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 😬

What point are you trying to make? That people touch alarm cords in toilets?

@5128gap 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? If he was challenged by a lone woman in there then yes I think he would.

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? Oh so there was someone else there while the woman was being assaulted. Yes that does make a difference as it would probably make him think twice whether he was challenged or not. In the OPs case she doesn't' mention anyone else being there so if two men walked into the ladies loo with ill intent do you think they'd stop because a long woman challenges them?

The single self contained cubicles that I hae used don't have gaps above/below the doors.

Yabu, you're not the toilet police

There are some in my town, if you are in there with the door locked for 15 minutes you get a warning that if you don't press the button by the lock the door will automatically open. You get a countdown, think it might be 30 seconds so you have time to press the button. The other good thing is the doors open outwards so if someone has collapsed in there they won't get hit by the door and also it means there can't be anyone hiding behind the door when you go in. They feel so much safer than the old toilet blocks.

They do sound good @Iwasafool. I have yet to see any of those in a public space and given how skint local councils apparently are, I’m not sure I’ll be seeing them any time soon, but I can hope!

I see we were at cross purposes. In the scenario I referenced in my comments, a man had walked into the women's toilet at a busy station, which typically would have required him to enter the wrong space in sight of other members of the public. He did so without being challenged, and if he had been, would have very likely slunk away with an excuse rather than continued to proceed with his intended assault due to the high risk of being caught. I didn't mean the assaulted women could have prevented it by challenging him herself at the time of the assault. (Although in fact she did challenge him, then reported him, and he is now in prison.)
And no, I don't think a lone woman can protect herself from two men by speaking out, of course not. But the thread has gone further than that, with several people telling the OP to mind her own business about who uses women's toilets, which is poor and dangerous advice.

They are really good although on a thread on here about single cubicle toilets I was told they were terrible and posters wouldn't use them as a man's bum might have been on the seat so they'd prefer the old toilet blocks which I think are sometimes dangerous and often scary. I'm thinking of walking into a block with maybe up to 20 cubicles and you have no idea who might be hiding in one of them and in the ones we used to have they were often quite dark at night.

It is a shame it always comes down to money.

OK but that scenario is nothing like the OP.

It doesn't need to be. It was an example to illustrate the danger of persuading women to 'mind their own business' about who is using women's toilets.

You know what's also sexist and misogynistic? Assuming someone is a man because they're not presenting themselves prettily enough for you.

I've got zero sympathy for you.

Oh yeah- there is one single toilet like that on a beach car park in Cornwall, of all the odd places for an expensive toilet to be built!

I'm in the south west as well but not Cornwall. Maybe the south west is going to set the trend in decent, safe public toilets.

Well maybe if you'd explained it was people being seen and identified and challenged outside the toilet it would have been clearer.

My god the responses on the thread are idiotic.

'They were WOMEN and not men, they weren't a threat' - YES, but the whole point is the OP MISTOOK them for women. A mistake.

'women don't need to conform to stereotypes' - No one is saying that, however if you look so much like a man, then sometimes people might mistake you for one.

People who employ their stereotypes before their eyes, yeah- and if that’s you then you should accept people thinking you are a dick.

I'm not really sure what it means to 'employ their stereotypes before their eyes'

If you are trying to say we shouldn't see in stereotypes... it is literally how the human brain makes sense of the world.

We look at something and instantly we fit it into categories we know . If it has a trunk and leaves we know it's a tree. This process happens in a split second.

We of course do it with male and female, especially if we ARE female as it is a survival mechinism. If two women have short haircuts like a man, are wearing typically male clothing, and maybe walk and move in a masculine way, it can be easy for us to mistake them as men. There really should be no problem in this, as the women in this scenario almost certainly KNEW they looked masculine, so it shouldn't have offended them.

They could have just explained, and then said hello to the child and left it at that.

Instead what they did was intimidated, bullied and used a moral highground to ACTUALLY victimise someone else, who had a child present.

Not fucking cool, and it's a shame that so many morons who can barely even string a sentence together have jumped on the moral-highground bandwagon without even having thought it through.

Why would they say hello to the child?! The mother had just implied that they were in there because they were predatory men- I doubt they were in the mood to interact with her child.

Clearly the op did make a snap judgement based on what she thinks a woman should look like, and obviously she isn’t the only person who behaves in this way. She acted on her stereotypical beliefs before actually bothering to look at these women.

As I said in my first post, there wasn’t a need for them to behave defensively in this particular instance.

However as you pointed out, they will have many many more instances of this lazy stereotyping causing dickheads to give them hassle, and it seems they have run out of patience.

Who can’t string a sentence together? Would you like to back up your insult with some examples?

Yes, and fuck people that are visually impaired and their 'lazy stereotyping' they're just dickheads too I guess.

The irony of you calling people idiotic while making two contradictory points in just one sentence. 😂😂

If their visual impairment results in them having a go at someone for using a toilet, then yes, they are dickheads.

What absolute morons, dress like a man you'll get mistaken for a man. What did they expect? Some people are so utterly vile, they will be vile given any excuse. I used to think we were quite respectful to each other but people seem to be getting more and more hateful. She made a genuine mistake for very obvious reasons. The women were being obnoxious and the pps coming out in support of that are also showing a monumental lack of awareness.

Nope, they are disabled. That’s an entirely different situation.

The same would go for people with learning disabilities who rely heavily on appearance to categorise people.

Or children for that matter because they tend to have a more narrow experience of the variety of people in the world.

I’m presuming you have a different view of someone with a white stick knocking into you as opposed to someone who isn’t looking where they are going?

The op doesn’t fit into any of those categories however. Just because some people have a limited capacity to look at and understand something doesn’t mean that nobody has to bother.

This!

That's not ideal either. What if you've got IBS or Crohns or just a case of the runs and you need longer than 15 minutes and you can't get off the toilet at the point when the door opens? And the door opens outwards so you can't even reach forward to pull it shut again when it exposes you.