Recently, I got a message from a student who asked me to join an e-mail action. The goal was to bring the trans-exclusionary lack of bins in male designated bathrooms to the attention of a university’s staff. In response, the university explained that the bins are special hygiene boxes that are emptied by a specific company. All the new boxes would need to be included in the contract. They were willing to do something, as they asked the students to point out in which campus to put them. In other words, it was going to cost them, and they were only willing to put the bins in specific places.
This example shows not only how trans accessibility depends on the willingness of individual institutions, it similarly shows how feigned tolerance favors arguments of practicality and money over change. In this chapter, I analyze how people navigate the debate on gender separated toilets and exclusions. First, I show how the public bathroom is depoliticized by narratives of bathroom inattention and ‘othering’ practices, rendering the space unworthy of socio-political action and change. Then, I show how the space is politicized and made intelligible as a place of queer exclusion and inequalities. I extend on the reimagining of bathrooms, highlighting how the fear of the ‘other sex’ and protectionist feminism especially underlies resistance to change. Lastly, I map out possibilities of queering the bathroom space.
(De)politicizing the public bathroom
Generally, the public bathroom was narrated as a practical, goal-oriented space which many had not given much further thought. I read this in the accounts of “never thought of it”, “it is just a place to go to the toilet”, and “it’s just a practicality, a quick transaction”. At the same time, most participants could point out issues considered worthy of socio-political attention, although especially for cisgendered men, those problems often were of ‘others’. What seemed to be counted most as issues were those of hygiene, inaccessibility to disabled people, the commodification of toilets, the lack of seated public toilet options, non-cisgendered people’s accessibility and in two instances the cultural insensitivity of toilet design. For the focus of this
thesis, I will dedicate to how gendered bathroom issues were foregrounded, had been inattentive of or both.
First, I show how the inattention to the bathroom as a space of gendered inequalities intersects with the inattention to gender diversity. Especially when I asked how the public toilet is understood as a political issue, it became clear how those who benefit most of the toilet cistem fail to see how their inclusion requires exclusion under the realm of practicality.
“For me it is just a practicality without further thought […] But for some people it can really be an issue […] like really where should I go? [...] it is something you don’t think of as possibly being an issue but I understand how it is.” –Peter
Bluntly stated, it is easier to understand the toilet as a mere practicality when it has been built for you, on the false premise of cisnormativity and heteronormativity. The favoring of especially cisgendered men in the toilet cistem illustrates how male bodies are still taken as default bodies. As Peter shows, his inattention was not necessarily accompanied with intolerance or lack of empathy. Still, does show a lack of knowledge on how exactly toilets construct an issue to queer people further than the struggle of which bathroom side to pick.
Especially for cisgendered men, besides the question of hygiene, the toilet was a rather vague issue for ‘the other’, the women, the disabled, the queer.
Not only the inattention to queer experiences, but the reluctance to politicize the toilet cistem as affecting cisgendered people reinforces the idea that this cistem ‘works’, just not for some. Mila, who earlier expressed frustration about the pee disparity, nevertheless believed that it is political to ‘others’. Because she is a cisgendered women, it could not possibly be political to her. When I referred to what she had mentioned earlier about unequal opportunity to use the toilet, she revised her answer.
“Not for me specifically, I think because to me it's actually kind of a good situation because I am indeed just cis. But I understand that for other people it can be quite a political thing.”
“I'm starting to think about it now… if you want to change this, I think you would have to do it through politics”
Without claiming the toilet cistem affects all users equally, there is a certain power in emphasizing how it is affecting everyone, however more subtly. As Halberstam articulated in The Undercommons, “the mission then […] is to recognize that when you seek to make things
better, you are not just doing it for the Other, you must also be doing it for yourself. […] No one will really be able to embrace the mission of tearing ‘this shit down’ until they realize that the structures they oppose are not only bad for some of us, they are bad for all of us. Gender hierarchies are bad for men as well as women and they are really bad for the rest of us” (Harney
& Moten, 2013:10). Especially cisgender women might be prone to render the toilet problems they face as especially personal instead of political, under the realm of post-feminism and the idea that the only differences left between men and women must be natural or logical. The recognition that the subordination of women’s needs, the ignorance of queer bodies and the obsession with men peeing standing up are all products of the same binary ideology might renew understandings of whose problem the toilet is.
As binary bathrooms have become so natural, its separated nature itself had been especially inattentive of. Rose mentioned how she was “not aware of going to the female toilet” at all, because she does not consider it as one of the two options, but a given. In the following quote, she reflects on both the naturalness and the strangeness of the gender binary.
“I think it's so ingrained, that I don't really think about the fact that there's a split in there, it's just very natural, while it's super unnatural actually! Because of this conversation I think again it is bizarre actually, but normally I really don't think about it.” – Rose
The bizarreness of the naturalness illustrates how the cultural fantasy of perfectly categorizable men and women has become so plausible, explaining away all alternative identifications and bodily beings (Brown 2004). The relevance of gendered bathrooms is only questioned when bringing to the surface what has been subconscious before. As Goffman remarked upon, “the functioning of sex-differentiated organs is involved, but there is nothing in this functioning that biologically recommends segregation; that arrangement is totally a cultural matter” (1977:316).
Rose herself seems a passive actor, following the hegemonic gender frames as learned to do so, while reflecting on its bizarreness. However, she can be understood as (unwillingly) actively reinforcing the binary too, specifically because of her inattention to having made a choice. As sociologist Spencer Cahill put it, “every time we enter a sex segregated bathroom [...] we display our sex-identity to the audience-at-large and reaffirm its importance” (1985:45). The strongest form of depoliticization is not believing you make a choice at all.
Like Rose’s reflection, the autopilot on which binary bathroom options were navigated by cisgendered people did not stay unrecognized, which I read in accounts such as “I’ve known it all my life” and ‘”it's kind of a learned thing”. In contrast to Rose, the recognition of learned
behavior often formed a legitimization to the divide more so than an explanation as to why it has been so unquestioned. As a naturalistic fallacy, there allegedly must have been a good reason this learned behavior has come to feel so ‘natural’.
The more privileged or ‘passing’ in the toilet cistem, the more inattention is intertwined with the narrative, for they are less disadvantaged by bathroom design and policing. Those who had actively expressed their frustration about gendered bathrooms similarly rendered the toilet
‘just’ a toilet.
“I like it better when there is a toilet for everyone, but I don't attach much to it, I have to pee anyway, um, and I don't pee at urinals so I just go to the women. Yeah I don't care. I am very aware of how everyone will probably see me as a woman anyway, because in the society we have now I am put in that box” - Sam
Sam expresses both her wish for inclusive toilets as well as her understanding of the bathroom as mundane, accompanied by the notion that others will see them as a woman anyway. As Sam is femme presenting and uses the female bathroom, they are not as much affected as someone who does not adhere to the gender norms of the bathroom side they go to. Thus, the conceptualization of the bathroom as a space of exclusion as well as a mundane practicality exists simultaneously.
Interestingly, the same discourses of normality and practicality were used to politicize the toilet space as well. It is ‘just’ a toilet, why should it be separated on gender in the first place? Sam for instance, explained how she would “get a bit angry that we are so uptight about the man/woman toilet, everyone has to pee, don't be so difficult.” Jordan similarly noted how separated toilets made no sense at all in their male-dominated work environment, as it was not practical considering the amount of users of each space. Both especially used the idea of (practical) difficulty on gender separated toilets, whereas others used practical and constructional difficulty to oppose gender neutral toilets.
The discourse of normality is similarly used for both normative as well as marginalized understandings of the bathroom. Even though most referred to binary toilets as ‘gewone WC’s’, normal toilets, some especially referred to all-gender toilets as ‘gewoon’. Especially in the Dutch context, the words ‘gewoon’ or ‘normaal’ have strong normalizing effects (Van Lisdonk, Nencel & Keuzenkamp 2018). As Van Lisdonk, Nencel & Keuzekamp have shown, it is increasingly used by gay people to normalize their sexuality, such as saying one is gewoon homo, ‘just/ordinarily gay’ (2018). It seems as if gewoon trans, gewoon nonbinary as well as
gewoon wc for gender neutral toilets is often a step too far, as gender is still commonly understood as more fixed and static than sexuality. At the same time, as some are already using these words at least for all-gender toilets, the discourse of normality on gender might slowly be shifting.
Especially for cisgendered women and non-normatively gendered who had more personal attachment to the topic of bathroom inequality, the bathroom was seen as a very political place. Mithi, for instance, reflects on how feminist and queer issues formed her understanding of the bathroom as political.
“I really live by the second wave feminist slogan of personal is political. And the bathroom is the most personal thing. It is the most political thing as well, because bathrooms really show that that the world is designed in ways that either favor you or not favor you. Like the right to pee is a basic right, it's like the right to have a dignified life. So the issue of bathrooms, especially for people who fall outside of the binary, it is a very political issue.”
Mithi’s understanding of the bathroom speaks very much to the Butlerian question of which bodies come to matter, ‘which ways of living count as ‘life’, lives worth protecting, lives worth saving, lives worth grieving’ (Butler 1993:16), which bodies are allowed to pee, in this case.
Especially the use of the word dignified speaks to the question of who gets to be a ‘decent’
human and who does not; as privacy, dignity, prudishness and hygiene has long become intertwined with current day toilet habits (Cavanagh 2010: Chess et al. 2004), the experience of awkwardness, discomfort, non-belonging and even violence in public toilets can be considered a very political move of showing and reflecting who is and who isn’t counted into humanity.
Luke similarly politicized the bathroom space, referring to the current political climate in the Netherlands when it comes to attitudes towards gender diversity.
“To me this is a political issue, mainly in the sense that politics is very much behind, […] politics is still very binary. And that is also because there is only one non-binary person in the whole political realm perhaps? […] it sucks, it's also not on the top of the agenda because of course there are so many problems. And what also makes it political: you also have a party that has literally campaigned with ‘how many genders do you have today?” – Luke
This account speaks to the broader political climate into which these questions of gendered in-and exclusion enfolds. Like Halberstam in his work on Female Masculinity (1998:20), Luke
similarly questions why there is still little evidence of “multiple gender options, multiple gender categories and real-life nonmale and nonfemale options for embodiment and identification”. Luke emphasizes that not only what counts as a problem matters, but who gets to do the counting matters when it comes to which issues make the political agenda. With democratically elected politicians in power that ridicule gender diversity in a country that portrays as tolerant and egalitarian it seems an almost impossible quest to strive for (increased) gender neutral bathrooms when especially this is seen as political, whereas the continued institutionalized gender separation of bathrooms is not.
Petronella similarly emphasizes how the wish for gender neutral toilets is mainly seen as political as opposed to the wish to conserve gender separated toilets.
“It's very, of course, ideological. Because you break with conservatism. […] Gender neutral toilets are changing people’s habits. And if something in the habits changes, then you change the construction. […] And that's very political, because it's political not to want that change as well as wanting it. […] I know some people hate it, but queerness is political. It is an ideal.
Unfortunately it's very political, because it's not normal.” - Petronella
The sentence “I know some people hate it” is very interesting, for it emphasizes how others are understood as reluctant to see the personal as political, which is especially understandable to those non-normatively gendered and sexualized. What for should my identity be political, whereas heterosexual cisgenders are not? Petronella emphasize how vouching for that what does not constitute of the current norm is seen as political, ideological, while wanting to uphold gender separation itself must be understood as political and ideological as well. Changing one of the few public spaces that are so explicitly segregated by gender symbolizes a bigger movement of abolishing hegemonic understandings of dichotomous sex and gender in society.
At the same time, resisting change symbolizes the strong attachment to the continuation of the binary gender system.
In conclusion, the bathroom is depoliticized by inattention, cisgendered and male privilege, notions of practicality and ignorance to queer lives and bodies. Discourses of normality, practicality and difficulty are employed on both sides of the debate, and especially women and non-normatively gendered politicized the bathroom space in the light of faced inequalities. I will build on these notions in the following section to further understand toilet activism and how the right to pee for everyone is made intelligible.
Toilet activism and making intelligible the right to pee
Cultivated bathroom inattention and ignorance of women’s and queer lives and experiences especially constituted of being misunderstood under those most affected by the bathroom binary. Five participants engaged in what I shall call toilet activism, the efforts to bring under the attention of or demand action to change exclusionary toilet facilities and design. What underlies these accounts is the necessity to make intelligible the question to those who do not understand. Especially lack of knowledge and ignorance was foregrounded as resisting change.
In the following account, Sam explains how and why they took action when she saw a note in the women’s toilet that referred to the service desk for menstruation products.
“I sent an angry email with 'why isn't it in the men's restroom’, there are also trans men who have their periods or non-binary people who use the men's toilet, but apparently people really don't think about this. Either they're really ignorant, or they just really do not consider that as an option.” – Sam
The lack of knowledge on trans, non-binary or queer needs are both constitutive of and reinforced by binary bathroom design, facilities and binary language with which we speak of it. The ignorance dominant discourse represents and creates for non-normatively gendered bodies, experiences and voices prompts people like Sam to have to make intelligible the question of bathroom inequality. More firmly, they need to remind people in power to change bathroom design that trans, queer and non-binary people exist, for their bodily needs and possibilities are rendered unintelligible in the toilet cistem.
Noah similarly reached out to educational institutions to vouch for more gender neutral toilets. The reaction they mostly got was, as Noah said, ‘we think it is important but we already have a gender neutral toilet somewhere’. Even though none explicitly opposed more gender neutral toilets, they foregrounded many practical objections to legitimize refraining from action.
A similar disparity was found when Noah discussed the issue with people on campus, saying
“I don't know if they were against it per se, but they especially thought ‘why should we pay attention to that’”. Not explicit opposition, but implicit opposition and resistance in the form of inattention and lack of empathy is what was faced most, and might be even harder to refute.
Having to share personal experiences in order to be understood was a recurring notion, as empathy seemed easier to be returned when being the ‘queer friend’ as opposed to the ‘queer other’. The following account is especially illustrative of this.
“When I told that colleague of mine what I had experienced, what friends of mine had experienced, why it is important, and that it does not have to come at the expense of her women’s toilet… She almost immediately said like ‘gosh, I never thought of it that way’. And that’s it. It’s the whole ‘I have never thought of it that way”. – Luke
What is especially interesting in this account, is how Luke has to ensure women will not lose
‘their’ toilet. This can be understood as a reaction to subtle exclusionary feminism. The already insufficient seated public toilet options and the symbolic value women’s bathrooms hold on solidarity, safety and one’s exclusive place in a world designed for men constitutes of the fear to lose designated female space. Taking up space for non-normatively gendered and sexualized people, literately and figuratively, is often only thinkable when it creates a new, third category that contests the binary at most, but certainly must not disrupt its dominance. The whole “I have never thought of it that way” underlines the degree to which cisnormativity is ingrained and illustrates, again, the common ignorance to queer lives, possibilities and struggle.
Petronella, who similarly mentioned a discussion with a colleague on inclusive toilets, encountered a more explicit uttering of TERF-ism and transphobia.
“I recently had a conversation with a colleague about gender neutral toilets in which I really saw a transphobic under layer. […] So I sent an email afterwards explaining how I didn't feel like it then, but what I see here is you do this and this. Please read up on yourself and we'll have another conversation. To which I was told that I might be women excluding […] I remember she said ‘oh yea but then it becomes very difficult again, because I no longer know who is and who is not.’ So someone must be passing for you, only then she can come in to your toilet.” - Petronella
The accusation of being women excluding when being trans inclusive is a classical TERF narrative. Especially the notion of “no longer knowing who is and who is not” portrays an essentialist view on sex and gender, being convinced of the existence of ‘real’ women which implies the exitance of ‘fake’ women that pose danger to the ‘real’ ones. As Petronella articulates, ‘someone must be passing for you’. Someone must be appropriately cisgendered to mend your gender panic and to make you feel safe by portraying a gender norm conforming performance. Again, lack of knowledge is pointed out as the primal cause of transphobia and misunderstanding. However, as Kopas pointed out, the efforts of Petronella to make their colleague read up on the topic might not have effect on deep-rooted attachments to the gender system (2012).