FRISCO, Texas -- It was an unsettling bathroom counter that Jessica Rush will never forget.
Rush was inside a bathroom Thursday at Baylor Medical Center in Frisco when a man barged into the women’s bathroom because he thought she was a male.
“You didn’t look like a girl when I saw you enter. I thought you was a…,” the man told her with a heavy accent.
“A boy?” she asked him.
“Yes, I was kind of confused when I saw this,” the unidentified man. “That’s the only reason. Now that I see you are a woman. … You know it’s difficult. Of course, you dress like a man. You dress like a man.”
Rush recorded the encounter and posted it to her Facebook page, the latest episode in what’s quickly becoming a hot debate over who can use which bathroom.
“I’m clearly a woman,” said Rush, who wears her hair in a platinum faux hawk. “I was just in basketball shorts and a t-shirt. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
Rush says the man came in with a woman that she later learned was his mother. She was about to go into a stall when he confronted her.
“He scared me more than anything,” she said. “I was shocked. I didn’t even know what to do so that’s when I flipped on my video camera.”
She’d gone to the hospital that day after breaking a couple of her fingers when she fell.
“Regardless of it being a woman’s bathroom, why come in and then start attacking me personally?” said Rush, who manages a restaurant. “That’s scary to me as a five-foot-three, five-foot-four female.”
Later in the lobby, she recorded another video while discussing with him why he had come into that bathroom. He says he was worried because he thought a man had gone into the bathroom that his mother was about to use. He wanted to make sure that his mother was going into the right bathroom.
"The point is I was helping my mom. I was confused when I see someone entering the woman's bathroom looking like a man," he told her.
Rush says it’s the not the first time her gender has been called into question. She says another time she went into the women’s locker room at a gym.
“A lady came and tapped me on the back and said, ‘Excuse me, sir,” she said. “And as soon as I turned around, she said, ‘I’m sorry. sorry. I thought you were a boy.’’
Rush says the incidents just go to show that you can’t you can’t always make assumptions about someone’s gender by the way they look.
“I do feel for the transgenders because this happened to me,” she said. “I can only imagine someone who is taking testosterone and growing facial hair and still having to go to the women’s bathroom.”
“If I do go into the women’s bathroom, then I clearly identify as a woman whether I’m trans or not, which I’m not and I don’t plan to be,” Rush said. “I just think everybody just needs to kind of stay to themselves and don’t be the bathroom police.”