The viral New Year’s Eve bathroom confrontation involving Zachary Willmore felt shocking to many viewers. A young man, dressed in jewelry and presenting in a way some deemed “too feminine,” was verbally confronted in a men’s restroom by a stranger who decided he did not belong there.
Willmore is a cisgender gay man. He is not transgender. That distinction matters for accuracy, but it does not change the underlying truth of what happened.
He was punished for how he looked.
For those of us who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, this story feels painfully familiar. Long before social media outrage cycles, before bathroom bills, and before gender identity became a political obsession, gender nonconformity was already being scrutinized, mocked, feared, and attacked.
What has changed is not the discomfort. What has changed is the target.
Today, transgender people bear the brunt of this anxiety, even when the person being confronted is not trans at all.
Growing Up When Gender Nonconformity Was Everywhere
If you grew up in the 1970s or 1980s, gender nonconformity was everywhere, even if no one had a name for it yet.
Gender nonconformity refers to expressing gender in ways that do not align with traditional or societal expectations tied to one’s assigned sex. That can include clothing, hairstyles, voice, mannerisms, interests, or emotional expression. It does not automatically mean someone is transgender, gay, or questioning their gender identity. It simply means they do not perform masculinity or femininity the way society expects them to.
By that definition, gender nonconformity was practically mainstream.
Men wore makeup on album covers. Boys had long hair and soft voices. Women wore suits, cropped their hair, and rejected delicate presentation. Androgyny was not hidden. It was sold on records, broadcast on television, and plastered on bedroom walls.
At the same time, adults panicked.
Parents worried music would confuse children. Politicians warned of moral decay. Religious leaders preached about the collapse of traditional values. Talk shows invited “experts” to debate whether eyeliner on men was a social threat.
None of this language is new. It is simply recycled.
Children often took these images at face value. They saw creativity, style, and self-expression. Adults, however, projected fear onto them. Fear of blurred boundaries. Fear of losing control. Fear of change.
That fear did not disappear. It just waited for a new target.
The Artists Who Terrified Adults First
Gender nonconformity did not sneak into culture quietly. It arrived loudly, stylishly, and unapologetically.
Artists like David Bowie blurred gender so completely that people argued for decades about who Ziggy Stardust even was supposed to be. Prince wore lace, heels, and eyeliner while becoming one of the most celebrated sex symbols of his era. Boy George confused television hosts simply by existing. Elton John turned flamboyance into stadium spectacle. Annie Lennox challenged femininity by rejecting softness altogether.
The same arguments were made then that are made now.
They will confuse children.
They undermine masculinity.
They represent moral decline.
Sound familiar?
Gender Bending Was Allowed, But Only As Entertainment
Here is the unspoken rule many people internalized without realizing it. Gender nonconformity was acceptable as performance, but not as life.
You could watch it on MTV. You could buy the album. You could applaud the artistry. But you were not supposed to embody it at the grocery store, the office, the school hallway, or the bathroom.
This is where today’s panic lives.
Society tolerated gender expression as long as it stayed safely contained. Once ordinary people began living it openly, the tolerance evaporated.
Zachary Willmore did not break any rules. He used the restroom aligned with his gender. He did not provoke a confrontation. He simply existed visibly.
That visibility was enough.
How Gender Expression Became a Political Threat
As culture slowly accepted gender nonconformity in art and media, the fear did not disappear. It shifted.
Transgender people became the new focal point for anxieties that had always existed.
Bathrooms became symbolic spaces. Not because they were dangerous, but because they were intimate, everyday, and unavoidable. They became a convenient stage for enforcing conformity.
What Willmore experienced mirrors what transgender people experience constantly. Someone deciding they look wrong. Someone appointing themselves as gender police. Someone escalating discomfort into confrontation.
The logic is always the same. If I do not understand you, you must be a threat.
Why Saying “He Is Not Trans” Does Not End the Conversation
Clarifying that Zachary Willmore is not transgender is important. But it does not solve the problem. It exposes it. Gender policing does not stop at trans people. It never has.
Masculine women are questioned. Feminine men are harassed. Nonconforming teenagers are targeted. Even straight, cisgender people who deviate from expectation feel it.
Once society decides gender expression must be enforced, no one is truly safe from scrutiny. Transgender people are simply the most visible targets right now.
The Myth of a Gender Rigid Past
Many arguments against gender nonconformity rely on nostalgia for a time when gender roles were supposedly clear and orderly. That time did not exist.
The 70s and 80s were messy, expressive, rebellious, and experimental. Gender lines were pushed constantly. Fashion exploded. Music challenged norms weekly. Television reflected shifting identities.
What people miss is not order. They miss control. And control has always been the true objective of gender enforcement.
Trans People Are Not a Modern Invention
Just as gender nonconformity is not new, transgender people are not new either. What is new is visibility without permission.
Trans people now live openly as neighbors, coworkers, parents, and friends. They are no longer confined to whispered stories or sensationalized headlines.
For those who fear losing rigid categories, this visibility feels threatening. But a threat is not the same as harm.
What Living Freely Actually Looks Like
For transgender people, living freely does not look like a spectacle.
It looks like errands. It looks like jobs. It looks like bathrooms. It looks boring. The fact that these ordinary moments provoke outrage says more about societal anxiety than about trans lives themselves.
Zachary Willmore’s experience demonstrates how quickly harmless existence becomes suspect when someone does not perform gender “correctly.”
We Have Lived Through This Before
We were told glam rock would destroy society. We were told disco would corrupt youth. We were told androgyny would erase masculinity. None of it happened.
What did happen was adaptation. Acceptance. Growth.
History shows that fear fades once expression becomes familiar. The danger lies in how much damage is done while society waits to catch up.
The Bottom Line
Gender nonconformity is not an ideology. It is not a recruitment strategy. It is not a social experiment. It is people expressing themselves honestly.
Transgender people are not asking society to reinvent reality. They are asking for the same freedom once begrudgingly granted to artists, performers, and icons who are now celebrated in hindsight.
The lesson history keeps offering is simple. Expression does not destroy culture. Suppression does. And every time society panics about gender, it eventually learns that the fear was never justified. The harm, however, was very real.
