There is a rather wonderful poem that I love by Kim Addonizio. It is called To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall. It details bad sex, bad haircuts, bad bleeding and bad heartache. Its last line is a message from one woman to another in the next toilet cubicle: “Listen I love you joy is coming”.
I have been that woman crying in the toilets. I have been that woman listening to others crying, vomiting, pouring their hearts out, passing tampons and tissues under the door. I have seen girls patch each other up emotionally and physically, find out they are being cheated on by the same guy, wash the blood from their clothes, swap make-up, take drugs, plan to run away together.
It is not that women’s loos are some kind of utopia, but they are a female space where female bodies do female things. They have never felt entirely safe, especially public loos, but safeish, I would say.
The advent of the gender-neutral toilet has stopped all that. Many places now have a “gender neutral” loo or “men’s, women’s, plus gender-neutral” – which effectively means twice as many toilets for men as for women.
Theatres have excelled themselves in alienating women. At the Lyric, in London, for instance, women are invited to walk past a row of urinals to get to a cubicle. Who actually wants this? Do men want to pee in public? Do women want to see them doing so? And if somehow “trans rights” is your answer, then, again, we must ask why it is women who must always make way, have less provision than men, when women’s needs for clean and safe loos matter.
So I am relieved that the Government has said that new buildings – restaurants, schools, hospitals – must have separate male and female toilets and not these “universal” lavatories.
Thank God. Wanting to maintain women-only spaces has been a ridiculous ongoing fight over the past few years. The tide is turning. Our privacy, dignity and safety are not to be given away by men or anyone who cannot be bothered to think about why women might need those things.
Last week, a man who knows all about invading spaces where he is not wanted – the ever cocksure Alastair Campbell – tweeted a picture of the door of a gender-neutral toilet with the boast: “My Tree of the Day is the one that was made into this door. I mean, honestly, what is the problem? You go into a communal space, there are men and women, no urinals full of fag ends and chewing gum, no spraying and checking out for size, just private toilets for all. Much better.”
Countless women replied to explain to him just what was wrong with this statement. To put it bluntly, men’s toilets are smelly and dirty and women fear getting attacked by men.
Indeed, there is a fundamental refusal from those who believe that being female is just a feeling in a man’s head to accept that there is a difference between male and female bodies. Menstruating women have different needs to men. This can be hugely difficult for teenage girls. My daughters always came home from school bursting because the school loos were horrible places at the best of times. It is ludicrous to me that we are made to feel like blushing naïfs for wanting privacy. Menopausal women may find themselves flooding and need space to sort that out. Remember when Fleabag’s sister miscarried in the restaurant loo? Well, that happens. I am sorry if this is all too much information for you, but female experience is always somehow too much, too real, too damn inconvenient for those who think what matters is simply disembodied gender.
When I was put on a mixed-sex ward after nearly dying because of an ectopic pregnancy, I was throwing up constantly because of the morphine, had a catheter and was emotionally in a right old state. The men in the beds around me probably were in a bad way too, but I just didn’t want anyone seeing me like this. Do I really need to explain myself? Does any woman?
“Gender neutral” has meant, in reality, fewer facilities for women and more for men. But that’s part of the current stupidity that calls restricting women’s access to safe, private spaces progress. In reality, there is nothing neutral about shutting down women-only spaces.
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