Join the mixed-sex loo resistance movement!

[WomanBornNotWorn]

Ideas for what we can do:

Theatres etc - go up to box office loudly asking 'where are the ladies'?' again and again as loudly as you can so the representative has to keep repeating the answer - if you're in a group, take it in turns for variety.

Ring an offending restaurant and book a table for six. Then ask 'I assume you have separate men's and women's loos?' then when they say no, say 'ah no, that doesn't work for us. I'll cancel that and we'll book at (name bitterest rival restaurant that does have separate loos) instead'. Get everyone you know to do it. Make sure you've blocked your number.

Come out of cubicle with full moon cup and wash it out in front of any men present (just pray they're not menophiliac).

Stickers. Lots of stickers.

Learn the statistics so you can recite the evidence of sexual assaults in mixed space etc etc whenever you're contradicted. 'In fact, Home Office statistics show that xx% ... ' etc.

Train your daughters to understand why we are saying no and to have the confidence to speak out. And your sons, too.

Brooklyn Brewery, if anyone would like to boycott their beer....

Oh no. Oh no no no.

On the olden days if you were out and getting hassled by a creepy guy you could just skip into the ladies loos to escape their attentions. If they tried to follow you, you could scream blue murder.

Bye bye that then.

Some really good points on here made about the posters on the back of toilet doors as well. They're so important for our most vulnerable women but that's gone to fuck. If the TRA/MRAs get their own way, there will be literally no space in this whole country where women can be free from men. My heart breaks for those most vulnerable women where something as simple as a 'secret code' poster on the back of a toilet door could be life-saving

piss all over the floor and blood dribbling down the walls like a scene out of Carrie

Literally never, ever, ever seen that in female loos,never.

Have seen/smelt the dire state of mens loos, disgusting.

Girls do hold themselves all day at school, and this is causing harm to them physically and psychologically.

Is anyone seeing the toilet thread on AIBU?

I am wholeheartedly on the proposal of pouring blood in sinks in mixed loos and leaving it there (women and their vile practices!)

@TruthOnTrial Exactly. The small handful of times I've seen skidders in women's toilets I've always been quite surprised. My impression is that this is just the norm in men's toilets.

At my DP's work there was a man who used to take a shit in the middle of the toilet floor (in the communal sink area) every single day. I just physically can't imagine that happening in women's toilets of a workplace.

I'm behind the idea of filling moon cups with food colouring and brazenly washing them out in the sink in mixed-sex toilets

I’m all in favour of brazening it out in the gender neutral urinals. And lobbing a few sanpro items in them might bring things to men’s attention, which let’s face it is the only way we’ll change things.

Imagine being in charge of a school theatre trip. Macbeth, say. Or the panto, at Xmas. Or the Gruffalo (all these trips happened at my kids' school)

Has the risk attached to toileting just risen immensely?

Thanks Erish for citing the relevant law concerning workplace loos. Bookmark it on your phone.

I like it better like this because there are shorter wait times/queues - woman take bloody ages if you go to a woman's only toilet!

Dear lord. Of course, it's women's fault, that the provision is crap! So, I don't know, let's add some men in there as well!!!

There have been studies done to explain why this is. Guess what, it's that pesky female biology that TPAs like to pretend is so irrelevant. Women have to sit because we don't have dicks and we have to undress from the waist down. We have to close, lock, unlock, and open a door. And that's not considering periods, changing ripped tights, etc.

Men only need to unzip, point and shoot, quick shake and zip up again. Of course they will be faster than women. Only anti-woman activists would try to frame this biological difference as being women's fault.

Women need twice the number of cubicles as men need urinals to get the same throughput. Truly fair building regulations would require that we got twice the cubicles as the men get urinals.

I was in a rock bar recently where the graffitti in the women's loos including warnings about male regulars and band members who were rapists and batterers. If men are allowed in, those warnings, issued by women who have learned the hard way what these men are like, will disappear and more women will be hurt.

Two points to add.

1 Urinary incontinence is another issue that many, many women have to deal with either on a daily basis or occasionally.

2 Urinary tract infections are much more common amongst women and girls and can kill. It is rare, but it happens, a colleague of mine died from sepsis brought on by a UTI. She was 53. She left an 18 year old daughter behind.

Except I wouldn't actually do this because I'm not a dick, and I think about the men in my life who would be rather embarrassed sharing a public toilet facility with a woman and also how the man at the next urinal might be a bit put off his flow by me using a she-wee next to him.

To be fair, us chaps of Man Friday did use the gents' loo on Fridays, and I did use a she-wee (with baby DS strapped to my chest in a sling). The only comments I got were confused then positive, alongside outrage at the proposal to amend the GRA.

I had a conversation today with a friend whose colleague at work had their waters break during a meeting. The woman rushed to the loo quickly and discreetly as she could, followed by my friend.

Fortunately she was assisted by my friend and another female colleague and then bustled off to hospital.

This would have been a nightmare in a mixed sex toilet with men inadvertently wandering in. It would also have been a nightmare to try and help a distressed woman in this state, squeezed into a single enclosed cubicle off a corridor, as many gender neutral toilets are.

Single sex spaces with stalls and shared sinks are designed that way for safety and dignity. It enables privacy but enough access to help people who are in distress.

Was at the Royal Court Theatre on Saturday. They have labelled their toilets

Cubicles

and

Cubicles and urinals.

Urinary tract infections are much more common amongst women and girls and can kill.

I've been hospitalised twice with UTIs and my bacterial flora are now resistant to one of the two first-line antibiotics given for them, because I get them so often. The stock TPA retort of "you'll just have to hold it in like we do now" is a practice that could kill me.

The answer is single-occupant loos, taken from the men's loo space.

The answer for trans people is single-occupant loos, taken from the men's loo space.

We women will keep our cubicle farm loos with shared sink space, thanks.

Women's toilets have in my experience always been about more than a place to just use a toilet. They're frequently a place of refuge - usually from men (I'm thinking the escape from the over zealous drunk in the club or bar for example). They can be the place that you go crippled with period pains to wait til the drugs kick in and you can go back to work without grimacing. The place where you cry on your friend's shoulder because the guy you fancy has just snogged someone else (ok so that was a few lifetimes ago). The place where you go to put on your brave face and go out and face whatever knock you might have just taken. The place where you go with a friend or female colleague to sort out a solution to your period starting unexpectedly or flooding leaving your clothes stained and messed up. I want that sanctuary, that refuge, that place of safety, that women's space to be as available to my daughter as it has been to me.

I wish the people on here who have no issue with mixed sex toilets would ask their grandmas what their thoughts are about them. They do not want to share with men due to some in vogue notion.
My business is next to some public loos - women’s loos. These are well used by ladies over 60, many who have incontinence issues. The cleaning staff often have to help old ladies who have had an accident. I’d say it was a weekly ocvurance.
We recently had a victim of DV hide in the women’s loos as her attacker was outside. Other women kept her safe and called the police.

piss all over the floor and blood dribbling down the walls like a scene out of Carrie

I've never seen this in the women's toilets. Plenty of piss over the floor in the men's though.

piss all over the floor and blood dribbling down the walls like a scene out of Carrie

This sentence haunts me. Where IS this fantastic torture loo?

I think most of us are in agreement on this. It seems that in the days of PC and H&S that common sense and judgement go out of the window.
I think most of us are comfortable as things used to be. For whatever reason.
I also think that the average bloke would rather not share the ladies. After all girls are made of sugar and spice and that might come into question!
All this goes into the same basket as girls bro g made to wear trousers at school (to prevent up skirting. Hanging culprits would be a better solution!)

I’ve only seen one absolute ‘loo of horrors’. Poo all up the walls - and I mean it looked like someone’s backside had exploded. Unisex loo.

We did have a bit of a ‘dirty protest’ in one of the ladies loos at work. The bosses were religious so each floor had one loo which was either designated male or female.

The one on our floor was female and there were 3 women who worked there. I was part time (so not in every day) and another woman had to leave bang on to pick up her kid from school.

Someone took it upon themselves to poo in the bins in the loo on our floor. It was one of those kitchen bins that was about 25cm wide and 80cm off the floor with a flip lid. Agility aside, how and why someone would poo on a bin (next to a functioning loo) was a mystery.

The receptionist was adamant that ‘it’s a man’. To be honest, some of the men in that place - it really wouldn’t surprise me.

Another thing about the traditional womens’ loo:

‘Oh shit, no loo paper.’ ‘Oh, here you go,’ and some loo paper magically appears under the partition.

Never been asked for a tampon by a stranger, but wish I had a quid for every time that’s happened. Who would feel comfortable with that from a bloke.

Actually, I lie. I once walked into the loos when two teenaged girls were panicking because one had come on. They didn’t ask for a towel but I discreetly handed a towel to one of them as I walked into the loo.

That’s another nono, hushed panicky conversations with your mate when you’ve been caught out.

It's fascinating how it's always the women who a. hate other women and b. would love to share toilets with men who keep running across women's loos that look like a scene out of Hostel.

So, we're proposing that not only privacy (which both sexes prefer) be removed, but also all the other stuff that goes along with women's loos (place of temporary refuge when needed, women who understand periods and miscarriages and will treat other women who're having an emergency decently, relative difficulty for men to place hidden cameras, fact that women of some religious backgrounds etc simply cannot share) and weighing that up again "well some trans people and some women who resent the idea of other women having boundaries quite fancy them"? Cause if so, I think the choice should be fairly clear.

And like littlebrowndog said, this wasn't the norm even a year or two ago, and wasn't even proposed until a few years before that. You're being socially engineered into accepting a strange and unusual situation that benefits very few and disadvantages most and some are too thick to even realize it.

Conversation with a friend yesterday:
'How's [her first-year DD] getting on at uni?'
'Oh, fine - not very keen on the mixed loos, none of the girls are, but she says they know it's the way things have to be now, so, well, what can you do...'

Bloody girls and their good manners and niceness.

Womanbornnotworn
Genius idea