Gender neutral toilets with urinals? The Barbican

[Stopsnowing]

So tonight I went to the Pit at the Barbican. Toilets were gender neutral with some saying cubical only and some saying cubicles and urinals. Obviously I went to the one with cubicles only. There were three or four toilets there and two men making use of the facilities.
i biologically cannot use a urinal and I don’t want to be around men getting their dicks out in open urinals.
I have looked at the Sex Matters website which says this set up is illegal and Ithink the image it uses to illustrate this point is actually a photo of the Barbican signage. But i am not clear why exactly this is illegal as women still have access to cubicles only albeit much reduced provision.

Because where provision is for both sexes it has to be cubicles with sinks enclosed within then and floor to ceiling walls. A cubicle where you have to share a sink with the opposite sex is not lawful.

Also access for women is reduced - they have half the number of facilities as men. So sex discrimination.

Absolutely grim

So the sim of the signs is to let men know which will have the equipment which they may want to use at that time

itnis misogyny on stilts and it is fucking grim

Have the Barbican still not sorted out this embarrassing idiocy?

no way would I use toilets with urinals in them. I do not want to walk past men with the their penises out.

as a young teenage girl I used such facilities in Spain and the man at the urinal turned and leered at me when he saw me and sort of stroked/lifted his cock and I felt so ashamed and dirty and unsafe.

plus my own teenage boys would be mortified to be at a urinal if a woman was able to walk past them.

this works for absolutely no one.

That seems right. But the others I'm not so sure about. Isn't it only in schools that toilet provision must legally be segregated by sex? Everywhere else, isn't the rule that sex-segregated toilets are permitted, rather than obligatory? Probably because it never occurred to the law-makers that anybody would not provide toilets segregated by sex!

Obviously I went to the one with cubicles only.

And therein, right here, lies the mistake. The only way to fight back against this is to make men every but as uncomfortable as we are being made.

To be fair when I pointed out to the men in the cubicled toilets that women had less provision they looked sheepish and said they hadn’t seen the mens toilets.

But I am not clear why exactly this is illegal as women still have access to cubicles only albeit much reduced provision.

You've sort of answered it yourself - it's the much reduced provision. This could be both directly and indirectly discriminatory towards women. Women have fewer opportunities, and it will take longer, this restricting women's time/movement etc.

Also, there is no provision for either sex whose religious beliefs require them to be segregated by sex in areas such as lavatories & changing rooms. This directly discriminates against the protected characteristic of religion or belief.

I don't think there should be any restrooms with open urinals anywhere. I don't like my young sons going in them (neither do they) and some men probably feel uncomfortable with it too. And that's before you even think about the issues with expecting women to share the same areas.

The Barbican did this a while ago. Arts and education places really seem to have gone for this. I was at a uni visit recently and went to their arts centre (advertising a lot of childrens shows).

Of course the loos were men, unisex, unisex, and there was a woman’s (but I suspect in reality they wouldn’t enforce that) which was hidden around a corner.

I was looking for the ladies and muttering ‘men, unisex, unisex - no bloody way! sexist and dangerous for women. Where is the ladies!’ I bumped into a young woman who asked ‘where is the ladies?’ And we found it (hidden around a counter), and other women in the corridor followed us. None wanted to use the unisex. They all (now) know the stats of sexual assaults on women in unisex loos.

I did only see one pronoun badge - a mousey nervous looking girl who felt the need to state that she was ‘she’. I was expecting waaaaay more.

If you’re the ticket holder you may get a post-visit questionnaire, OP. You won’t get any kind of response or acknowledgement, but you can at least tell them what you think of their policy.

If I remember correctly, the Barbican is run by the City of London Corporation, which has a long history of this sort of misogyny dressed up as 'inclusivity.'

Ah yes. Also has the girls school slap bang on the premises. Girls bunking off to hang out - what could go wrong?

I imagine this set up will also make men reluctant to use the urinals. I can’t see my DH using a urinal if he thought a woman or girl might be passing by. So that will reduce provision further still. What a stupid system.

I agree that this set up is wrong but i have a question.

I have used this kind of toilet faciity (urinals & stalls) both as a mixed-sex facility and as a men's (with forewarning and agreement, when the queue for the ladies is hilariously long and there is none for the men's). I have been doing this for years. I even go to football and see countless men every time (the stadium is in the middle of fields) peeing against trees, fences, into fields. And i have NEVER seen a penis unless i want to literally walk over and lean over for a peek (i have never done this)

I think the "penises out" argument isn't the strongest here. The strongest argument is that women are entitled to single-sex provision, and that set-ups like this reduce the number of facilities for women on average and I'm pretty sure there is law around that too.

Men in general have the fear of being thought of as a pedophile or sex pest. You can see it when a child is lost and crying in a shop - mostly it is women rush to ask ‘where’s your grownup? Are you lost?’ While the men tend to hang back as if the child is radioactive, or nudge a female accompanying them to ‘see if they are ok’. They don’t want to be seen to be ‘interested’ so having a pee with little old wandering in and out?

This so-called gender neutral drive just makes a bad situation worse. I went to an old victorian theatre last night and there were 3 cubicles in the (amazingly still) female toilets, for use by the entire floor. Had they advertised them as mixed, the ridiculously long queue would have been even worse. As it stands, I was near the end of the queue and only just managed to get back to my seat in time for the start of the second act.

This. I would take great pleasure in whipping our my shewee and using a urinal. Or using a cubicle and then kicking up a stink with management about the lack of bins - which forced me to leave my used pad on the floor beside the loo.
Don't think it would take long for sanity to be restored if women started doing this.