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175 13 The Politics of the Stall Transgender and Genderqueer Workers Negotiating “the Bathroom Question” Catherine Connell On the promotional poster for the 2005 film Transamerica, a transwoman stands frozen between two bathroom doors. The symbol for Women and the outline of a stick figure in a dress marks one door. The corresponding Men symbol and a stick figure in pants marks the other. The poster is representative of the major theme of the film, which is one transwoman’s journey (literal and figurative) from man to woman. The film itself does not address the question raised by the promotional poster—which bathroom a transperson should and could use—yet this is a significant concern for transmen, transwomen, and genderqueers alike.1 “The bathroom question,” as it is often referred to by transpeople, is one with symbolic and material consequences. For some trans- and gender-nonconforming people, choice of bathroom is fraught with anxiety, ambivalence, and anticipated harassment. Though bathrooms are typically naturalized as apolitical spaces of bodily necessity , the lived experience of transgender workers suggests otherwise. The experiences of transgender workers show that workplace bathrooms, in particular, are sites of symbolic power and privilege. How a workplace answers “the bathroom question” for transgender and genderqueer workers affects these workers’ senses of authenticity in their chosen gender, feelings of community and acceptance, and perceptions of the success of workplace integration. In this chapter I ask, How do workplaces respond to “the bathroom question”? Further, how do transpeople respond to, negotiate, and resist these policies? I explore these negotiations and assert that they reveal an often-unexplored dimension of workplace inequality. Specifically, I argue that the spatial organization of bathrooms contributes to the gendered organization of work (Acker 1990) in a manner that perpetuates gender and sexuality privilege. As such, it is important that feminist sociological research explore the mechanisms of this spatial system of privilege and its implications for the possibilities of gender equality at work. Bathrooms, I argue, are an unexpected but important site of intervention that workplaces must address to further gender equality on the job. 176 Embodied Resistance Previous Studies Even though the socializing power of bathrooms is rarely recognized in contemporary sociological literature, bathrooms have played pivotal roles in some of the groundbreaking research in gender and sexuality. For example, Laud Humphreys’s (1970) research on the “tearoom trade” dramatically changed the way sociologists conceive of the relationship between sexual identity and behavior. Humphreys found that men used public bathrooms as a site of anonymous same-sex sexual encounters—including many men publicly identified as straight. This research challenged the assumed relationship between sexual identity and sexual behavior, using bathrooms as an unlikely but significant site of empirical investigation. Erving Goffman (1963), who is credited with establishing performative sociological theories of gender that dominate the sociology of gender today, also considered bathrooms in his work, identifying them as a significant component of the system of folk beliefs that maintain the belief in the naturalness and inevitability of gender (1977). Judith Lorber (1993) also pinpointed bathrooms as a piece of the institutional gender system that upholds the (false) binary between men and women. The role that bathrooms play in these foundational texts begs a closer look at the gendered spatial organization of bathrooms. Theoretical claims about trans- and gender-nonconforming people have suggested that they hold the potential to upset the taken-for-granted quality of the gender binary . Judith Butler (1990) was among the first to consider the transgressive possibilities of cross-gender performance. In her analysis of drag, Butler asserts that, “in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency” (137). In her more recent work, Butler (2004) extends this claim to include transpeople, who, by openly transitioning from one gender to another, similarly challenge the belief that gender and sex are inevitably connected. Similarly, theorists such as Kate Bornstein (1995) and Sandy Stone (1991) have argued that transgender experiences are key to dismantling the binary gender system that upholds gendered inequalities. Recent research on transgender individuals offers some empirical support for these claims that transpeople have the potential to challenge naturalized gender arrangements . For example, Kristin Schilt’s (2006) analysis of transmen at work finds that as “gender outsiders–within,” they have unique insights into the structural advantages that accrue to men. Elsewhere, I have argued that transmen and transwomen attempt to subvert the gender binary in their workplace interactions and develop a feminist consciousness through...

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