Was it low-key transphobia or nah?

November 12, 2018 8:09 AM

I need some help checking in on something that just happened at the gym in the locker room.

First: I am a trans woman. I have had "THE SURGERY".

Deets: I was getting undressed in the locker room after working out, getting ready to get in the shower (my gym has 4 individual shower stalls). I grabbed a towel and a lady doing her thing next to me asked me "Are you getting into the shower?". I replied "Yes" and thought to myself "Maybe there's a line for the showers?" but when I walked to the shower stalls they were all available.

So, I got in the shower and figured maybe the woman was confused or something, I took a shower, and, no one else came to take a shower.

When I got out of the shower the lady who had me the question was gone.

So, my gut feels are:

1. That lady did not want to be in the shower area with me because I'm trans
-OR-
2. That lady just didn't want to be in the shower area with anyone else.

I'm like, sitting here trying to figure out why the fuck someone would ask a trans person if they are going to take a shower in a ladies' locker room in the gym and I keep coming back to "That shit was low-key passive aggressive transphobic shite" but I'm also totally new at being in women's spaces and maybe there's some girl code I'm missing where certain cis women ask other women if they are gonna take a shower or not and it's no big deal?

Help me sort my feels out, shit's confusing.

posted by nikaspark to Human Relations (18 answers total)

People are weird about showers/locker rooms/etc. I cannot tell you what that person was thinking, but option 2 is absolutely something that would be possible for people I have known.

Option 3, of just the worst type of small talk ever, is also certainly possible.
posted by annabear at 8:22 AM on November 12, 2018 [47 favorites]

I am a cis gender woman and consider myself to be a trans ally. I also have a certain amount of body shame and prefer to shower in public places when no one else is also there. That said, I use a public gym and while my approach is to keep my head down, not make eye contact, and hope/pray that no one is looking at or judging my body I get through it and accept that sometimes I am showering in the same space as others. That said - this is at a gym with separate stalls, protected by thin shower curtains. If the shower area is all open and collective, to be honest, I would probably never use that gym. I also would never initiate a conversation with someone in the shower area or changing area in general, and if someone does initiate a conversation with me, I might - embarrassingly, but being totally honest here - either skip my shower or hide in the bathroom stall until that person was no longer going to be naked in the area where I was also naked. I know, I have body issues.

All of this to say: I don't like showering with others, I would never initiate a conversation with someone else to establish their showering plans (or anything else) in a changing/showering space, and I would also interpret this as an expression of transphobia.

I'm so sorry. You didn't deserve for someone to make you feel this way.
posted by pammeke at 8:22 AM on November 12, 2018 [7 favorites]

It's unclear to me. It could be 1 or 2 easily, or it could be that she was going to ask you to watch her stuff for a short while because she had to do something? Who knows. Locker rooms have always been strange spaces for me as there's such a cornucopia of relatively intimate activities that happen there and an equal number of surprising ways that people execute those activities. For reference, I'm a mid-40's cis woman.
posted by quince at 8:24 AM on November 12, 2018 [9 favorites]

Yes it could have been transphobia but it could have been something else (maybe a class was beginning she was going to ask if you were going to? Maybe was going to ask for a ride to the bus stop?) Maybe just making ackward small talk because she felt ignoring you might feel like a micro aggression to you (“that woman didn’t even talk to me because I am visibly different!”). It is probably better for you to assume good intentions on the part of other people.
posted by saucysault at 8:27 AM on November 12, 2018 [4 favorites]

Best answer: I think you should trust your gut in terms of coming to any sort of conclusion about what happened; don't let us gaslight you, or don't gaslight yourself!

But since you asked for possible alternatives: At my gym, even though the locker room is pretty big, it seems like there are just a few popular spots where most women choose lockers, so it often ends up that a few people will be all clustered together trying to change/get dressed, and it gets crowded. I sometimes assure my locker-neighbor, "I'm just grabbing my stuff to shower!" as a way of indicating that she doesn't need to make room for me on the bench.
posted by lazuli at 8:29 AM on November 12, 2018 [27 favorites]

Cis woman here; people like #2 certainly exist (as seen in this thread), and maybe you met one, but to answer your q, there's not some particular 'girl code' I'm aware of that you're failing to pick up from what you describe. (People at my gym only talk to each other in the locker room if they need to navigate/ask each other to move). Seems like a 'Schrodinger's transphobe' incident to me; no way to know what was in the heart of this woman, but I don't think you're at all out of line to suspect bias. I'm sorry this happened to you.

(As for whether you should err on one side or another of these assumptions, I'd say your own gut is probably better than people who weren't actually there.)
posted by heyforfour at 8:32 AM on November 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Some additional context I forgot to add: She was undressed and had a towel around her, which led me to think she was about to go get into the shower as well. (I saw her come in, she undressed at the same time I did)
posted by nikaspark at 8:33 AM on November 12, 2018

In my experience, in ladies’ locker rooms, everyone focuses on themselves and their own body image issues if they have them and tries not to look at anyone else. I cannot imagine that this lady was checking you out enough to determine that you were trans. Anything is possible but I think it’s more likely to have had nothing to do with you specifically.
posted by amro at 8:33 AM on November 12, 2018 [9 favorites]

Just want to chime in and say that it's entirely possible it was transphobic, but locker rooms and locker room showers are weird and fraught places for basically every woman I know. Definitely for me.

In women's spaces, it's probably safe to assume that 95% of the women around are feeling fucked up about their bodies at some level. It's endemic. Stupid patriarchy.
posted by hought20 at 8:39 AM on November 12, 2018 [28 favorites]

Response by poster: I'm gonna go ahead and resolve this. Here's what I think:

Between what Rock Em Sock Em and Lazuli are saying, both are absolutely at play in my gym. It's a pretty daunting place, there are regulars, there is an established gym culture, and it is a well-known and respected fixture in downtown Austin. Being new there is a bit overwhelming. ALSO, the gym locker room is pretty compact and people sometimes aren't really all that mindful about the amount of bench space they are hogging (or they just don't care).

So between those two things (and ask versus guess) I think that she was probably overwhelmed and either wanted to know if I was freeing up bench space, or she could be relatively new and wanted to be shown some ropes or help navigating the kinda unspoken ways of the locker room.

I'm gonna side on "I'm pretty fucking anxious being a naked trans woman in the locker room and this person probably is a guess person who either wanted bench space or some guidance".

Thanks everyone!!! (I'm gonna mark this resolved now)
posted by nikaspark at 8:42 AM on November 12, 2018 [60 favorites]

Whenever I have managed to fit a gym or spa visit in, my long-standing believe that locker rooms without a lot of individual stalls are the work of the devil is confirmed. Locker rooms are horrible places where a lot of people are uncomfortable and self conscious. I have myself changed my planned cleansing rituals if I felt particularly self conscious or the place was packed. So there is no way of knowing what this woman was thinking or doing.
posted by koahiatamadl at 8:48 AM on November 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

After reading your question and before reading the other responses, I thought of it this way: I (cis woman) am super uncomfortable in locker rooms and would 100% ask someone if they were fixing to get in the shower so that I could then avoid getting in the shower. I second other folks, too, saying that I probably would not even have gotten more than a glance at your body, because for the most part, there's an unspoken rule about not looking at anyone in there ever. There's not a particular "girl code" about asking about a shower, but there is definitely a code of everyone being insanely self-conscious. (Every now and then you get that one woman who just stands around naked blow-drying her hair, but she is an outlier!)
posted by fiercecupcake at 9:24 AM on November 12, 2018 [11 favorites]

Sadly I think the only "girl code" at work here is us being really fucking uncomfortable about our own bodies. I hope you can somehow miss out on that part of womanhood, although I fear not so. :(
posted by mccxxiii at 9:37 AM on November 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

Yet another option was that she felt weird doing whatever her next step was right next to somebody (putting a pad in her underwear, for example, or taking medication, or just being naked enough to fully change) and was hoping that your shower answer would be yes. Which could also have to do with her recognizing you're trans, but as other folks are saying, changing rooms are such fraught spaces, OMG, and I am always 100% sure I'm doing the wrong thing, and I'm in the changing room to which I was assigned at birth, and so it is toootally plausible that it had nothing to do with your trans-ness.
posted by tchemgrrl at 10:05 AM on November 12, 2018

Response by poster: (everyone, as a trans person I experience the same body issues that cis women do with the added layer of gender dysphoria on top. If you wanna know what gender dysphoria is, this ask is a literal example of it in action)
posted by nikaspark at 10:11 AM on November 12, 2018 [22 favorites]

I know this is resolved, but as an athletic cis woman at 35 who has been in and continues to use women’s locker rooms on an almost-daily basis, and works with all men and has for the past 12 years, a lot of women are weird about showering in gym locker rooms. Personally, I spent a short stint in the military and that broke me of modesty rather quickly, but a lot of women won’t come out of our single-stall shower room at my main gym without being fully-dressed. My male coworkers, however, have no such thoughts of modesty. Anecdote is not anecdata, but there seems to be a different mental construct. For instance, older fire stations I’ve worked at the men’s lockers were all communal, where the women’s had stalls (that were hastily put in place as women moved into the profession). So I think you’re ok and she was probably just a woman who, for whatever reason, was planning on showering alone.
posted by sara is disenchanted at 1:31 PM on November 12, 2018

I just thought of something else: I was basically trained not to look at anyone in a girls' locker room because in junior high, if anyone even THOUGHT you were looking at them, they might scream that you're "A LESBIAN" (gasp) as loud as possible. For those of us who were actually queer, this was so terrifying that I pretty much got dressed while staring at the floor. Not sure if this happens in boys' locker rooms, since everything I hear about them suggests camaraderie (?).
posted by fiercecupcake at 1:48 PM on November 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

I understand this is marked resolved but I'd like to add another possibility. If you were looking at this woman for long enough to ascertain that she was wearing a towel, she might have noticed you looking, felt you were staring, and asked you that question because she felt uncomfortable about being looked at/ noticed in the changeroom and wanted to ascertain your motives. Many of us tend to really actively avoid noticing other changeroom users at all whenever possible, especially if they aren't fully dressed.
posted by windykites at 7:27 AM on November 13, 2018 [1 favorite]