Can Transgender Home Buyers Use the Seller’s Bathroom?

Before deciding to use the seller’s bathroom, ask your buyer’s agent.

It’s not just transgender home buyers who might face discrimination, it’s all home buyers in Sacramento who might want to use the seller’s bathroom. Some sellers have particular phobias about anybody else using the bath. Especially a stranger. Home stagers, thank goodness, realize this because they advise sellers to remove all of the toilet paper rolls from all of the bathrooms except the guest bath during an open house. Further, sellers of luxury homes in Sacramento often insist that an agent be present at all times when a home is shown precisely to stop a home buyer from using the master suite bath.

I don’t judge what sellers expect. However, I know home buyers are often uneasy over whether it’s OK to use a seller’s bathroom. If you’re out looking at homes in Sacramento for several hours, you might not want to, say, stop at a local gas station frequented by homeless people when you’re already at a place with facilities. Granted, a seller’s home does not offer public utilities. They are private bathrooms in a private home. So, the first thing to do is to ask your buyer’s agent if it’s OK and not just presume. Or, ask to stop at a restaurant para el refresco.

In vacant homes, it is a very bad idea to use the seller’s bathroom. I’m not sure if it’s embarrassment or overall ineptness but sometimes buyers don’t flush, and then it stinks up the entire house. Have they no decency? I have a vacant home in Antelope in escrow at the moment, and the seller let me know a toilet handle had not been depressed by the previous occupant. It’s not uncommon behavior, but it’s gross.

The other problem is flushing the toilet and not waiting for it to stop running. Homes have flooded this way. All over the hardwood floors, rotting for days. And when the buyer’s agent name shows up on the Supra lockbox as the last person to show, whoa . . . nobody wants to be that agent.

Then you get into the whole transgender and bathroom usage thing. F### North Carolina lawmakers. Is it OK for a transgender home buyer to use the seller’s bathroom? If it’s OK for everybody else, then absolutely. I realize there is a woman out there who might shudder at the thought of a male using her bathroom, as though men have no personal hygiene and were raised in a barn, especially if she is the type of woman whose idea of a male cleaning a bathroom is limited to that joke.

You know that joke, right? Honey, why didn’t you clean the bathroom? I did, I flushed the toilet.

But if a female seller harbors discriminatory thoughts about men to the extent she wants to apply that kind of thinking forward to transgender people, well, I imagine a male who identifies as a woman goes to great lengths to fulfill that destiny, and vice versa, and overall, transgender people probably excel in the attention-to-detail department. In the end, I think we have to get past our prejudices and discriminatory attitudes and realize that when people have to go, they have to go, even if it means they have to use the seller’s bathroom.