It might be obvious to everyone living in the dorm’s corridor that that unlabelled door with a big chunky looking lock on it (that is actually unlocked) – but that doesn’t help when you’ve just moved in or are visiting for a night.

(And when you keep looking further afield for toilets, you manage to lock yourself out of the building whilst wearing only nightdress. But that’s a different story.)

I’ve mostly seen truly mixed toilets in queer spaces, which makes it feel like segregation is partly enforced to prevent sexual naughtiness/unwanted molestation – a reason I’m sure was used to be used to keep women out of a lot of places at one time or another.

I think that blogpost is inspired and I was really fascinated when I first read it.

The ones where the upended triangle is actually a woman instead of what I would expect were particularly interesting. And the hijab one, where the woman’s shape is sort of carved out of “negative space” where the male shape is in relief. So what defines the woman is her clothes.

Have a look at this blog post (if you haven’t already seen it that is): http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2010/09/02/guest-post-go-where-sex-gender-and-toilets/

:)

That sounds like the best idea ever – I’m in!

Ah, (fashionably) late to my own party as ever…

Hi Gabrielle,

Thanks for the comment, and for highlighting the language use. As Miranda points out erasure was not intended, but I write – as we all do – from our own particular perspective on the world and mine doesn’t see cis or trans women as being substantively different in terms of taking toilet breaks – they have both chosen to live as women so all suffer equally from the torturous queues for the loos.

More generally, I suppose I generally use the term “women” (rightly or wrongly) without the suffixes to mean “people who identify as women”.

In this instance, I used the reference to biology in the sentence to infer “those who were born cis women and therefore need to pee sitting down”, which I had thought was sufficient, although in hindsight I guess I should have probably used “with cis female genitalia”.

The bit that especially got me thinking was when I did the research for the article and realised that actually you don’t *need* to be sitting down, and that expectation is a cultural / social one and therefore falls more into the categories of “feminine” attributes than pre-requisites for functioning in a particularly shaped body.

You’ve given me a lot of food for thought – so thank you. There’s obviously a conflation in my mind between female/woman, and I do use them interchangeably as being terms for sex and do not generally use either “cis” or “trans”, which makes me think that perhaps I need to work on this. Without citing it as any form of defence, this sort of language use is down to my own background and also an amount of artistic licence in how I use words when I’m writing, both for brevity and comedic effect – which I accept might not be entirely appropriate at all times, so I’ll need to put some more consideration into that.

When I write, I enjoy using words that do have a number of meanings, especially in this arena. I think that the play of meaning and interpretation of words – how we come to use them in the way we do – is part of developing our understanding of our world view and also of making better, clearer dialogue within feminism (and within our lives). I think that the word “woman” for example comes with a whole barrel of issues that we could probably devote our lives to unpicking without even touching on cis/trans.

Skipping to the end: I did use “women” in tandem with the reference to “biology” as a cipher for “cis women”. My bad.

Hi Gabrielle,

As a quick edit I’ve now inserted “cisgender” into the line. Erasure is certainly not the intention in this piece, and I don’t think it alters the sense of Sarah’s point to add it in. I agree that “biology” is readable as “cis-as-default” so thank you for raising the point.

Biology has made it difficult – though not impossible – for CIS-GENDERED women to urinate standing up.

In reading the rest of your article I realise that you attempt to be inclusive of trans individuals needs, hence I thought I’d point out the assumption of cis by default which is a form of erasure. But a good article otherwise – supplying enough toilets for women who pee sitting down, either by biology or social convention, is an equality issue.