Are Unisex Toilets Unfair for Women?

Public toilets in Australia used to be pretty simple. One set of toilets for females and one set of toilets for males. The male toilets almost always contained a urinal. Nowadays though, at least in my local area, the local council are replacing almost all the toilet blocks with rows of unisex toilets. Some parks also have unisex showers, which for some reason, are always locked. I guess they only open them up for special occasions. Each unisex toilet consists of a single toilet and a blue light, presumably to discourage drug use. Now before I get started with my discussion, I’d just like to point out that I’m not against unisex toilets per se, but there certainly are issues which I’ll point out soon.

I don’t know why my local council have gone on a unisex toilet splurge, but I presume it has something to do with transgender issues. I read through this article on the ABC recently titled, “Transgender people withdrawing from society due to lack of gender-neutral toilets”. It basically talks about the difficulties transgender people face when using regular male or female toilets. Based on their gender identity, some are simply not socially accepted in either toilet and have faced abuse and so on. So I get that. Everyone deserves the right to safely use a public toilet without feeling threatened, hence the need for at least some unisex toilets.

However, the local council have not just installed a couple of unisex toilets – they’ve replaced all the male/female toilets with unisex toilets, and this in my opinion has had unintended consequences. When I was at the local park with my family, we witnessed a lady walking in and out of each stall basically saying, “F***ing disgusting!”. She was obviously upset with the cleanliness of the toilets. As my 10-year-old son correctly pointed out, there are no urinals in these new toilet blocks, and this has caused problems. Just based on casual observation, 90% of visits by men are standing visits. Because there are no urinals, men have no other option but to use these unisex stalls, and lets face it, no matter how careful they are, there’s going to be some spillage. It’s not because they’re all lazy, there is actually some physics behind it that I won’t go into here. The point is, after dozens of men have used these stalls throughout the day, they are quite literally covered in urine.

Unfortunately for women, when they visit the toilet, they have to sit down 100% of the time (I assume). So half the population (men) can get away with standing up 90% of the time, so don’t really have to deal with these hygiene issues, but the other half of the population (women) have to either spend time cleaning the toilet before each visit, or avoid these public toilets altogether. And I presume some transgender people suffer these same issues. On top of this, there are also some religious issues. Here’s an article from the ABC that shows that some Muslim women have had issues sharing the same facilities with men. In order to avoid this, they illegally sought the use of private facilities at a surf club stating that they had no other option. Unisex toilets simply do not meet their religious requirements.

All of this could quite easily be fixed. Instead of replacing female/male toilets with rows and rows of unisex toilets, why not just put in a couple of unisex toilets that everyone is free to use, as well as male toilets with urinals, and separate female toilets? Then females can happily use the female toilets knowing that there won’t be men in their pissing all over the place. 90% of men can just go use the urinals in their designated section. And transgender people who don’t feel comfortable in either the male or female toilets can use the unisex toilets. But unfortunately, it seems like society is always so extreme. We either only have male and female toilets and nothing else, or we just have unisex toilets! Surely, there’s a happy middle ground? By the way, I like how Google cut off the rest of this sentence in the news article summary. “All toilets are sin!”.

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