there's a man or a woman in the men's or women's room

People are having vision problems in San Francisco International Airport. For example: I need to swap contact lenses for glasses for the long flight to Beijing. I’m standing outside the restrooms debating which to enter. I’m hesitating. I choose the door on the right, marked with the placard without the triangle-shaped skirt. If the icon isn’t clear enough – which it isn’t, because my silhouette looks like neither it nor the one on the other door – the word underneath assures me that I am properly self-selecting into the club of MEN.

Sometimes you see what you perceive to be a tree – a long trunk and leaves on top – and you get close and you realize you’ve been looking at a skinny person with a bushy hairdo. Then you say to your brain, “Brian, that wasn’t a tree at all! How could you!” With the same myopic little eyes and the same pattern-recognizing little brains we associate short hair, dun clothes, and a boxy build with the bathroom placard without the triangle-shaped skirt.

Today I’m wearing shapeless brown canvas pants, a heavy hiking boots, a thick leather belt (with a flathead and a Phillips head screwdriver built into the buckle), a shapeless black t-shirt, a shapeless black softshell hoodie, a unisex Timex, a chest-flattening sports bra, and fuschia panties with teal trim. Glasses, black travel bag, red day pack. Big hands, callouses, muscles. Broad shoulders, slim hips. Nearly 5’7” in boots. Caffeine deprivation headache. My hair is short and unstyled. I stand with my weight evenly distributed to both feet, which I keep more than shoulder width apart. I sit with my knees spread. I cross my arms across my chest and nod without smiling when acknowledging people. All of this is not an affect but actually who I am in my normal life, but even if I’m behaving as I usually do, it feels like a performance because the space is not one I normally inhabit. I feel self-conscious. It’s the international terminal, with Chinese and German travelers on CA986 to Beijing  or UA1452 to Frankfurt . They fail to queue and they breathe down my neck – the travelers begin to take on the culture of the destination country even before we’ve left the ground. The security line is filled with couples discreetly exchanging saliva-based intimacy communications, men with short hair and women with long hair, men in pleated khakis and women in scoop-necked shirts in cheerful colors, and me. I think I read as a young, beardless man. Am I equally disempowered when perceived as a thirty-one year old masculine Chinese woman or as an eighteen year old Chinese boy? Did you cut in line in front of me because (1) you see me as a weaker, younger man, (2) you are taller than me and simply didn’t see me, or (3) because you are Chinese and constitutionally incapable of waiting your turn? Are you staring because you’re scrutinizing my gender, because my fly is unzipped, because I am so attractive you can’t stop looking – or is that just the information-gathering glance you’d give to anyone who crosses your path? If you had to choose one or the other, do I seem more like a wet noodle or a kettlebell? A heavy summer rain or a crisp autumn afternoon? A one or a zero? Such are the preoccupations of your neurotic performance artist.

Yesterday, a man in a hotel lobby in San Francisco addressed me as “Sir – ma’am – sir.”  I haven’t gotten that one before, the double switch! Usually it’s “Sir – sorry – ma’am” or “Sir – uh . . . .”  How confusing I must have been for the poor attendant! My profuse apologies to all those who prefer decisive gods and cities laid out on gridlines – masculine women must feel so disorderly! Like litter, or dogs with human names.  I smiled and said, “Don’t worry, I’m aiming for the middle.” Then he was speechless, so I said, “Which way to the Horizons event?”

Other responses I’ve developed are include, “It’s okay, I’m not sure which one myself!” and “Whatever you’d like, honey!” Which is a different place than where I was ten years ago, when my hair was also short and my clothes were even more masculine and my face was even younger. I used to get so frustrated when people failed to read my sex properly. I don’t think I understood that I was inviting the confusion with my gender presentation. I didn’t have the social skills to turn another person’s discomfort with my gender into curiosity and a conversation that both of us would want to have. I just used to be so pissed off all the time. So many conversations that went: “Sir, can I help you?” “Ma’am.” “Oh, sorry.” It was experimenting with femininity in Chicago – into which I flew knowing nobody and therefore feeling empowered to remake myself via subjectively meaningful but objectively trivial transformations such as (1) non-secondhand clothing, (2) slightly tighter pants, (3) slightly longer hair, (4) slightly looser collars on (5) slightly more colorful shirts, and (6) thinking of learned helplessness not as a form of high-voiced idiocy but as a tool with which to manipulate men socialized to respond to weakness with courtliness, assistance, and a slight flooding of blood to the pudendum – that taught me to be more serene about my gender presentation. Because people are so myopic. Because it is so easy to signal femininity. Because it is my choice to confuse people about what’s happening under the fuschia and teal panties. I could end the sir-ma’am-sir conversations with a big pink bow in my long, flowing hair. I could dress as Miss Piggy! But I am more Barnaby the scrivener than I am Miss Piggy, and I would prefer not to. Once I learned that I could perform femininity, I no longer felt tormented when people read my performance of masculinity as male.

All to say I feel better now. I can laugh about it. I can invite that perplexed hotel attendant to laugh with me about it. One thing I’m learning as I get older is that I can control how other people react to me. When you open a speech saying, “Please excuse my lack of preparation; I’m so nervous,” your audience will receive you as an unprepared incompetent. When you declare what you want, you’re likely to get it. So if I’m cagey and antagonistic about my gender, I’m going to get that in return. If I don’t take my gender too seriously, and I invite you to do the same, you’ll be more likely to respond with curiosity than with pitchforks. This is the theory, at least. Let’s see how far into China this serenity will travel.  

(It’s a little different in China because I don’t think I’ll be able to have the nuanced conversations that I want to have about gender. Hard to talk about gender performativity when my conversation is at about the level of sophistication that permits me to say “Me am woman!!” and not much more.)

Post script. The men’s room was a non-event. I strode into the handicapped stall. I tried not to hesitate because it looks really weird when people are indecisive about going to the bathroom. In the stall, I peed as I usually do, sniffing then lifting one leg against the wall and spraying – just kidding! I hovered. Then I switched from a boob-enhancing underwire bra to a sports bra. I have a chest binder that reduces my tits to a nice, mesomorphic set of pecs, which I will wear when I’m not on 13-hour flights. Then I washed my hands, changed from contacts to glasses, and strode out. I don’t know if anyone gave me a second glance, because I wasn’t looking around to see them looking at me. And that was that.

I just ate an airplane meal of beef with rice that was primarily composed of tendons and anuses. I feel sick, so I am going to take myself to the unisex toilet now and ralph in the most ladylike manner possible.

P.P.S.: An older woman addressed me as 小伙子 as she asked me to help her bring her luggage out of the overhead bin. 小伙子 is Northern slang. It's an affectionate way to address a young, healthy boy or man, kind of like "champ" or "buddy" in English. Like, "Hey champ, can you help me get this bag out of the bin?" I said, "Of course!" I was so pleased.