If "and horrors, they could get a UTI!" is where you clue into that, ur doing it wrong.

By "you" do you mean me? I'm confused. And possibly offended, but I don't know who you're talking about.

their friends or family will probably notice and ask and then people can share about the challenge that way.

It's not my statement, and I can do anything I want, but that's what I'd prioritise. However, if I did it, a month would go by, and unless I started talking to people about my bathroom habits, no one would be any the wiser, and profile wouldn't have been raised one whit.

Is that the point? That I should be talking to people about when I need to use the restroom? That I'm privileged because I don't? That this is a taste of what it means to be trans, to have to have it be something that's discussed in public?

Maybe that's it. Maybe it's just me being smug because I thought about it already, but in my head, I angle for accessible, shareable statements, not internal ones that ask for a commitment that mean I'm already on board.

So it could be that simple, that I think of my aunt sniping in the women's restroom "Well, you look like a monkey and they let you use it!" when someone expressed discomfort at my butch cousin (now FTM) using it too.

I already know which public venues I frequent don't have gender-neutral change and rest rooms. I'm already disturbed by it. I'd just have to be way more disturbed to consider not using them for a month. And the month wouldn't make me more disturbed, or more, well, anything.

However, it's being discussed here now, so even if no one takes it on, that's one more discussion than before they suggested it.

Completely unrelatedly, I am in the office, and there's a note saying "I figured you may need this one day, so I printed it out for you. Happy Hunting--P" attached to a picture of this. Which is so damned nice.

every month, her computer will ask her if she wants to back "That Ass" up.

If that's as rarely as she's backing that thang up, she's doing it way wrong.

How often should one back that thang up?

Ooh, that reminds me, I need to resolve the space issues on my backup drive. Turns out you can't just keep replicating your Napster/Rhapsody/every other damn product that turns up libraries every time you change computers and expect your backup drive to keep them all backed up without running out of space. But I thought a terabyte was infinite, people!

By "you" do you mean me? I'm confused. And possibly offended, but I don't know who you're talking about.

Not you - I was aiming at the opposite point, that driving yourself to a UTI shouldn't really be necessary to grasp the challenges trans people face. IOW, I think I'm agreeing with you, but I am probably not being coherent.

I would bet that, at least in my little corner of the world here, most people have not only never thought about the restroom problem, but would not grasp what the problem was if they did think about it.

I'm not sure that experiment would help, either. It would bring home the difficulty in finding a gender-neutral bathroom, yes, but not the reasons a gender-neutral bathroom is needed.

Yeah, I think for the experiment to be successful, they should just go into their regular bathroom and have people cuss at them and chase them out. Hell, I used to get glares when I just had my hair pixie cut.

ita I think this challenge is geared towards people with less awareness of how the bathroom issue effects people.

You have a high level of awareness but not everyone does.

I know that this is an issue, but it's not something I actually think about on a daily basis. I know my work place doesn't have unisex restrooms. But I don't know if the mall (where I've been several times in the past month) has a family restroom or a unisex one. I don't know if the movie theater I frequent has a unisex or family restroom.

Even though intellectually I know this is an issue for people I've never thought "what if I couldn't use this restroom" when I'm out in public.

On another issue:

Oh Canada, you so crazy. First they dump $5 million worth of change on the highway. Then someone else crashes and spills candy over the whole thing. It's like a Simpsons montage.

AND we're getting rid of the penny!