auto-pilot gender-bender

Breaking old habits = very hard to do. Not just psychological bad habits, but the physical kind where your body does things without your brain acknowledging it, a situation we call auto-pilot at my place. Hubby will often go on auto-pilot while driving, suddenly veering off course to go to work when really we need to stop at the gas-station or the grocery store.

I don't know who designed the new first floor bathrooms in my building, but they underestimated the auto-pilot abilities of the long-term employees here. If they realized how difficult it is to break your body's natural path to the washroom when your brain is concentrated on the bladder, they might not have switched the position of the boys & girls bathroom.


It is a wee bit more complicated then that, of course. The old design was a female washroom and custodian closet along one hallway and then around the corner a short distance away, a male washroom. I suppose it makes more sense to have the two washrooms next to each other and the custodian closet around the corner. Fair enough. But the new design didn't just swap the custodian closet for a male washroom and left the female washroom intact oh noo...the old female washroom is now the new male washroom, while the custodian closet has been transformed into an expansive female washroom. 'Cause we need room to move in our skirts, yo.

Once every few days I catch myself plowing the first door open to the men's washroom. There are two doors, which allows me a space for my brain to catch my body in action and back the fuck up. I don't particularly care, and have lived in a shared on-campus residence where washrooms were unisex. It suited me just fine. But I expect walking into the men's washroom to face an older colleague would be weird for them.

And this whole thing reminded me of an ad campaign I saw recently for a NSFW website called xdress. The sticker option made me giggle:



My course of action is obvious. Bend gender norms and question the status quo.