“Do you think I’m too paranoid?” Trans games about bathroom anxiety and the UK’s new EHRC guidance
Following the release of new Equality Act guidance by the UK’s EHRC, an exhausting bucket of fuel has been poured (yet again) on to the trans bathroom debate.
Here’s what video games like Dys4ia and Don’t Pee Your Pants can teach us about the damaging tedium of gender essentialism.
On the 21st of May of this year, the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) released their Statutory Code of Practice: Services, public functions and associations setting out how public facilities (such as restrooms) need to be segregated based on biological sex. To support this change the code also sets out that the category of ‘sex’ is biological (read: biological and immutable), the document making explicit reference to the For Women Scotland Supreme Court ruling in order to make this claim.
In tandem with this, trans people now fall under a ‘gender reassignment’ characteristic, but only if they’ve evidenced their transness (somehow) and regardless of any Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC).
To quote NB barrister Oscar Davies, by releasing this statutory guidance the EHRC has effectively made GRC’s “barely worth the paper they’re written on” and UK trans people are now legally categorised as some sort of ill-defined third-class citizen. Worse is that this is the exact situation the Gender Recognition Act was originally enacted to overcome.
Meanwhile, we have groups like Sex Matters laying claim to victory, rejoicing that they finally feel free to police women’s bodies in single-sex spaces “without a lawyer present.” This is despite the fact that the unworkable guidance is set out for service providers, not the general population.
Pushing back on the EHRC guidance and the body-policing its supporters seem keen to engage with, I want to share two games which give us some insight into what it’s actually like navigating bathroom politics as a trans person: Dys4ia and Don’t Pee Your Pants.
Dys4ia
An indie darling of the 2010s, Dys4ia is a game created by the legendary game developer Anna Anthropy. Consisting of four playable chapters, the game is an abstract and auto-biographical telling of Anthropy’s first six months on Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT).
As Anthropy describes, it is a journalistic “attempt at documenting the emotional experience of transitioning in the 2010s, created for other trans people who might have related.”
Dys4ia involves playing through various gaming loops which describe some of Anthropy’s transition milestones. Of particular relevance here is that the game includes a sequence where (yes, you guessed correctly) you need to navigate bathroom politics.
Navigating quickly through the bathroom stalls, avoiding (assumedly) cis-women’s stares as you do so, the game does a great job of exemplifying Anthropy’s anxiety and discomfort while trying to locate a usable public toilet.
Despite this strange and backless narrative that trans people are all too eager to get into spaces they seemingly don’t belong in, Dys4ia demonstrates how a trans woman’s quest for the loo means just that. The shadowy, panopticon-simping women remain safe and nobody is attacked. As Anthropy shows us, if you play it right then nobody even notices you.
Don’t Pee Your Pants
Don’t Pee Your Pants is a 2019 game created by developer pensyte and released on itch.io. Following in the same vein as Anthropy, the game is a sort of visual journal that depicts the plight of a trans man navigating the labyrinthine structure of the men’s bathroom. As the name implies, this is all, yet again, in service of finding a toilet to use.
In contrast to Anthropy’s game which focuses on depicting interiority as she went through the initial stages of HRT, Don’t Pee gives looks at the experiences of navigating the men’s bathroom through interactions with NPCs.
In some rooms, you come across choice antagonistic lines like “Remember when I told everyone you were a pervert?” while in others, you encounter queer NPCs asking you “Do you think I’m too paranoid?” Increasingly and tragically, it seems that the correct response to the latter is an ever-more resounding “No!”
Dys4ia and Don’t Pee Your Pants don’t give us the gamut of trans and gender non-conforming bathroom experiences, nor should we expect them to. What they do give is a small and impactful insight into trans experiences while also demonstrating the power of trans voices in the game development space more generally. They show us that although supporters of the EHRC guidance claim it as a return to “common sense,” what we are really getting is the further exclusion of trans people and communities in public spaces.
Thankfully, there are people, politicians and organisations that are challenging the EHRC and their gender-critical supporters. In the meantime let’s make sure we let the trans people in our lives know they are, as ever, supported in their idiotically simple yet bafflingly complicated quest to find and use a public bathroom.
Author’s Note: For ease, I use the term ‘trans’ throughout the article as an inclusive way to refer to gender non-normative identities (including trans, gender non-binary, gender fluid and agender identities). This is in contrast with the EHRC’s use of the term.
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