"Need to use the lav? I'll have to see your papers, ma'am."

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Good morning, noon, and night, readership. My name is Phil, the new fellow bringing some B and the T to this QUILTBAG blog. This is my first post, and I’ve been agonizing over what to write for quite a while. After a bit of research (read: poking around Reddit) I decided to write about something very near and dear to my heart and my urinary tract: bathroom usage.

By now most, if not all, of you have heard about the recent bathroom scandal at the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

If you haven’t, here’s the lowdown. From an article in the Pittsburgh City Paper, “On March 20, a university official informed Pitt's Anti-Discriminatory Policies Committee that transgender students and faculty must use bathroom facilities that match the gender on their birth certificate rather than the gender with which they identify.” This means that a person has to use the bathroom that their birth certificate says they belong in, regardless of how they identify. So any transwoman wanting to use the ladies’ room is outta luck unless she can present a valid birth certificate proving that she is indeed a lady in the eyes of the government, and vice versa for a transman.

Most states in the Union require proof of Sexual Reassignment Surgery (SRS) in order to change your legal sex on your birth certificate, and Pennsylvania is no exception. Now, SRS can be wildly expensive, and a fair share of insurance companies won’t cover anything related to transition. This means paying a huge amount of money out of your pocket, and for what? Using a public bathroom at a college? Now this may just be me, but I think that’s slightly on the other side of silly.

Every person going through a transition has their own reason either to go through SRS or to opt out. Some people feel that they need to get the full on package to complete their transition, and some people don’t see it as so much of a big thing. Personally, I’m opting out of getting SRS in the future simply because I really don’t have that much of a problem with my basement-level bits. This means I’ll probably never get my legal sex changed, and personally I’m just fine with that. Of course, if I ever attend the University of Pittsburgh for a lecture on the proper use of symmetrical rows in matrices depicting 21st century music, I’d have to use the restroom depicted on my birth certificate. Cause I’m sure a burly swaggering Old Spice-smelling Southern boy’ll go over real well in the women’s bathroom.

The short of the long here is that it’s utterly insane to ask a transgender person to go into a bathroom that they’re not comfortable with. Public restrooms can be the utter bane of a transgender person’s life, and creating a silly rule that college students and faculty have to go into the bathroom that matches with their legal status is the opposite of progress. If you’re interested in signing a petition to get Pitt to revoke this rule, one can be found here.