Mick Hartley: The tale of the gender neutral toilets

There's a spot of bother over the Old Vic's new toilets. Faced with the familiar cry from women that they were hard done by as far as toilet provision goes - as indeed they are practically everywhere, with queues spilling out of the door while we men nip in and out with no fuss at all - the theatre decided on a refurb. They raised £100,000, and pledged to double the number of ladies' loos. Except they went all woke instead, and decided on going gender-neutral:

Iconic London theatre the Old Vic has made its toilets ‘gender neutral’ just months after promising to double the number of women’s facilities.

Last year, the Old Vic ran a £100,000 fund-raising campaign with the backing of celebrities like Joanna Lumley, pledging to add more women’s toilets to tackle notoriously long waiting queues outside female loos.

But instead, all toilets at the Waterloo-based theatre have been replaced with cubicles, urinals and one gender neutral facility, meaning there are no toilets specifically for women.

The Waterloo-based theatre made the announcement on Twitter and shared pictures of the sleek new toilets, adding that the facilities are ‘self-selection rather than being labelled male or female’....

‘When you come to visit us you might notice something a little different about our new loos. First, there are double the number – 44 loos within the building.

‘Our loos now offer ‘self-selection’ rather than being labelled male or female. This takes a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, approach following advice from surveys conducted with focus groups.

‘When you arrive in the theatre, you will see labels signposting which blocks contain cubicles and which contain urinals. We also have one specifically designed gender neutral loo.

‘You can choose which one you want to use, rather than responding to a label placed on you which you may not identify with.’

For many of us - that is, for men - this might provoke little more a raised eyebrow and a sigh, as we head for the one with the urinals. For women, though, it's not so easily shrugged off. Caroline Prado Perez, on Twitter:

So @oldvictheatre has refurbished their toilets, and ended up giving men 18 facilities practically speaking just for them, plus 24 they share with women. So that’s 42 men have access to. Meanwhile women have access to 24, that they share with men. This is an improvement how?

Now Perez has expanded on her displeasure with an article in today's Sunday Times (£):

[Y]ou can imagine my delight when the Old Vic in south London announced that it was raising £100,000 to carry out extensive refurbishment works, the centrepiece of which was the promise of “more ladies’ loos”. The theatre released a video full of actresses reading out audience feedback. Women were tired of spending the whole interval in a queue.

The oasis of interval drinks seemed almost in sight . . . only for it to dissolve cruelly into a mirage when the Old Vic announced the details of its refurbishment. Rather than doubling the number of women’s loos, the theatre has got rid of them altogether. All the facilities at the Old Vic are now gender-neutral.

Except they aren’t, because bodies aren’t gender-neutral and female ones can’t, on the whole, use urinals. Of which there are 15 in the same lavatory block as a number of cubicles that women can, in theory, use but in practice don’t, because most women don’t want to queue up alongside men urinating. I’m reliably informed by men that they don’t want us there either. [...]

Women in Britain and America fought hard for our right to our own loos in public spaces: campaigners saw it as fundamental to women’s access to those places and they were right. All around the world, women still suffer for lack of women-only lavatories. I have reported on women in Mumbai slums, in refugee camps, in Afghanistan, all of whom faced sexualised violence simply for lack of access to safe, sex-segregated facilities.

Look, I never asked to become head of feminism’s lavatory division. I never expected that one of the greatest effects of writing Invisible Women would be that women would start sending me photos of themselves stuck in the inevitable queue for the ladies’. But here we are. And when feminism calls, I answer. Rather like I wish I could answer whenever nature calls.

As one commenter notes:

They can call them gender-neutral but really they are mixed-sex. Who is asking for that? I have never heard anyone, male or female, demand mixed loos. The UN is still campaigning for single-sex facilities for women and girls in the developing world - and here people are rushing to dismantle them.

It's always women who get the short straw from this gender-identity movement. After years of campaigning for women-only spaces - not just toilets, but in sport and in refuges for victims of domestic abuse - all the hard-fought-for gains are being eroded.

Ophelia B at Butterflies and Wheels has more on the subject - here, here, and here.

Comments

Portland refurbished its City Hall recently and decided to get rid of urinals all together. Patriarchy or something. It didn’t take long before people realized that was wasting water.

Posted by: Dom | October 06, 2019 at 04:09 PM