When I first attended an academic conference en femme, it turned out to be relevant to the conference’s discussion of gender ethics. It also taught me something else – by accident.

When a break between panels began, a female colleague and I were having an enthusiastic discussion of topics coming out of the previous panel. We both needed to go to the washroom¹, so we carried on our discussion on the way to the women’s room. Then we entered neighbouring toilet stalls and sat down to do our business – and continued our Buddhist-ethics conversation across the barrier between the stalls, while sitting down in them.

Now what was your reaction to the story I just told in the previous paragraph? There’s a good chance I can predict your own gender from it. If you thought “so? what’s her point? what is she getting at?”, I bet you’re a woman. But if you thought “that’s crazy, who would do that?”, you’re a man.

Women’s washrooms in North America are social, conversational places. Strangers compliment each other on their outfits or makeup, they offer mutual support and camaraderie. Men’s washrooms, however, are spaces of quiet contemplation. Even talking while at the sink or walking across the room is somewhat unusual; talking across urinals is highly frowned upon; and to attempt to talk across stalls, well, that would be like leaving your genitals exposed when you left the stall. It’s just not done.

These are the sorts of social norms that, most of the time, we just don’t think about. The German philosopher-sociologist Alfred Schutz referred aptly to the taken-for-granted world. You have to learn it all when you are very young; we wouldn’t be surprised to hear a little boy trying to chatter across the barrier of a men’s room stall, because he hasn’t yet learned that that’s the sort of thing you’re not supposed to do. But by the time you are an adult, it has become such a second nature that you barely think about it anymore. Of course you don’t talk in the washroom, assumes a man: who would do that? Well, turns out it’s half the population. But if you never go into women’s washrooms – as the other half of the population usually do not – then you wouldn’t know that, or at least you would only know it second-hand.

Jerry Seinfeld’s standup monologues regularly touched on the differences between typically masculine and feminine norms, but I don’t recall him ever talking about washroom conversation and would be surprised if he ever did – because how would he even have known? If he were ever to enter a women’s room as I did, I’m sure the difference would have quickly struck his keenly observational mind – but of course it probably didn’t, because that’s probably something he never did.

So all of this feels to me like an unexpected blessing of gender fluidity: an ability to see through our usual norms and take our usual gender lifeworld a little bit less for granted. I don’t at all buy standpoint theory’s claim that marginalized people’s lived experience gives them a better understanding than privileged people’s – but it does give each a different understanding. Different lives in different categories of identity can sometimes be lived in different worlds. Our own understanding of the world can be hemmed in by all the norms we have learned to take for granted, so that we don’t see beyond them. A women’s washroom, it turns out, is a world of its own.

Gender fluidity is far from the only thing that can take us out of the taken-for-granted world, of course. The most obvious way of doing this is travel. Many young adults have a life-changing revelation when they spend a while in a place far removed from their birthplace, one that speaks another language and has its own different norms. I’m no exception. But it’s not just about the large-scale life-transforming insights; one also comes to see through far more mundane and everyday norms. I was delighted to learn in my early twenties that in Thailand one eats rice and curry with a spoon. Until then, that was something I’d never even considered an option: of course you only eat rice with a fork, that’s just what’s done. But once I saw the different norm I thought of course: a spoon is much better at scooping up rice and especially sauce, it doesn’t fall through the tines. I didn’t care how weird people found that when I got back home; I’ve eaten it with a spoon ever since.

You can, of course, also learn about other norms second-hand, from others’ experience. I’ve just been telling you about them myself. Our ability to learn from others is also something that I think is deeply underestimated by standpoint theory’s emphasis on lived experience. That said, there is something to be said for the experience of crossing cultural boundaries directly: then the differences are something you notice for yourself, rather than something someone told you.

One other powerful way to get out of the taken-for-granted world is by reading old texts, works from centuries or millennia ago. There, the author is not telling you what is different about their world, because they don’t have your world to compare it to. Rather, they’re showing you; you get struck by it yourself. It’s not necessarily that the ancient author’s view is better. We now are usually horrified to read the ending of the book of Job, where Job’s loss of his children is treated as having a happy ending because he gets new ones. However justified that horror may be, that ending is still a reminder of just how differently it is possible for humans to think. And the different thinking we discover is often not horrifying; sometimes it leads us to helpful, productive places. In the political disengagement of Śāntideva and the Pali suttas I found a worldview very different from the politically intense world I was raised in – but one that has proved incredibly helpful and soothing in this dark political age.

It is good to be shown a world different from one’s own, to remind oneself that one’s taken-for-granted norms don’t have to be like that. One more reason I’m grateful for my gender fluidity is to have seen a different world in a place as mundane and nearby as a washroom.

1. This conference was in Vancouver. “Washroom” is the standard Canadian term for what Americans call a bathroom – and while we’re on the topic of questioning social norms, I may as well point out that “washroom” is a more accurate term for a room with no baths in it. ↩︎