On pissing in public.

Being a trans person, something that always strikes a chord with me, is the idea of public restrooms. While they are convienient to most, trans people every day have the unfortunate delay of bathroom use. A few great documentaries exist as a training of sorts on the troubles trans people face in the bathrooms. Such as Toilet Training, a documentary put together by the Silvia Rivera Law Project.

Being many years into transition, the problem I face is not access to bathrooms, but the idea of standing to pee, or rather in my case, not standing to pee. More often than not I will walk into a bathroom, and not only are there no seat covers, which I am entirely a fan of, but I find that someone has pissed all over the seat, or hasn't flushed and its an entire mess, one which I should not have to deal with, and it leads me to thinking that most men believe that a.) no ones gonna know it was them and b.) theres an underlying assumption that all men stand to pee, and are only using the bathrooms for the sole purpose to pee. c.) These men have a serious sense of entitlement

Along with immediate annoyance that my trip to the bathroom has been given barriers, some questions come to mind, for instance; "how in the world to you not only miss your target, but manage to hit the barriers on all sides?", "Were you intently aiming for something other than the intended target?" and "Why could you not clean up your own mess or not notice that you have just inconvienenced the next toilet user?"

While there are devices that allow one to stand to pee such as this or this or this even! (the last of which is actually pretty brilliant and the most comfortable of all of those products) Most of the devices are a combination of uncomfortable to use, messy, not logical to just carry around in your pocket. How exactly do you explain just whipping it out of your backpack? And what if you don't even carry a back pack?! Which brings me back to my dilemma of, what do we do about poor bathroom etiquette at the cost of others who actually sit down to use public restrooms?

While I have no proposals, I needed to get it out there, that peeing in public can sometimes be a little too much of a stress factor and I really wish that people were more considerate of those using the restrooms that are not them. And how would they feel if they found themselves in a situation needing to use the bathroom sitting down?

Food for thought.