What are women's toilets even for? :(

[IntegrityisDead]

Sad super whinge coming up.....
Had to go to the lav in Sainsbury's this morning - there's one male, one female and one accessible/baby change.
A casually dressed man comes out of the women's and almost crashes into me - I was a bit surprised and said 'Have you just been in the ladies?', half-thinking he was going to say he had been doing maintenance... 'Yes', he said 'I waited at the men's for a couple of minutes but they didn't come out.'
How is this acceptable? The accessible toilet was free (the door was ajar) if he had health issues.
I am really anxious around men and it has made me quite shaky (dramatic over- reaction, I know). But I already have to avoid unisex facilities because of my anxiety - does this mean I can't go out if I may need the toilet because a man shouldn't have to wait?

Men just don’t get it.
I’m sorry that happened to you and hope you’re ok OP 💐

Dirty bastard chancer.

I had this in a supermarket’s ladies loo. We came out of the adjoining cubicles at the same time and I just screamed at him “this is the LADIES” and kept shouting. I did feel threatened coz it was just the two of us in a small space. He looked absolutely horrified and scuttled off pronto, so it was likely a genuine mistake…. but that moment of fear - I get you OP.

Weird behaviour and not ok.
Some guy did come into the ladies once while I was washing my hands, he looked absolutely mortified even though he was barely through the door - obviously he’d got the wrong one. I’m sure most men no this is a definite no no, only creeps behave like the guy you described.
The only time I’d be unbothered by that is if it was one of those single room toilets that are for some reason assigned to men or women, I guess mainly because they don’t want to fork out for more than one sanitary bin - they have those at my local supermarket - they could just be uni-sex really I guess. I’d think it was cheeky but not creepy.

Yuck.

Although to be fair, I used a male toilet recently at the supermarket. The female one was out of order and there was a queue for the disabled one which should have been kept free for people who actually needed it.

Me, another middle aged woman and a younger mum with a daughter agreed to do a takeover of the men's. So there was always at least one person outside telling men not to go in. Probably shouldn't have done it but we didn't really have an option.

Not justifying it, but when you need the toilet depending on different factors, you need the toilet so to speak

I can see why you did this but the reverse would likely be deemed an outrage on here. But when you gotta go.... 🤷‍♀️

Perhaps he had an upset stomach or something and someone was in the accessible toilet when he arrived. Presumably he left the toilet clean and was polite and you'd have been fine with it if he'd been doing maintenance.

Actually @thankyouforthesun I wouldn't - I would have thought there could have been a sign and then I would have stayed back. And anyway the guy admitted he just didn't want to wait so surmising that he might have been caught short/in distress is irrelevant.

It just feels like walking on quicksand at the moment - the war in Europe, Covid aftermath, climate crisis, disgraceful politicians, exploitative utility monopolies, huge rise in poverty etc etc - all my old certainties are disproved - that is all bar one - that it is still men, often older, white, privileged men, who are still calling the shots.... :(

It's NEVER acceptable for a man to use a woman's single sex place. Only a man who doesn't care about women would do something like this. Decent men wouldn't dream of it.

I would never have done so when I was younger but since I hit my 50s I will use the mens facilities if the women's toilets are unavailable. My reasoning is that male bogs have at least one stall and a urinal, men have been ignoring women's boundaries forever and (putting it bluntly) what they gonna do? The first time was in a service station and the single women's toilet was in use for ages and I was desperate and on an emergency journey, so I asked the woman who came in behind me to ask any men to wait and then I'd do the same for her, when I came out she'd gone and nothing bad had happened. Now I just don't care if I upset men anymore because most of them don't care if they upset women. So yeah I crash their boundaries. I've never been challenged on it.

@EfingNora - please don't do that. We need to be better than the men who do that to us. Rise above them. You might think you are "brave" but you are not helping the cause.

PS It's not going to upset them because they don't care plus we are not a risk to them.

@Tralalalalalalalalalala but I just want to pee.

@EfEfingNora I can't see how you are harming the cause of lack of equal toilet facilities between men and women by using the toilets of an overserviced with options group that pose a risk to the underserved group. (And if there is any actual harm caused, then it is offset easily by complaining about lack of equity in toilet facilities that result in greater wait times for women.)

@EfingNora is harming is the attempt to keep single sex spaces for women. And it's women who lose out when those single sex spaces go, not men.

Women before us have fought hard to make society fairer to women.

Some of the changes were to allow women to be included: the right to vote, access to university education, admission to professional careers such as being a doctor, promotions to the board room.

But other changes were to create spaces where men were excluded: men's toilets so that we can leave the house for longer than our bladders will hold, women's sports changing rooms and sessions so that we can have play sports, women's professional sporting categories, so that the best female athletes can have a sporting career, women's wards in hospital so that we dare access medical treatment whilst incapacitated, women's prisons where we are forced to shower and share locked cells with strangers, and sadly women's rape councilling where we can discuss our trauma without being re-traumatised.

Sadly, although the Equality Act allows for single sex spaces, there has been a systematic push to destroy them over the last 10 years. The law still holds (for now!) but social practice doesn't follow any more.

Not for toilets, as pp have noted.

Not in hospital wards, where it took an NHS hospital an entire year to admit that a woman had been raped by a person on the women-only ward with a penis. Despite holding cctv footage which showed the rape had taken place they continued to insist - to the police and the victim - that only women were on the ward, so the rape was impossible,

Not in prisons, where just this week a paedophile who raped multiple children - youngest aged 7 - was put into a women's prison with a mother and baby unit.

Not for sports, where athletes change from the Men's category to the Women's category from one month to the next. There might be hope here, since the cyclist who did that was later excluded. But many sports still allow it.

Not for rape councilling, where Sarah Summers is currently suing Brighton Survivors network for refusing to provide the female-only sessions she needed in order to heal. They barred her when she objected to a new participant joining the group, turning it non-single-sex, so this was no theoretical objection. Note that rape councilling charities which aim to provide female-only sessions are now denied funding.

We need to keep shouting that we need single sex spaces. That the need is due to biology - our vulnerability from being the type of human who can (possibly) have babies versus the type of human who reproduces by getting us pregnant. And that the need is to exclude people with male biology - it's that exclusion which makes single sex spaces fulfil the purpose for which they were created: which is to allow women to participate fairly in society.

women's toilets, obviously. Not saying that autocorrect is sexist, but...