I went to the theatre in Perth with my husband in 2018 (just before I peak-transed). I needed the toilet after the show finished (lots of women did) and when I entered I saw (and heard) a man dressed in women’s clothes standing in the queue in front of me waiting to use one of the cubicles. He was talking to another woman. He was about 6ft 4”, obviously a man and was trying his best to speak and gesture “like a woman”. The rest of us stood quietly and watched. He was very loud. I didn’t think anything of it. I was still in the “be nice” and “they’re not doing any harm” frame of mind. Except (and I didn’t think anything of it at the time) his presence made some women walk straight back out of the women’s toilet as soon as they saw there was a man in the bathroom. They were forced to leave because his presence made them uncomfortable. Then I heard him joking with the woman he was with; “Do you need a tamp?” and he pointed at the tampon dispensing machine. She just laughed. She didn’t answer him. She just laughed it off. But I DID think something of that. I remember feeling uncomfortable and that it was a strange thing to ask a woman. I’ve never asked a friend that, and I’ve never been asked that in the women’s toilets when we’ve been on a girls night out together. You just wouldn’t ask a woman that out of the blue and completely off topic! It was bizarre.
I told my husband about him when we got outside and what he’d said about the tampon machine. He said “Yeah, it’s a sexual thing.” And we got into a bit of a row over it because I tried to argue that it’s not sexual, it’s gender dysphoria and all that. My husband just kept rolling his eyes at me in exasperation. I couldn’t imagine why a “trans woman” would get off on women’s periods and tampons etc. They believe they are a woman, so why would they get off on tampons and period blood? My husband’s words; “If you can think of it, there’s a man out there who will sexualise it and wank over it”.
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