Was I out of order

[YouwouldthinkIhavemoresense]

Yesterday I was at a football match and at a stadium. It was heaving and I have never been to a stadium, or indeed a football match, before.
Had my children with me. One of each sex. Just me to add. No other adults.

Anyway, took my youngest to the female toilet with me just before half time. Two men ( or at least I thought they were) - entered as well. Both very masculine looking and dressed very sporty with very short/ shaved haircuts.

So me being me, said quite nonchalantly to one of them “ this is the ladies “… just that.

One of them responded with “ we ARE female “
I apologised for my mistake and thought that was it.

Well, with that, there was then a tirade of passive aggressive behaviour/ comments from both of them: it was all very unpleasant. They even spoke to each other loudly about me whilst in the cubicles.

I then bumped into them whilst washing my hands and they continued to goad me- staring at me, laughing, telling each other to “ calm down” and “ that I wasn’t worth it” , commenting on my face/ appearance.
It was horrid. And all this time I had my child with me.

AIBU in feeling uncomfortable or was my initial reaction really that provoking?

Preparing to be flamed 😬

Well possibly, but seems not very likely to me.

That’s sad to hear. I should have qualified my statement by talking about my own response, which is that ten years ago I wouldn’t have looked twice at a ‘masculine’ woman in the ladies. These days I might do a surreptitious double take to check it was actually a woman.

I'm sure if someone had challenged that man he'd have decided to apologise and change his mind about sexually assaulting someone.

Should we just have mixed six loos then @Iwasafool?

Ive very very rarely come across a man in a woman’s space (apart from questionably aged boys with their mums), but I’ve come across an awful lot of bigoted homophobic women.

Yes that was exactly what I was saying. Do you seriously think challenging a man who is a woman's loo intending to sexually assault someone is going to stop him?

Personally I think single room toilets off a corridor are safer if that helps you.

No we should have lots of nice individual toilets with sinks and plenty of space. That would solve all the toilet angst. Since that quite often isn’t practical we have to have single sex toilets.

Individual self-contained cubicles are a nice idea but actually impractical once you think about it. If they have gaps above/below the doors, voyeurism can take place. This sort of thing is unfortunately absolutely rife- eyes/cameras/phones etc in changing rooms. There was an MN thread the other day about a group of men who’d received paltry sentences for filming teenage girls in a swimming pool changing room. The number of posters on that thread reporting acts of indecency and voyeurism in public spaces was staggering. The alternative is to make the cubicles completely enclosed with no gaps, in which case there is a risk of a person becoming ill in a cubicle and not being visible from the outside. I have learnt from some wise posters on MN that this is a concern for people with epilepsy/other medical conditions/drug users etc. it’s also dangerous for fire evacuation because emergency services will not be able to easily check or get to anyone in the cubicles.

So no, single sex it is, and must remain.

Well I very much doubt he'd have continued to walk in, approach the woman in there and assault her, knowing that another person had taken enough notice of him to challenge him. Do you?

Do you seriously think a man is going to continue with his plan to carry out a sexual assault when he has been noticed and challenged on his way in to the women's toilets?

You're so right - rapists always stop when someone notices and challenges them, of course. If fact, if you just politely say 'I notice you're a man who might be planning an assault,' they'll totally change their minds.

FFS.

Rape apology at its worst.

You just have doors that fit properly, alarm cords and locks that can be opened from outside in an emergency- this all exists already in accessible toilets.

The problem is the space it would need, and therefore also the associated costs which no venue wants to pay.

You are NOT being unreasonable. It is well within women's rights to lay boundaries and to protect them - by instructing men to leave. You genuinely thought these were men, fair enough.

The bad behaviour was absolutely on them, they could have just told you they were women and left it at that - they must have known they looked masculine, as they have chosen to appear the way they have.

To speak to you like in front of your child is terrible. To basically undermine a mother trying to lay boundaries in front of her child is really fucking stupid.

Sadly it seems you bumped into some gender zealots, who believe they can act this way and bully people. Sorry for you and your daughter xx

You are making up stories.

The OP didn't say that she instructed men to leave. Rather, she glanced at two people and said, 'nonchalantly' that 'this is the ladies'.

She then took a second look and realised these were two women.

I am so disgusted with the idea that these women owe it to everyone to perform femininity in a certain way. Where do we stop with that? 'OK, you can't have a short haircut - you must know how you look! Ok, you also can't wear a shirt - you must know how you look!'

It's not your job to be the toilet police. 🙄 It sounds as though these women responded badly to your comment which they shouldn't have done. But it was honestly not appropriate for you to confront them officiously when you hadn't established the most basic facts. As you said yourself, when you looked more closely it was clear they were women. Maybe next time hold your tongue before making an inappropriate comment.

I just don’t think I see it as a particularly awful thing to be mistaken for the other sex. I was often mistaken for a boy when I was a child. My DH remembers being missexed when he worked behind a bar as he had long hair and had his back to the customer who addressed him as ‘darling’ and then looked disappointed when DH turned round 😂 We both survived those experiences. I just can’t imagine being that outraged that someone has made a mistake because they didn’t look carefully. Maybe they’ll be more careful in future!

The thing is this won’t be the first time this has happened to these women, and when people make these comments you don’t know if they will realise their mistake and shut up/apologise or double down and give you a load of hassle or abuse (and throw in some homophobia and threats to call security or the police)- which means people will react defensively sometimes when actually they don’t need to.

To speak to you like in front of your child is terrible. To basically undermine a mother trying to lay boundaries in front of her child is really fucking stupid.

Not as stupid as the lazy and dim witted stereotypes the op is teaching her daughter by presuming that anyone not performing femininity ‘correctly’ is a man.

It is well within women's rights to lay boundaries and to protect them

Women’s spaces don’t need to be protected from women- not even butch women with short hair.

I still don’t see how you’d be able to tell
from the outside if someone had collapsed inside the cubicle.

Please don't be ridiculous. You'd need to lack the wits you were born with to believe that a person is as likely to commit a crime of any sort in the full knowledge they'd been observed and challenged before hand. Are you not familiar with the concept of 'witnesses' and how undesirable they are to criminals?
The very reason the man in the scenario managed to gain access to the woman was because he wore a jacket to make it look like he was a station official. To reduce the likelihood anyone would notice and challenge him. Why? If he didnt care one way of the other?
You should also make sure you understand the meaning of terms like 'rape apologist' before you use them as cheap insults in a serious discussion, as it has no other relevance here. At the same time reflecting on why you're so invested in convincing people that attempts to challenge men in women's spaces are pointless. Even if only some attacks are prevented by intervention, its worth it.

If they hadn’t pulled the cord?

Presumably because there would be noise when it happened/people would know they had been waiting for ages and no one was coming out/if the person in there was with someone they would know they hadn’t come back/the person who was in trouble could shout or use their phone/colleges could notice someone was not at there desk but hadn’t signed out/teachers would notice kids weren’t back in class/cleaners are always doing rounds/people who are prone to falling or fainting often have alarm buttons or a sensor that goes off if it senses dropping etc.

The chance of someone silently becoming completely incapacitated during the two minutes they are in a public loo is not large.

Its been a working system for accessible toilets for years- and the people who use those are far more vulnerable to accidents or sudden illness than the general population as a rule.

They were women. Just ordinary women.

Not men dressed as women, or men in fake uniforms hell bent on trying to rape people.

They are in fact just as vulnerable to men as any other woman… but also subject to questioning and passive aggressive comments (in THEIR SAFE SPACE) from other women who are too lazy to actually look at people before they do their toilet monitor bit.

Yes, they were women. Yes, the OP should have looked properly. We are in complete agreement on that. However, there are people on here arguing not that the OP should have looked properly, but the reverse, that she should have not looked at all, and minded her own business, because challenging a man in the women's toilets would not prevent him carrying out a sexual assault.
A PP particularly invested in the idea women should ignore who is in our spaces went as far as to call me a 'rape apologist' for stating the obvious, that an intervention from a member of the public can prevent a crime.
And while I agree with you that challenges need to be done with care to avoid upsetting GNC women, disproportionate anger at the OP, belittling her attempts to protect the space with comments like 'toilet monitoring', excusing the abusive behaviour of the women in front of a child, are not helpful. The OP made an error in trying to do something I believe we should all be doing. Her takeaway should be to look more closely, not as many on here are pushing, to not do it again.

Clearly challenging actual men in women’s spaces is a good thing- just make sure that’s what you are doing instead of adding to the pressure on women to conform to the ideal gender norms of the male gaze.

what, you mean the alarm cords that cleaners, parents with small kids and everyone and his dog tie up because its 'in the way'?

People using disabled toilets can't leave that cord alone, never mind putting them in every single cubicle.