Who Wants Candy?

Recently, on a drive across the state, our family of three stopped for a pee. As usual, Izzy would not get out of the car, instead staying glued to her screen, sequestered in the backseat. I have never seen her enter a rest stop on any highway.

I recall that when I was young, I also didn’t pee on road trips. “Are you sure you don’t need to go?” mom asked every time she stopped, interrupting whatever I was doing (which would have been drawing or reading). Peeing required leaving the comfort of the backseat, the blanket I may have wrapped myself in, and stepping out into the air. I just couldn’t be bothered.

This was before the time of the Great Hydration. I never drank water. No one did. At meals, if I said I was thirsty, mom reluctantly poured me half a cup of liquid so I would not annoy her later by needing to find a bathroom when we were out shopping. In ballet class, in gym, at track meets, we sweated for hours. There were no water bottles. I can still hear my ballet teacher sneering at the girl who brought water to class once. I don’t understand this strange weakness.

Izzy is terrible about hydrating. She has the high-end megaflask the girls of her generation carry—the one with the fat straw. I have never seen her refill it.

Her reluctance to leave the car on road trips is familiar to me. But her reasons are different than mine were. Izzy’s thinking is: If I walk into the restroom, I might get my ass kicked.

She’s not wrong. As a young trans woman, she could be confronted. Forced to strip. Beaten. Halted by a state-sponsored “inspector” or just some rando, in thrall to this new chapter in the old story of anti-LGBTQ hysteria, tugging out her waistband with a handgun. We were driving through an open carry state.

So I went in alone, as always, to the rest stop. In my head I was picturing one of those whole fish baked in salt you see on cooking blogs, the fish being Izzy’s liver, suffering a slow internal shriveling and encrustment because Izzy, who annoys me in the most ordinary teen girl way, does not drink water no matter how I pester her.

I pushed open the women’s room door and stumbled into a tall, gangly, young guy—he was maybe 18 or 19, and disabled—with two middle aged women, one on either side of him, gripping his arms. Like me, this boy needed to use the bathroom, but he required assistance and coaxing and even some force to gather his limbs into position. The women—maybe they were his mom and aunt—were having to corral him.

They looked up and saw me and panicked.

They shouted something. I don’t remember what, because I froze too, seeing their faces. One of the women yelled something like, It’s okay!—she raised her voice because the boy was resisting their efforts, but also her tone was the tone you would use if someone was drowning.

They clearly thought I might scream, call 911, pull a gun. They said, it’s okay he’s here because we are helping him. I tried to summon a calm as large as their fright. I wanted words to calm not only them, and me, but the storm of moral panic swirling outside this public restroom.

I said: It’s okay, I have brothers. I spoke at a normal volume, as though it was the most ordinary thing in the world. Which it is. I opened a bathroom door and walked into these people’s everyday, every several times a day, reality.

And I laughed. It worked. The laughter spread. The four of us laughing at the idea of brothers in the bathroom.

Suddenly it was all so funny.

I peed, washed my hands, switched on the reassuring turbo-dryer.

There was no storm outside, just dried-up rest stop grass, chip bags, and a yorkie with a man on the end of its leash.

But the moral panic is real. Republicans are trying to make trans girls (notice: never trans boys) seem like fringe characters doing some deviant masquerade, recruiting tired moms drying their hands on I-70 into their “lifestyle.” They are trying to turn trans people into a spectacle.

In reality, trans people are just as boring as anyone.

They stand in toothpaste aisles choosing a flavor. They go to baseball games and happy hour, work in the same dull jobs as everyone, writing reports, answering questions on helplines. They buy birthday cards and walk their kids to school and make dinner and get haircuts. And yeah, take care of disabled cousins.

This is all very terrifying for Republicans. To them, a trans person needing to pee is an oversexed, out of control, toilet-terrorizing tranzilla. It’s a sad imaginary world they live in.

Their ideas about trans people are fantasy, but the fantasy keeps my very real teen daughter from getting out of the car. She does not drink water so that she will not find herself attacked—harmed, dead—owing to some weirdo’s ruthless vision of “people like her.” Those women who were helping their disabled relative felt the same fear my daughter does.

And that is why you will never see Izzy with me in front of the vending machines, picking out her own snacks.

She likes Rice Krispie Treats and Mike-and-Ikes. So I get one of each. My husband is avoiding sugar since his last trip to the periodontist, so I get some peanuts. Then I head back to the car, where Izzy and her dad are arguing about who was the best James Bond. I drop the treats on the console and ask, Who wants candy?