From Both Sides

 Fairly recently I wrote yet another rest room post. This time though I sought out experiences from Transgender men. I often wondered if trans men felt the same anxiety as many transgender women when using the restroom which fits their authentic self. From several comments on my Medium writers format I found out they did. 

Here is the first comment from Jamison :

"I started at a new school, I'm a teacher, this past fall. Only 3 people knew I was a trans man. No one knew any different. In fact, there was this one teacher that was on my college softball team. Even with my same, rarely seen last name, had no clue I was AFAB!

Photo from Unsplash 

The first time I used a public restroom. I was terrified. I was so sure I was going to get clocked, because I had read where urinating sitting down from a vagina sounds different hitting the water than from a penis. Therefore, I would only pee when someone either flushed or washed their hands. When I would walk into the RR, I would take a quick look around to find the stalls. Once they were located, my line of sight went back down to about 6 foot in front of me while I made my way to the toilet. One of my worst fears was the possibility of my packer falling onto the floor. It actually happened once, at an airport. Luckily, the stalls next to me were empty!!"

And all this time I thought I was the only one paranoid about how my urine hit the water when I peed! Thanks for the comment. The second comes from Norm:

"On the whole, I would say that the transgender male experience is far less socially difficult than I thought (although my self-esteem loves to remind me otherwise), though I am also autistic and may not be picking up on negative nonverbal signals about how I move through the world. I don't perceive (so far) much change in how I am treated at work (I am a software engineer who came out and stayed at the same company), but I would be very interested in how I would be perceived as a stealth man elsewhere, should my career ever take me elsewhere. I theorize that right now, since most coworkers knew me as female for almost a year (and likewise know me as openly autistic, which opens the ableism can of worms), they just don't subconsciously read me as a 'real' man and hence don't subconsciously treat me like one."

Again, thanks to both of you for bringing another aspect of what should be a very simple aspect of our lives (the rest room) into focus.