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Bath puffs 		Inside the Women’s Locker Room

I finally made it inside that last bastion of female privacy, the women’s locker room. I’m here to tell you all about it.

I’ve never been a sports person, so locker rooms were never an issue for me as far as being transsexual goes. I didn’t expect to see the inside of another locker room as long as I lived! But a funny thing happened a few months ago: I suddenly got the urge to start exercising.

After much consternation and weighing of pros and cons, I decided to join a health club. Not any big commitment, mind you; I wouldn’t be signing any multi-year contracts. But something on a month-by-month I could handle, just to see if I like it.

I found a wonderful little health club close to my house and signed up. (I won’t tell you the name of the health club because I don’t want them worrying about transsexuals in their locker rooms. But I will say it is not a color, or a timespan, or a shape, or an Olympic event.) I began working out and I made it into the women’s locker room at last.

By the time I made it into the women’s locker room, I was over a year post-op. Women’s restrooms and changing rooms had long since ceased to hold any special fascination for me. But women’s locker rooms—ah, that was different. Women are naked in locker rooms, aren’t they?

Funnily enough, it turns out that women are NOT naked in locker rooms. The women I see in the locker room are surprisingly good at changing clothes without revealing any naughty parts. (I have no prurient interest in seeing women’s naughty parts, as that part of my sex drive is totally gone. But I will confess I am curios to compare their bodies to my own.)

I do see bras and panties from time to time, and even the occasional breast or two, but downstairs is never revealed. I find it amusing that women are so modest in the locker room. Is it just a matter of courtesy, or does it reflect poor body image?

I myself have not mastered the art of pulling on my panties without dropping my towel, nor do I have any embarrassment about exposing my body—hell, I worked so hard for this body, I’m happy to show it off! But I would say that, much to my surprise, a pre-op trans woman would not necessarily have any difficulties in the locker room, as long as she can do that particular presto-change-o mambo.

Even with occasional glimpses of bras and panties, the women’s locker room is far from the way it was portrayed in the Porkies movies. In the first place, we get very few high school girls in our health club; we are mostly an older crowd. Two, we do NOT look like playboy models or strippers. And finally, we’re talking a lot more Hanes and Platex than Victoria’s Secret and Frederick’s. In short, for the most part, it is not a pretty sight.

Besides the semi-naked female bodies, the women’s locker room is hardly different from men’s locker room’s I visited in my former life.

When I first walked into the women’s locker room, I notice one peculiar little quirk I had never seen in a men’s locker room. Many of the lockers had colorful mesh bath puffs hanging from the ubiquitous combination padlocks. What is up with that? Are the women adding a decorative touch to the locker room? Are they somehow marking their territories? Is it for identification, like why you might put a colorful sticker on your luggage when you travel?

I couldn’t figure out the reason for this odd custom but I wanted to fit in so I, too, soon had my purple puff hanging from my lock. Eventually it dawned on me. The lockers with the puffs are rented for permanent use, not just day use .The puffs are simply hanging outside the lockers to dry, after having been used in the showers. Duh. I stopped hanging my dry puff from my lock.

Speaking of showers, the showers are individual stalls equipped with curtains, so naked women are not on display there either.

The locker room has a jacuzzi spa which I like to use naked. I very rarely see any other women in the spa. (I don’t think they’re avoiding the spa because I am in it naked; the spa just isn’t very popular.) One Japanese woman also goes in naked, like me. I’ve seen a few other women use the spa with bathing suits on.

The last thing I noticed about the women’s locker room is that the women generally don’t talk to each other. This surprised me because I usually see women chattering away like magpies when they are together. I once told one of my trans girlfriends, “We really need to talk a lot more if we’re going to pass as women!”

But in the locker room, women keep to themselves. They do their business and get out. I’ve gossiped more in bathrooms than in the locker room. Maybe being semi-naked has an inhibiting effect on conversation.

However, speaking up in the locker room is not considered to be rude. I’ve had a few nice conversations in the women’s locker room when some particular subject or another presented itself. But as a matter of course, women do not greet strangers in the locker room, or make an effort to strike up conversations.

On the other hand, if friends or acquaintances come into the locker room together, it’s a whole other story. In that case, we chatter exactly like magpies.

I can’t think of anything else to tell you about the women’s locker room. Like most things on the other side of the gender divide, the locker room quickly becomes quite mundane. Except for that one time, when we discovered that the boys had drilled a peephole in the wall between our locker rooms... oh, wait a minute—that wasn’t real life; that was a scene from Porkies!

—Lannie Rose, 8/2004 		 

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