TOILET MATTERS
according to public toilets in many countries male identifying people are shown as the neutral human figure sign and female identifying people are shown as the human figure with the skirt.
I just realized yesterday, how discriminating public toilets are. apart from the fact, that people who don’t identify with this binary system are completely ignored, these signs hold quite some social prejudice, seemingly saying: “there is the universal human and then there are women”.
while I wasn’t sure, where I stand on the ‘should we separate toilets or not’-debate for a long time, I do now think, we should stop separating – it would make things a lot easier.
waiting times per amount of people would be equal (on that note: it is a fact, that female bodies do have smaller bladders, which is why women have to pee more often than men – any rational conclusion of this would be, that there have to be more toilets for women than men… just sayin’). in the end we are all human beings.
this of course throws up many questions. “what about the pissoirs?!” – sure, I get that. it makes me wonder, why there was a special peeing toilet invented for men, while we women never got our specialized toilet (personally I’m thinking along the lines of squatting, what do you think?).
I also catch myself thinking “well, it is quite nice to go to a bathroom, where only women are, it is somehow a safe space”, - is this a feeling I adopted, because of the culture I grew up in? wasn’t it nice ‘to go to the bathroom together’ with your girlfriends in high school, when you really needed to talk about personal matters? – which just shows how complex the topic is.
I can also hear these:
“I don’t want to pee/shit when a person from the opposite gender is in the bathroom”. really? all human beings are hopefully peeing and shitting on a regular basis, so please, let’s get over it and UNLEARN TO BE ASHAMED of such basic bodily functions.
“I don’t want men to know, that I have my period / I don’t want to see period blood”. another physiological function we should stop being ashamed for – period blood is the very material we were all surrounded by during the first nine months of our existence in the wombs of our mothers, it is literally part of where we all came from.
in any case, I think we should consider the signs on toilet doors.
maybe a sign with a vagina and one with a penis – even that would be more respectful, because it takes the subject down to physical facts, unrelated to what a person is identifying with or whether the person is wearing a skirt on that day.