole year, really. A busy year. That’s my excuse for not filling these pages for months. I need to stay busy, though. You can reasonably expect that if there are a good amount of subsequent posts here, I’ve had time to sit around and write them. Which is why we’re here now, at Vesuvio in North Beach, feeling self conscious in a corner booth with all my tech out, trying to think a post into existence. I’m too worried that other patrons think I’m a tech bro with my iPad and wireless keyboard and AirPods in to drown out the much-too-loud music in this otherwise cozy bar. Why do all bars need to play loud, shitty music? Music and lighting account for a large part of atmosphere, and few places in San Francisco seem to get it right.
I’d hoped to write something other than a mind dump, something of its own distinct category, but at the risk of not writing anything else at all this year, I’m doing another end-of-year recap. Unfortunately this site has become more of a voyeur’s magazine where one might wander into the mind of a stranger like me than the amalgam of more serious musings I’d hoped it would be. Guess it’s never too late to try and circumvent nihilism.
Why is this titled Kalalau? I hiked the Kalalau Trail earlier this year with my brother and a few of his friends and wanted to write about what it meant to me. It was a placeholder title for something I intended to write, and now I’m using it as a springboard for thinking back on the year. Wish I felt like getting into it with you, the hike, but I don’t. Maybe later. I pasted some old goals of mine in this draft a few lines down and I want to discuss them a bit.
These are near verbatim from a little black journal I keep in a cart near my desk at home. Every year, I try to come up with just three succinct bullet points to guide my thinking for the year ahead. And every year it gets more difficult as I trade faith in the future for the inevitable wisdom gained by going to bed each night and waking up each successive morning. Check the footnote—it’s hard to edit on an iPad and I think I’ll be too lazy later to better organize these thoughts.
Let’s get a little personal, shall we?
Goals 2018 and beyond…
- Be more authentic
- Write more, type less
- Read before adding
Starting back six years ago, here’s a snippet of what I wanted to improve upon. Let me try to guess what these meant back then.
Authenticity… this might not have anything to do with gender, but at t-minus four years until minus-t, maybe I didn’t feel myself and wanted to feel more myself but didn’t know quite how.
Writing more? I wanted to make more of an effort to write in ink vs keystrokes. A romantic thought. And I do still pen thoughts sometimes, but then it just takes more time to put them here. Not that everything has to end up here, but I like being vulnerable with you. We’re all so aloof nowadays, at least I think so, in some sense, in this post-digital era. I love reading into people’s minds, so it’s only fair I offer a portion of mine to you. Besides, when my skin suit expires and I can’t talk or type, maybe these electrons will be around to communicate for me.
Finally, “Read before adding”: It means I should burn through my read-it-later library before saving more articles.
Goals 2019 and beyond…
- Replace social media
- Focus on your book
- Become more flexible
Social media has fucked off from my life, thank god. I fucking hate privacy pirates. Instagram only occasionally, temporarily makes it back onto my phone when my brothers send a slew of reels and want to talk about them. And I guess I got Bluesky when someone who worked there sent me an invite and I was curious if someone could build a more user-friendly federated network than Mastodon.
Focus on my book? Hah… hahaha. Nice try, younger me. I had as little to say then as I do now. Everything’s already been written. I’ve tried and tried and tried, albeit not very well, to blast past the formative stages of novel writing, and I always give up. Someday maybe something will be worth writing about—just gotta keep living until it shows itself.
And flexibility… I definitely wasn’t doing yoga back then. Maybe I wanted to be less stuck in certain ways? Flexibility sounds like a cop-out goal. I have let myself get a bit stiff, though. Huh.
Goals 2020 and beyond…
- Post consistently
- See beauty in imperfection
- Take more time to breathe
Here I am posting! Consistently? Well, we’re not dead yet. More useless posts to come.
Beauty in imperfection… I sound like a monk. I think I might’ve gotten this thought after a friend in Kyiv showed me a wabi-sabi style vase with gilded cracks. It’s a good reminder in general, to invert dissatisfaction. I’ve started to like scratches on things.
More time to breathe? Again, good in theory, but god are these terrible goals. I got more creative in 2024 with the threesome idea—let’s keep more of those comin’.
Goals 2021 and beyond…
- Learn and apply something technical
- Try for 250 words per day in book
- Meditate for 1 minute daily
I’d have to think hard about something technical I learned and applied that year, but this has definitely been a focus of mine recently: Scuba, sailing, climbing, motorcycling… learning feels good, man.
More book shit, another failed attempt.
And the meditation bit is just an iteration of the previous year’s breathing goal. We get it, you’ve been a little removed from the present. I don’t think I’ll ever strike a balance between contentedness and thirst for what could be. I’m perpetually parched.
Goals 2022 and beyond…
- Daily self-compassion
- 30 minute weekly creative session
- Do a photoshoot
The compassion idea most likely arose from early days of therapy. I got a therapist in 2022 to help me figure out girl stuff. I can definitely be hard on myself. The idea of self-compassion feels simple and intuitive, but for me it’s not. I’m not sure I’ll ever fully figure it out.
The weekly creative session was yet another iteration of the book goal made even more abstract so that I might work in small bursts of inspiration and eventually create something, anything, of substance. Needless to say I did not follow through on this one.
What’s the photoshoot about? Would I be the one taking the photos or have photos taken of me? I’m guessing the latter, but the beginning of 2022 was still pre-transition, so I can’t imagine really fully feeling myself enough to want to document that particular corporeal state. Maybe I knew that I’d start altering my physicality soon and wanted to create a before for the impending after. I don’t recall if this was exactly the case, but I think I was prescribed and held onto my first batch of hormones for some time before gaining the confidence to actually pop one. Or I was waiting for some arbitrary but meaningful-to-me date and time.
Goals 2023 and beyond…
- Grow massive titties
- Be a hydration queen
- Run a fuckin’ marathon
The first one is pretty obvious. There are familial indicators as to your personal potential, but no one can ever be quite sure. Time and fat do the trick. Goal in progress.
Hydration… I wanted to be more moisturized inside and out. Still do. It’s a healthy way to be.
The marathon goal has been a bit aggravating. Sure I could work up to and run a marathon distance at any time, but I want to do a sanctioned race. The most notable one near me, the San Francisco Marathon, has evaded me for the past two years. The first year I’d lost my toenails climbing Mount Shasta and the second year I injured my ribcage slipping on the Kalalau. Entry deferred to 2025.
Goals 2024 and beyond…
- Get a girlie voice
- Have a threesome
- Discover a new place
We’ve arrived at this past year. My voice sounds like a dude still and I fucking hate it, but I’m too embarrassed and lazy to put in the work. There’s also some sense of pride in being a hot girl with a deep voice—the deliberate diversion from an impossible path toward maximum femme. I have a similar rebellious attitude towards keeping my dick.
The threesome, ah yes. There has been more than one. I’m a fan.
And as for new places, there have been many: Taipei, Tokyo, Kyoto, Lima, Medellín, Mexico City, not to mention countless spots within the states. I’m a really lucky girl.
…
Where does this leave us going forward? I’ll be honest—I had a rough holiday break. Some inexplicable sense of dread set in and cast a shadow over days reserved for rejuvenation. I’m not sure I need rejuvenation right now. I need inspiration, a real goal, and a team of people to accomplish it with. Community, challenge, learning, growth. I often tell my friends, but more oft lovers who already understand this of me, that I feel an intense energy within and simply don’t know where to direct it. I’m seething with desire to desire. I desperately want to care. And that’s all these yearly goals have ever been—an attempt to assign something to give a fuck about.
Maybe this is the year to stop with the bullets and just see where life takes me. Not that I ever heeded them too closely. 2025 is a good number—a quarter century. And I’ll be thirty next year. I think at this point in life I have a pretty good idea of how things work in general. I’m damn lucky and happy overall. Writing this piece has sure lightened my spirits after days of endless spiraling. If you’re also experiencing a moment of dismay, maybe this is your call to do something expressive. It doesn’t have to be perfect.
I wanted to share what I’ve accomplished this year like I did last year around this time, but the prospect of that is overwhelming right now. It’s my second day typing this out and I’m at a brewery with Maciej in Sebastopol.
The looming political situation has been a festering concern, considering my identity and Katya’s nationality. I think we’ll be okay, or more okay than others. But I’m worried, as many are, about the others. A lot is outside of our control. I think what I can do, at least, is to continue to share my perspective, because shared perspective invites empathy.
These are loose thoughts for now. My thoughts never feel tightened up, which is neither welcome nor unwelcome. It’s just how they are. I’m not sure if that makes me a bad writer, a lazy writer, or just a person trying their best and moving on with the day. I at least hope there are some word truffles in here for you, and that you’ve been able to sniff them out among the dirt.
July 21, 2024
This post is NSFW.
AI TLDR: I’m planning to create a sequel to Fucking Trans Women in the form of a zine. I’m looking for contributors who want to share stories, art, photos, or any other creative content related to this theme. It’s an open project with no strict rules or deadlines. If you’re interested in participating, email me with FTW in the subject line. Let’s make this happen!
Hey, it’s been a while. I’m gonna get to the point. I had a busy first half of the year and now I have nothing on the calendar and a backlog of creative ideas and big loads of energy.
I had on my 2024 goals list to make another xxx film with friends, but for whatever reason it hasn’t come together. I recently met someone with printing chops and access to publishing machines and materials. Lightbulb! Let’s make a naughty zine.
Fucking Trans Women II. The sequel. Remastered. Less muffing and more… huffing pheromones? I dunno. I’m not going to pretend I know much about the original. I just know it’s over a decade old and I wanna make something new and spicy with friends.
What are the rules? Fuck if I know. Making this up as I go along. It could be an open call. Or more intimate like friends and friends of friends who could contribute. Will it be an anthology? It’ll definitely have loads of art. I want to render photographs into anonymized risograph splendor.
Perspectives are paramount, but — and I wrestled with this — I want it to be trans women focused. Or at least keep that part true to the original. I want to write / curate what I know, and that’s fucking as a trans woman. People should pick it up and know what they’re getting into. Or maybe they shouldn’t. Because that’s kinda the whole point… most people who pick me up don’t know what they’re about to get into. Which is probably the case with most people, except cis het relationships tend to follow well read social scripts.
The publisher designer machinist artist friend asked me if the content of FTWII would be prescriptive like the first — a literal manual for how to bust your favorite tgirl. I think that would be fun, at least for some of the material. I have a draft in my notes app I share [mostly with men] detailing how to fuck me. And not a single utterance of the inguinal canal.
Where you come in:
If you’re reading this in July or August of 2024, I probably sent you the link because I want you to get involved! If you’re reading this much later, I hope we actually got the zine published in some capacity.
Much like my film project last fall, I want you to contribute however you’d like. What are you good at and interested in? If you’re a trans girl who likes to fuck or a person who likes to fuck trans girls or anyone with a related sorta story, fact or fiction, I want it in whatever form. Not a good writer? Record yourself. I’ll type that shit up. Wanna take sexy or non-sexy photos of your estrogenated body? Multiple bodies? In, on, or around each other? Your lady bits? Your bedroom? Grindr screenshots? Share away!
I’m not sure who’ll end up sharing and what all will be shared. Maybe nothing. A minuscule amount. Or maybe a lot. But there definitely couldn’t be too much. Oh no. Let’s bust the zine machine.
If you wanna work on something together, lemme know. Let’s have coffee or beer or water or whiskey and talk about our orgasms. Girly things. I don’t have a deadline for this. No rush. I just wanna make it happen because too often ideas sit in the queue. And this one sounds pretty simple. It doesn’t even need to be pretty. It just needs to be.
Want to reiterate I’m not trying to leave anyone out this round. But as the curator of the project, I can imagine a good amount of editing will be necessary and not every bit will make it in. Maybe we’ll have a raw-dog edition without edits and a dolled-up edition with choice chops. Who knows. I just had to write some sort of brief so when I tell people about this idea, they have a cohesive sense of what I’m trying to accomplish. Fuck, sorry, I know this is long. My excuse is if you’re really interested, you’ll have some time to sift through this text. Maybe I’ll get AI to generate a TLDR for ya. Wanted to get this typed up first so I could get the word out. I don’t want to make submissions complicated. You can email me with FTW in the subject line and we’ll be in touch. Yeah, that sounds good. I’ll connect with contributors on an individual basis. And when there’s enough material in the works, we’ll see what we need to do to compile it
and make sure everyone’s satisfied with how it’s laid out. That’s a way’s away though.
First, go fuck and make stories.
NSFW
April Littrell