In the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision, as I reel from the glee of the anti-trans lobby and wonder just what is it that drives people to hate each other so much, I’ve been thinking about toilets.
This isn’t a new preoccupation for me; when I was still working full-time in the university sector, I observed the general unpleasantness of the toilet facilities in those Higher Education institutions in which I had worked, which culminated in a fixation on proper flushing which bordered on the obsessive. I wrote about this, complete with illustrations, back in 2016, when gender-neutral toilets were still quite a new idea. I remarked then that I am “pretty insecure about toilets” and seem to have more toilet nightmares than others to whom I’ve told my dreams: loos with no doors, loos with no walls between them, loos with no actual loo in the cubicle, not being able to find the loos, all that and far, far more.
But what hasn’t featured either in my nightmares or in reality are trans women using the loos. In my waking life, I don’t really look at other people as they go in and out of the cubicles, or wash their hands. There’s the occasional moment of shock, nonetheless: loos where the facilities are segregated but the handwashing area is shared with men, something that I find odd, or – from when I was a student in Paris in the early 1980s – mixed loos where you had to walk past the men doing their thing with urinals, to make it to the cubicles at the back. A bit alarming the first time, but as nobody was making a fuss, it was fine.
Since I was a child, I’ve been someone who uses loos a lot. This isn’t due to any physical condition, but rather to a fear of not being able to find one when I need it; better go while the going’s good. If I am in an unfamiliar place, that psychological need intensifies. As a serious user of public transport, I know all too well the risk of finding that no loo on the train is functioning, or that the station loos are all closed.
But trans women assaulting cis women in the loo? Really, never encountered it and never met anyone who has.
I do, however, have experience of loo confusion.
A few months ago, we were in an unfamiliar area of London and the coffee shop didn’t have loos; they told us there were public ones just over there. I was approaching from the wrong direction to see the signs clearly, but followed what looked like a woman down the stairs. I was surprised to see a row of urinals, opposite cubicles. The person who looked like a woman approached a urinal. “How very modern and Parisian,” I thought, as I went into a cubicle. When I emerged up the stairs, I realised I had been in the Gents: oops. None of the other users seemed remotely bothered by my presence. My husband was very amused.
I recalled a story told by my late father. Driving through an unfamiliar town, he’d needed the loo, and gratefully found the public toilets. While he was washing his hands, a woman came in and he politely told her she was in the wrong place: this was the Gents. Embarrassed, she left. As he emerged, he realised he’d been in the Ladies. There was of course no sign of the woman: had she gone to the Gents, or gone away to tell stories of predatory males in the Ladies?
I also have experience of choosing to use the Gents. A London theatre: long queue for the Ladies, no sign of anyone in the Gents. So I use the Gents. Speaking at a conference for midwives: same pattern. In such cases, I encourage other women to use the Gents too. If the Ladies isn’t working but the Gents is – which happened recently when I was visiting a cathedral – I use the Gents and maybe post someone outside to warn nervous men that there is a woman in there. Many years ago, when I was first on General Synod, I took a wrong turn in Church House Westminster and ended up in something which no longer exists: the Bishops’ Loo. This was long before women could be bishops, of course. There was no sign of anyone using it, so I took advantage of the opportunity. That felt properly transgressive.
So, having confessed all that, back to the current claims that trans women will have to use the Gents because they were assigned male at birth, and the rather less discussed point that this would mean trans men using the Ladies: people who may be taking hormones which mean they have beards and a ‘masculine’ musculature. In my academic life I have written on the history of ‘bearded women’ (for example, here), and I do wonder what is supposed to happen if a woman, one who was assigned female at birth and who has serious amounts of facial hair, turns up in the Ladies. Put that alongside questions over women who just don’t conform to current ideals of what a woman should look like, and I hope you can see that this is… a mess. Alongside various quirky ways of signalling which loo is which, the standard symbols are a stick person with trousers (man) and a stick person in a skirt (woman). A woman who wears skirts, I am often the only person in the Ladies not in trousers.
Personally, I think that if a trans woman turns up in the Ladies, that’s entirely fine. And if a trans man feels that the Gents is an unsafe place for them, then please come along to the Ladies too. The Ladies has only cubicles, so nobody has to show their bits. We’ve all got to go, and nobody should find that their toilet nightmares have become reality.
The retiring academic 
