Cis woman with alopecia laments hatred & bigotry that led to staff accosting her in womens room – LGBTQ Nation

A cis woman with alopecia was accosted by cleaning staff and asked if she was a man while trying to use the women’s restroom in a grocery store in the United Kingdom. The incident is yet another example of how anti-trans policies and attacks negatively impact everyone, including the people they claim to protect.

“I went to go to the toilet in Tesco and, as I was coming out of the toilet, the cleaner shouted after me. She said something along the lines of ‘Are you aware you’re in the female toilet?’” Helen Rowlands of Gatehead, UK told ChronicleLive. “I was just completely gobsmacked. She was accusing me of being male in the female toilet. I didn’t know what to do or say. It just completely took me off guard. I found it humiliating and demeaning, plus embarrassing, and it made me feel really self-conscious.”

Rowlands lives with alopecia areata, an autoimmune condition where the immune system attacks a person’s hair follicles. This often results in round bald patches on a person’s scalp, but it can also affect other areas or create larger bald spots.

While Rowlands wanted to share her story to help raise awareness of alopecia, her experience highlights how gender policing in restrooms negatively affects all people who don’t fit traditional Western expectations of femininity.

“I have had people asking what stage of chemo I have got,” Rowlands said. “I have had strangers stroke my head in nightclubs, but I have never had anyone challenge my gender or anything like that before.” She added that she felt the incident was connected to the attacks on the trans community, saying, “I suspect it’s stemming from this, which is a shame.”

The anti-trans movement has spurred a a growing trend of cis women being targeted in restrooms when anti-trans people think they might be trans. Victims include women who are cancer survivors, lesbians with short hair, and teenagers. In 2025, Rep. Lauren Boebert (D-CO) claimed there was “a guy” in a women’s bathroom at the Capitol, only to learn it was a cis woman.

The trend has also included trans men who have been attacked for using the women’s restroom in line with the demands of anti-trans policies. The SB244 Compliance Crew worked to bring attention to that issue in Kansas.

Rowlands’ incident comes after the UK instigated its new Equality and Human Rights Commission Guidance, which restricts trans people from using single-sex spaces that align with their gender identity. In the UK, gender nonconforming cis women were already reporting higher levels of harassment when using the women’s restroom because of growing anti-trans sentiment, in part spurred by anti-trans activist JK Rowling, who has suggested photographing people in the women’s room in case they might be trans.

Rowlands originally posted about her experience on Facebook. “Losing my hair with alopecia made me feel stripped of my femininity, so to then be accused of being male is heartbreaking,” she said. “I wondered how long it would take for the recent hatred and bigotry to have an impact on natural born women who don’t fit societies beauty standards….naively I thought this would occur in the US, not the UK.”

Social media users in the comments tried to blame trans people themselves for the incident, with one commenter saying, “If only the ‘trans’ movement didn’t push so hard to allow men where they shouldn’t be this would not have happened.”

But Rowlands was quick to push back, writing, “this is where you’re wrong. If bigots stopped being bigots (and realised that predators are not going to dress as women to be predators, they’ll just be predators anyway, and that being trans does not equal a predator)…if stereotypes of female beauty equalling hair didn’t exist…if there was more knowledge of alopecia and less ignorance of visible differences and judgement….then this would not have happened.”

Rowlands also agreed forcefully with a commenter who said, “This is horrible, so sorry this happened. This is a direct consequence of all the recent hatred and bigotry around policing toilets and gender. Big hugs.”

Rowlands replied, “yep. I feared it would happen. People laughed and said it never would to those who were born female and that we were being paranoid….how wrong they were. It IS happening, and it’s not just us being paranoid.”

In another comment, she said, “Frankly I dont care what is betweens someones legs, i’m just there to pee in a cubicle and go.”

Earlier this year, TransLucent released the results of a study based on freedom of information data requests that revealed only four complaints related to trans women using single-sex spaces across 382 public bodies in a span of three years.

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