Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick knows what he cares about. And what he cares about is public toilets. Patrick, Texas’s self-styled Lord of the Lavatory, our Wizard of the W.C., our Pasha of Pee, has vowed that in 2017, he will make sure that the State Legislature passes the “Women’s Privacy Act,” a bill that will require “people to use the bathroom that corresponds with the gender on their birth certificates.”

I’ll be honest, I’m a traditionalist. The world is changing, quickly and, for us older people, confusingly. LG became LGB, then LGBT, and LGBTQ. Last time I checked, we were up to LGBTQIA+. I have no idea what the “A” and the “+” stand for. I want to be fair and kind and compassionate to my neighbors, but I suffer from Old Man Lag, always a step or two behind the times.

Our daughter, the college senior, attends a university that’s so relentlessly conservative, one of the raging on-campus debates is whether to allow caffeinated Coke products in the student union’s soda-pop machines. The other day, she told me that I was hamstrung by my “insistence that gender identity is a binary construct.”

“Where did you get that?” I asked.

“In my ‘Gender Identity and the Modern Cinema’ class,” she replied. She’s a Humanities major. The world is changing, even in Provo, Utah. I muttered something about how she should be taking a seminar called “'Would You Like Fries With That?’: Professional Strategies for the Post-Baccalaurate Humanities Graduate.” She was unamused.

The world is changing. North Carolina’s decision to pass legislation very similar to Mr. Patrick’s bathroom bill has cost the state $600 million in lost revenue so far this year, as everyone from Deutsche Bank to the National Basketball Association has canceled or relocated corporate expansions and performances in protest of the legislation. Bruce Springsteen explained his cancellation of a concert scheduled for Greensboro, North Carolina as a show of “solidarity” with those fighting “prejudice and bigotry” in the Tarheel State.

No one wants to be on the side of “prejudice and bigotry.” No one is opposed to “protecting women” — Patrick’s stated rationale for the bathroom bill — either, although the lieutenant governor’s shadowy vision of predators setting up shop in the state’s ladies rooms under the guise of “transgender equity” seems ridiculously far-fetched. But I’m not here to debate the merits of Patrick’s proposal. I’m here to reveal a deep secret, a secret I have heretofore shared only with the members of my Inner Circle:

My birth certificate says I’m a girl.

Back in 1983, while living in Los Angeles County, I needed my birth certificate to apply for a California driver’s license. The original had been lost; I contacted the clerk in Niagara County, New York, my birthplace, for a replacement. Six weeks later, it arrived, neatly embossed with the Niagara County clerk’s official seal, and bearing all of my vital statistics. Name: Cort Anthony McMurray. Birth Date: November 9, 1962. Gender: Female.

I’ll admit, as a man, I’m pretty disappointing. My physique is less J.J. Watt than Elmer Fudd. My voice is sort of willowy. On the telephone, I am frequently mistaken for a woman. When you answer your telephone, and the voice on the other end, the gravelly result of a lifetime of whiskey, unfiltered cigarettes, and refinery work, rasps, “Why, hello there, darlin’,” you can’t do much more than giggle and purr, “Well, bless your heart!” I’ve flirted with more old men than a phalanx of truck-stop waitresses.

(There are limits to this charade. Once, a woman gave me a brisk, “Yes, ma’am, I need to speak to someone in customer service.” “I can help you,” I replied, “but I’m not a ‘ma’am;’ I’m a ‘sir.’” She was incredulous. “Really?” she asked. “Are you sure?” “Hold on,” I said. “Let me check.” I put the phone on the desk and made some fumbling noises. “Yep. I just took a look. I’m a man, all right.” She told me I was very rude, and hung up the phone. Another satisfied customer!)

Granted, I’m no Sam Elliott, but I have fathered three children. My taste in clothes runs to vintage flannel baseball jerseys and cargo shorts. I’m somewhere between Ed Asner and Sasquatch on the hairiness scale. A photo montage of my life would look like the cast of Up: one moment, I’m Russell, the round and exuberant Boy Scout; the next I’m Carl Friedricksen, right down to the stooped shoulders and the Harry Caray glasses. The last place I belong, is in a women’s restroom.

If Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick — the Potentate of Piddling, the Kaiser of the Crapper, the Fidalgo of Flush — has his way, the women’s rest room is precisely where I’m bound. Because my birth certificate says I’m female. And Dan Patrick isn’t concerned about common sense, or fairness, or sensitivity to people who are frequently misunderstood and usually mistreated. Dan Patrick is only worried about protecting folks from the fantastical beasts of his own creation.

I won’t miss the men’s room, with its overflowing trash cans and unflushed toilets and sickeningly slick floors around the urinals (it gives one pause to know that in a state that prides itself on its long history with firearms, so many men have such terrible aim). I wish this had happened twenty years ago, when the Astrodome was still a going concern.

The Dome men’s rooms didn’t have urinals; they had stainless steel troughs, roughly the length of a football field. You’d belly up to the pee trough, in full view of the fellers on either side of you, all of you crammed together, boot to boot, unzip, and let it rip. It was an unholy Texas Trinity: bad hygiene, performance anxiety, and a crushing sense of male inadequacy, all rolled into one.

Women’s restrooms, I imagine, are a little like Athena’s quarters on Olympus, orderly and pristine and smelling faintly of ambrosia and lilacs.

The law is the law. If Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick — the Baron of Bowel Movements, the Emperor of Evacuations, the Duke of Dooky — says that a 54-year-old man with an erroneous birth certificate has to do his business in the ladies’, who are we to argue? As for all of those transgender people who have been quietly using the “wrong” restroom for decades without anyone experiencing even a shred of discomfort or unpleasantness, well, this isn’t about them.

This is about fairness.

Cort McMurray is a Houston-area businessman and a frequent contributor to Gray Matters.

Bookmark Gray Matters. It's flirted with more old men than a phalanx of truck-stop waitresses.

