Bathroom Reading
My Quest to Stay Dehydrated
I’m writing this on a plane from Houston to Los Angeles, my connection on my way home from a short trip to New Orleans for a conference of reality TV producers and aspirants. Five minutes ago, the captain turned off the seatbelt sign, and I rushed to be the first to the lavatory. I’ve had to pee since my New Orleans to Houston flight landed. George Bush Intercontinental Airport never feels safe, really, definitely not the women’s restroom, and even using the single-stall family restrooms feels dicey when surrounded by so many men who accessorize in gun rights t-shirts, American flag patches, and toting their laptops in military-style backpacks.
If I really, really had to go - I would. But as soon as my connection switched from San Francisco to Houston, I stopped drinking anyway. No one would probably ever notice me slipping off to the all-gender bathroom, and even if they did, they’d probably leave me alone. But, it always feels dicey, so as soon as I noticed myself thinking about it, I resolved to wait for the plane.
Since transitioning, I have come to love airplane bathrooms in all their small, smelly, filthy, pissed-sprayed glory. I rarely look amazing when I travel, and I’m usually faced with a grab bag of “sir,” “ma’am,” and awkward avoidance of gendering me. Sometimes it’s “sir” when I approach, then “ma’am” when I speak, or “sir” when I approach, then “I’m sorry, ma’am” when I present my ID. Sometimes it’s all “ma’am” the entire trip. As a result, I have no idea how I read to strangers. But in the tiny, dark bathrooms at the back of our cabins, all of us, men, women, and others, are equal.
I’ve spent a lot of the last two weeks obsessing over Utah’s HB257 - a bathroom ban that, as initially drafted, would have meant a six-month sentence for trans adults using a bathroom other than the one matching the gender on their birth certificate. These bans are part of Project 2025, the Republican master plan for bringing American public life in line with the opinions of your least fun uncle.
So far, bathroom bans generally make some noise, get modified, and ultimately just make life worse for trans kids in red states. But despite the fact that anti-trans legislation fails to excite more than the most extreme base of the MAGA wing of the Republican Party, it keeps coming back, again and again. It leaves those of us with oddly gendered bodies in a persistent state of anxiety over tending to our basic needs.
If you are interested in the politics of all of this, trans journalist Erin Reed covers anti-trans legislation in her very necessary, very terrifying Substack. Chase Strangio, trans rights attorney for the ACLU is also a vital source of information about which politicians are conspiring to eradicate people like me from public life and what steps they’ve taken. (Project 2025 calls for all trans people to be incarcerated as sex offenders, an echo of the Third Reich’s attack on Magnus Hirschfeld’s clinic as a vibe check for how down the average German was for some hardcore cruelty.)
I’m not a journalist, attorney, or historian so I can really only tell this story through my personal lens, as a late-blooming trans filmmaker who would very much like to return to the Sundance Film Festival and as someone who is very neurotic about bathrooms and jail.
Nobody wants to go to jail. Issues of class, race and intergenerational trauma make some people more likely to end up there. Nobody was less likely, statistically speaking, than me as a child: a white boy in Texas from a middle-class family of white-collar professionals and no incarceration in his recent family history.
Despite all of this, I was sure I would end up in jail. I knew it in my bones. My scout troop visited our local police station and we took turns being locked up in a general holding cell, and the drunk tank. I remember sizing up the cell and feeling a terrifying sense of foreshadowing. How much time will I spend here? Ten-year-old me wondered. What will I do wrong?
I was, and am, a person who followed the rules. I was so grateful for D.A.R.E. and the chance to directly meet a cop and receive a full briefing on how to avoid my inevitable fate. But he had to be leaving something out.
Avoiding drugs, alcohol, and gangs was easy in a world of suburban evangelicals. That didn’t erase a deep feeling I had that there was a wrongness about me that would someday be revealed. Would I kill someone? That seemed extremely unlikely. I’d heard about “white collar crime” but didn’t know what it was, so that was at least a theoretical possibility. Maybe I would end up stealing something? I tried to avoid that too, aside from being peer pressured into shoplifting at the mall. When friends got caught, they didn’t go to jail. It had to be something worse. A felony.
The feeling of incarceration-worthy wrongness persisted. Every time I learned a scary new detail of life on the inside I would become more certain that this is what awaited me, around some twist-of-fate corner from Greek mythology.
It was only when I realized that I’m trans that the feeling went away. I understood why I felt so wrong and bad, and could finally name the guilty, shameful thing I’d been carrying. As someone who had grown up in homophobia fueled by the AIDS epidemic and transphobia across all media, from daytime talk shows to “dead tranny hooker” jokes, being trans felt wrong to the point of criminality.
Therapy, EMDR, and Ayahuasca helped me release my internalized transphobia and, for a little while, my feeling that there was something inherent to my nature that I’d be locked up for. It was a welcome relief.
Jail looms large as one half of this particular cluster of my neurosis. The other is bathrooms. I’ve always been pathologically private about my bodily functions. Writing the words “I poop” or “I pee” makes my face flush, my shoulders stiffen, my throat tighten. I once attended “college for kids” at Southern Methodist University and lived in the dorms for over a week holding it in while my guts twisted in painful spasms, through classes, sports, and making out with a cute blonde girl with acne and braces. Later, when I went to the east coast for actual college, I strained to hold my farts because I didn’t know if you could see them in the air the way you could see hot breath in the wintertime.
My recurring stress dream in the vein of “I’m back in high school with a test I didn’t study for” is that I’m participating in a meeting on a toilet. Everyone’s in the bathroom with me, just outside of the stall: my colleagues, my boss, my peers. There’s no toilet paper. I’m being asked questions I don’t know the answer to and worse than that, everyone is in the bathroom with me. They know I poop. They know I have a body. I am exposed as the actual human being I am and there is no way to escape.
So while anti-trans laws upset me for all kinds of rational reasons, they also push two of my most specific personal buttons and send me into a spiral. And when I am spiraling, my coping mechanism is trolling.
HB257 was introduced in Utah the same day that the Sundance Film Festival launched. I wasn’t at Sundance (and may never be invited back, keep reading), but I was so happy to see so many trans and gender nonconforming filmmakers on their social media feeds. Theda Hammel was there with her first feature Stress Positions, River Gallo with their first feature Ponyboi, Jane Schoenbrun with their third feature I Saw the TV Glow, Jules Rosskam was there with his award-winning documentary Desire Lines. Will Ferrell was there with his best friend Harper Steele and their documentary Will & Harper. Whether they were people I had collaborated with, admired, rooted for, or was learning about, it felt undescribably good to see so many people like me being celebrated for the thing I most love doing in a place I dream of being. Anyone who has grown up without visible role models understands how powerful this kind of display of possibility is.
And I thought: Wow, there are so many trans luminaries at Sundance! What perfect timing! I bet the festival is going to show the world what it looks like when powerful institutions stand up for extremely small marginalized communities!
But they didn’t.
It broke my heart. So much of trans life is watching laws, half-baked op-eds, hack comedy, arbitrary sporting regulations, podcasters and pundits shrink the space we’re allowed to occupy, chip away at our respectability, and make our lives harder. We look to our friends and allies, knowing that we’re 1% of the world and we need numbers to protect us. And they kind of sigh a “the trannies are complaining again” kind of sigh and put their energy into the million other crises of this world on fire. We are the theys who cry wolf. We are boring and repetitive. But in the trans version of the fable, there are always wolves.
I put my tiny-fist-shaking frustration into a series of memes on Instagram, which I’m sure most people who read my substack saw. If you missed them, here they are:
When I started, I was certain that Sundance would respond. I thought they were just busy with being the center of the entertainment universe for the weekend, but with a little nudging, they’d use some of their power to stand up for the filmmakers they were celebrating.
But opening weekend came and went, and it became increasingly apparent that this wasn’t an issue that Sundance was going to use their power to address. The trannies are complaining again.
I was interviewed by Laura Bradley as part of her reporting on the issue for The Daily Beast. She did a great job explaining the dangers of HB257 and Sundance’s all-filmmakers-matter non-statement on the issue. You can read the article here. In it, I am polished and professional, and do not mention that I, too, pee and poop. But here, we are friends, and I am real with you.
Thousands of people saw my memes. Mae Martin posted the classy, level-headed one. I felt cool and rebellious, speaking truth to power. It was like a higher-stakes version of my interactions with Instagram scammers, with more chances to use my Adobe Creative Suite license.
Despite my meme-making skills, HB257 has been signed into law. Trans kids in Utah are fucked, but I can still use the bathroom if Sundance ever sees fit to overlook my trolling and accept a project of mine to the festival or labs. But, it’s only January, and there is still a long year ahead and time for Utah’s legislature to draft a new bathroom ban, knowing that a $160,000,000 stakeholder in Utah’s economy won’t stand up for trans people.
Before the reality show convention started, my friend Jeff Pope took me and a friend on a tour of New Orleans. He’s an actor and has been living in New Orleans for years. He’s also a true they-don’t-make-them-like-that anymore character, artist, musician, life-liver and good hang. He took us in search of the post-Katrina “Brad Pitt houses,” showed us where Lee Harvey Oswald lived when he lived in New Orleans, walked us around the “hipster” neighborhoods, and drove us through all the historic neighborhoods, parks and destinations of the city. It’s a special kind of generosity to give a day of your time to showing a friend around your city, and a talent to do it with a point of view. It was a gift.
After the tour, we went back to Jeff’s house where we caught up with his lovely wife Anna, and Jeff rolled some joints which we passed while we chatted and caught up on life.
Because I’m insufferable, I brought up HB257. Because Jeff and Anna are kind, curious people, they asked how I approach bathrooms in unfamiliar and/or unsafe territory. The answers were obvious to me: carry a plastic urinal in the car on long road trips, look for small Starbucks franchises and porta-potties, pop a squat, find a hotel room, do not stay hydrated and learn to hold it for hours.
Anna said she’d never thought about these things before. Jeff said I should make a film about this because people don’t know. I’m sure there’s a funny trans person has to pee comedy idea out there somewhere, but the best I can do right now is a Substack.
When I go in for electrolysis and they see my dry skin, when I go to my primary care doctor and they draw my thick, viscous blood, when I go to my dentist and they see my parched tongue in my mouth they all tell me “Jude, you really need to drink more water.” For my health, I absolutely do. But for my safety, I aspire to be a sandbag with a skeleton.
I know too many cis women who have hard-earned reasons to fear men. I hate that there’s anything about me that reminds them of those things. I wish I could stand a few inches shorter, that my shoulders were a few inches narrower, my ribcage smaller around, my features more delicate. In five years of surgery, I’ve done what I can do to carve away maleness to project my inner truth to the outer world. I am imperfectly feminine, but I am not a threat.
When we look for the things that make us different from each other, we find them. I’ve never menstruated. I’ve never been able to get pregnant. I’ve gotten to skip hundreds of the shitty rites of passage that go with being raised as a woman in a patriarchal world. But most cis women I know would be disappointed to be defined by those aspects of their experience.
I transitioned in my forties, so when I pass as a woman, I pass as a middle-aged woman, which effectively renders me invisible in most circumstances.
But, in the French Quarter, drunk conventioneers saw me. Men in their 50s and 60s smiled too creepily and stared too long. They felt free in a place where my Uber driver told me, “Anything you want, you can get it there… if you know where to look.”
Some had the vibe of vanilla men hoping to get into some trouble with a tattooed weirdo before returning to midwestern middle-management drudgery. I feared them because of what it might mean for them to realize what kind of woman I am. Others had the look of adventure-seekers who knew what kind of woman I am, and were excited at my potential for sexual novelty. I feared them because they didn’t see me as a person.
When we look for the things that make our experiences similar, we find them. Trans women, like cis women, know something about what it’s like to attempt to avoid the hazards of the male ego while we look for somewhere safe to pee.