My First Full-Blown "Gender-Neutral" Bathroom Experience

Women's resistance to biological males in their bathroom is rooted in sound evolutionary psychology. And guess what! The gents don't always like it either.

Look dudes, there are only two. Just call them co-ed. Photo by DC Department of General Services.

No, this was not okay, but I really had to go to the bathroom.

My cousin and I had gone to the Hot Docs movie Shamed in Toronto’s Annex neighborhood, and I really had to tinkle, as my mother would have put it. My cousin directed to me to where he had gone before the movie.

Gender Neutral, the sign said.

I glanced around. I didn’t see anything else. There may have been another potty elsewhere, but it was late, I was tired, we had a subway ride ahead of us, I needed a shower, I had to go to work in the morning, and as people flowed up the stairs, I knew I’d better tee-tee before a line formed.

I entered, finding it was a men’s room with a new sign slapped on the door.

Uncomfortably, I walked past three men at urinals. I entered a stall and tried to do my thing, only to find I suddenly had bashful bladder.

It was downright weird.

I took stock. Did I feel in danger? No. Did I feel threatened? No. Did I feel deeply weird? Yes.

I sat, thinking about the subway ride home—only about fifteen minutes but with a ten-minute walk after. I managed to accomplish a little, at least, and figured I could hold the rest until I got home.

I’m glad I’m past menopause. I would have felt really uncomfortable unwrapping a tampon within earshot of everyone. Now that I think about it, I don’t remember seeing a separate dispenser for ‘lady discards’, although maybe it was behind me and I was too agitated to notice.

I went to the sink, and the fellow who was just finishing exchanged nervous smiles with me as he departed. I washed up quickly and joined my cousin in the lobby. He said something to me, but I wasn’t listening.

“I’m too pissed off to think right now,” I said. “I didn’t want a gender-neutral toilet.” I wasn’t angry at my cuz, but at the cinema. I don’t know if their ladies’ room was still solely for the biologically female or was also gendernutzi, but if I ever go to Bloor Cinema again I’ll definitely look for it as soon as I arrive.

That was the most uncomfortable bathroom experience I’ve ever had. I wrote a polite but irritated email to the cinema later. I’ve been there once or twice before, but it was before narcissistic activists had convinced idiot progressives that it was okay to force women to share bathrooms with the larger, more dangerous sex.

“I don’t like women in my bathroom either,” said my cuz.

He didn’t feel threatened, but he wanted his privacy when he ‘saw a man about a dog’ as my mother also would have put it (she was great for vintage polite or humorous expressions for human waste elimination), and I can’t blame him. He’s not the first man to express that.

I’ve had some other experiences with this gender-neutral bathroom crap, but this was the worst.

My favorite bar in town has kinda sorta not really political ‘gender neutral’ bathrooms. All I share with the hairy-armed is sinks. The stalls are all enclosed rooms with locks. I do glance around for hidden cameras. Dudes can be dudes. But I’m not uncomfortable with it.

A few years ago I attended a drag brunch in Toronto’s Liberty Village. Their in-your-face bathroom sign on the door belligerently proclaimed it was a gender identity free-for-all and if you don’t like it, you can go fuck yourself. I’m paraphrasing. I don’t remember the exact words. But it had, I think, a Pride flag and sounded like it was written by a misogynist man.

It seems like a minor issue to some, but it’s a critical stress to many. I’m not a victim of sexual assault myself, but if I was a sexual assault survivor, I imagine I would feel far more threatened, forced to share a private space with strange men, a sex with a millennia-long history of not controlling their penis very well. We don’t know which ones to trust. Sometimes we trust the wrong ones.

The sign made it glaringly clear how this is a political statement against women’s privacy rights and all but told women who didn’t like it to suck it.

What does the public think?

A 2018 article on the NBC News website noted that there was ‘no link between trans-inclusive policies and bathroom safety’, according to one study. “Data come from public record requests of criminal incident reports related to assault, sex crimes, and voyeurism in public restrooms, locker rooms, and dressing rooms to measure safety and privacy violations in these spaces. This study finds that the passage of such laws is not related to the number or frequency of criminal incidents in these spaces. Additionally, the study finds that reports of privacy and safety violations in public restrooms, locker rooms, and changing rooms are exceedingly rare.”

One must log in from an educational institution to access the study so I can’t see the rest of it. Seven years ago, that may have been true, but today there are more transgender-identifying individuals than before. Seven years later, there are plenty of incidents to question whether it’s a good idea to mix biological males and females in certain places. I’ve documented several of them here, but it’s not exhaustive by any stretch. I add new incidents as I encounter them, but I don’t actively look for them, nor do I include any if I can’t find them from a reliable enough source.

Many poll results since 2018 indicated a growing support for inclusive bathrooms, but I’m not sure how accurate that was, since media reliability, bias and factualism are all over the board today. However, in 2016, a Pew Research Center article found, contrarily, that Americans were pretty divided on the issue. Support was highest among young people and lowest, not surprisingly, with the oldest. Support dropped as age increased.

Nine years later, (that’s today!) Pew found that Americans had grown ‘more supportive’ of restrictive policies for trans people overall. And furthermore, support for using whichever bathroom matches one’s ‘identification’ had dropped as well.

Ten to twelve years ago, there was less attention paid to trans issues than now, and even today, I find people often have no idea any of this is going on. Or don’t understand what the big deal is when someone just wants to take a wiz.

What many don’t understand—or are too young to have experienced themselves—is that not so long go, it wasn’t a big deal to expect people to use the bathroom in accordance with their biological sex. That there were strong taboos about violating the holy sanction of the ladies’ or the gents’.

Many years ago I accidentally used the men’s room at a restaurant and didn’t realize it until a man entered and began using the urinal I had walked right past without noticing. Today I still feel a little embarrassed when I think about it, and it was over thirty years ago. The taboo is strong.

It doesn’t have to be this way

Transactivists have made a very simple process—going to the bathroom—a massive controversy, demonstrating traditional patriarchal male entitlement as they demand women cast aside millions of years of evolutionary survival wiring to be wary of males when they’re in the vulnerable position of going to the bathroom.

Only very recently have women enjoyed protected facilities of their own with locked stall doors. But in other parts of the world, women have learned not to go to the bathroom outside when night falls because of the higher risk of sexual assault. A USA Today article states, “The link between inadequate sanitation and sexual violence has been documented in cities from Kenya to India, as well as in other makeshift urban settlements (such as refugee and disaster-relief camps) in the developing world.”

Going to the bathroom in developing countries with inadequate sanitation facilities increases a woman’s chances of being sexually assaulted.

Just imagine what it was like for thousands of generations of our ancient grandmothers copping a squat in the forest.

Women’s resistance to gender-neutral bathrooms is based in sound sexual assault prevention. While it’s reduced with modern sanitation facilities, it raises the risk by mixing the sexes.

The plain fact is that women have very good reason to fear biological men in their bathrooms, or when forced into ‘gender-neutral’ bathrooms. I don’t understand how progressive feminists can support telling women they don’t have the right to personal safety, and even tell fearful sexual assault victims they should ‘get over it’, but these women also appear to be the most easily gaslit by men.

Hot Docs Cinema might return my email and tell me there was, in fact, a ladies’ loo there, upon which I’ll thank them for correcting me and noting maybe they should have a sign there directing women to it in case they don’t want to use the ‘inclusive bathroom’.

If they respond I’ll update this.

I’ll admit - I think this is really funny :)

When I’m not contemplating that I might have to keep my Mighty Keychain O’ Pain at close range while I make a deposit in First National (thanks one final time, Mom!), I help women and others reclaim their power here at Grow Some Labia.