The Real Bathroom Menace
On my list of times to worry about my child, this is low.
It doesn’t happen all the time, but there are enough occurrences of my daughter being mistaken for a boy that neither of us are really surprised when it happens. She keeps her hair short, wears baggy pants and hoodies almost every day and has a face that’s pretty much been a duplicate of my own since the day she was born. When waiters call her buddy or hostesses ask us “fellas” to follow her it usually goes ignored. If it doesn’t bother her then there is no reason for it to bother me.
Recently, however, a situation came up that bothered me a lot more than it did her. I didn’t hear about it until a passing comment a week or so later but apparently an older women, believing her to be a young male, gave her a really hard time about being in the women’s restroom.
Setting aside for a moment the particular battle in today’s culture wars about who should be entitled to use which restroom, I have a hard time understanding what exactly this old lady was afraid was going to happen. Did she really think that a horny young boy had intentionally snuck in there to try and get a look at some saggy…
