What is a “good experience” in a women’s toilet?

[MyAmpleSheep]

From Reddit.

List your good experiences of using single sex spaces of your gender?

Cheer up everyone’s day by listing your good experiences of using single sex spaces.
Helping fix a woman bra, giving a woman a pad, receiving compliments from women…

Can GI supporting people see why examples of a “good experience” for a trans-identifying man in a women’s toilet being - (first) to play with a woman’s underwear and (second) get involved in her menstruation - is profoundly unhelpful?

Wouldn’t a “good experience” simply be to use the facilities and leave?

How does this “cheer up everyone’s day״?

I’ve not been arrested and I’ve only seen a dead badger. I have been to Australia

Also quite happy to use toilets where the options are: incluuuusive feminist toilets and sacred palace of femininity toilets. Guess which one I’d pick.

Good experience for me would be my fellow women, getting a move on.
Wtf do some of you actually DO in a cubicle that it takes you so long. Has perplexed me for many a year. I have a weak and pathetic bladder and it pisses me right off!!

They decide what suits them obvs

Sometimes there is a benefit to be a genderfluid 😅

So today I arrived to London Liverpool Street by train for my next blood test and I had to go badly to the toilet. I was in boymode and I was glad. The huge queue in front of the female facilities... so I just zoomed in the male one saving a set of pants and panties 🤣

https://www.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/s/MeH5JAIKL3

• Dealing with the aftermath of IBS-C episodes.
• Dealing with surprise periods.
• Double voiding to fend off cystitis.

Thankyou! I hadn't heard of double voiding- I've always been prone to infections, will start trying it!

I have badgers in my garden. I only saw one once but there are snuffle holes all over the place. I've never been to Australia and am unlikely to. Not yet been arrested, but who knows?

I had to queue for the loo the other day. There was a charge for both men and women, but only the ladies' had a queue.

It pisses me off every single time. It's been an obvious issue for bloody decades and there I was, in a big modern railway station, watching the men saunter straight into the gents' as I and others queued in the bloody corridor.

So yep, being able to go straight in would be a good experience. Clean loo, hook for my stuff, space for the sanitary bin, bog roll, soap, a flush that works, decent ventilation, paper towels rather than a blower, clean dry floor. And no men - ideally, not even the cleaner.

We had a pine marten (or more than one) in our roof space - they're a protected species and the pest control agency could only block entrances.
I never saw them but they (or it) were active up there for at least five or six months.
My son saw one on the driveway once very early in the morning, but he's the only family member (6 of us living here at the time) who ever did.

What are the laws on ratios of male to female toilets and provision?

I used to live somewhere with laws on toilet provision that effectively meant twice as many men's toilets as women's because it stipulated something like eight toilet stalls for women, and six toilet stalls plus twelve urinals for men, per 1000 total guests/ visitors expected (altered proportionally to scale). A politician was lauded for campaigning to get it changed to be equal, but the change only a handful of contexts (new builds, and not all of them).

There’s Building Control and British Standards. If you use these properly for new builds and refurbishment then yes, typical calculations may be twice as many for women than men because women take longer (one of the extra reasons in reality is that women usually wash their hands where men don’t). However, local conditions need to be considered. If it’s a male dominated environment then this would not make sense.

There’s an example of it here on section 2.2
https://www.networkrail.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/NRGNCIV20004-Public-Toilets.pdf

Also there’s Health and Safety Executive guidance too.

Twice as many for women is the reverse of the place I was talking about, where although women had slightly more cubicles, men's provision was double women's because of urinals - so that's better in the UK at least!

It highlights the difference between feminine and female, too. When I miscarried a 20-week foetus in a pub toilet, it was an intense experience of femaleness. Not 'femininity'. Quite a lot of the events that are categorically female are viscerally unpleasant. We deserve additional respect and privacy because of this.

Things like lipstick and nail art are 'coded feminine' in our society; they are not in any way definitive of femaleness.

Yeah, dealt with 2 of those throughout my years and I still don't take forever in a cubicle.

I meant IBS-D. So there's the shits, and then there's trying to get myself cleaned up enough to carry on with my day after pebbledashing the toilet and both my butt cheeks, then there's trying to get the toilet itself usable for the next person. This takes a while.

I'm sorry for your loss.

I tried to explain to a gay male friend that being a woman is essentially a biological experience (even harassment as a young woman is rooted in biology, financial disadvantage is rooted mainly in pregnancy and breastfeeding and the possibility thereof). As he had asked how I knew I was a woman I talked about biology- especially periods, pregnancy, birth including hemorrhage and birth injury. He was critical that most of what I explained sounded too negative 🤷‍♀️

No men in fancy dress

<eyeroll>
Not prepared to take a woman's word for it, then?

Because female stuff is messy, and sometimes painful, and a nuisance. Breastfeeding a baby is a lovely thing to do, but you have to go through pregnancy and childbirth and sore nipples to get there.

As someone with IBS and lymphocytic colitis, I can empathise completely with you, @selffellatingouroborosofhate. I don’t go out much, partly because of the worry of this happening to me in a public loo.

Yes - he's lucky I stopped without explaining menopause...

He's fundamentally a decent person and did at least hear me out (and admit he couldn't define why I'm a woman by reference to anything except biology) but he tried to prompt me to agree I "felt like" a woman due to "anything else" and his objection to my negativity about all the biological things which let me know I'm a woman (and my belief that systemic misogyny is ultimately also rooted in reproductive biology or the assumption of) was - very male.

Urinals are often counted as units like cubicles in provision.

There are historical problems as women didn't have any provision in many places so provision has been carved out of men’s. Then obviously before that there wasn’t flushing water inside buildings.

The suffragettes were helped by the fact Selfridges installed women’s toilets.

All the obvious points: clean, nicely decorated, good loo roll and Hand-wash etc.

I was in a ladies loo at a wedding venue once that had a prosecco tap in it. That was excellent.

In clubs etc. you sometimes get some nice chat at the mirror when sorting your lipstick etc. It either lasts seconds or involves making sure someone is safe if they are hiding from a creepy bloke. No good if that bloke can follow you in.

You accused me of being someone else, twice. I made the honest mistake of replying to a post not intended for me, and you still think I’m that poster, it seems. Did you clear it up with MNHQ as I asked? That would be better than to continue copying and pasting posts to prove a non-existent point.

I did not accuse you of being another poster. I asked if you were. When I started asking, did you not go and check back to see if you made a mistake?

The following posts of mine are clearly asking clarity as to whether or not you were the poster who used the original term, because you seemed confused. I attempted numerous times yesterday to clarify just why you took a post and made it about you personally, when anyone reading the thread could see my posts referenced a completely different poster.

It is not unknown for posters to bypass MN security policy and post under a different username, hence why I asked the question and reconfirmed.

Here is my posts asking for confirmation because of my confusion as to your reaction.

Helleofabore · Yesterday 12:52
Have you changed usernames on this thread? I have no idea what you think.

Helleofabore · Yesterday 12:57
So you are not the poster the comment was referring to or quoted.

and then me acknowledging that you were not the original person posting that phrase.

You then accused me of accusing you of ‘shaming women’ telling me that I need to ‘listen to myself’.

I then post this, including a sentence mirroring your own suggestion, because clearly you have not read back to see where you made an error,

Helleofabore · Yesterday 13:26
You just said you were not the original poster, so the post describing the quote had context that had nothing to do with you.
Perhaps you should take your own advice.

and after you continued to react as if I had written my posts about something you said, I asked again to clarify if you were the other poster. Note : ‘asked’

Helleofabore · Yesterday 13:32
To repeat, are you TransParentlyAnnoyed and did you post at 02:31am today on this thread?

i asked again because you were still posting as if I have discussed your post and not someone else’s.

I then posted where I copy and pasted my replies and pointed out what was causing confusion with the aim of clarifying who my post referring to ‘sacred palaces of femininity’ was directly referencing. I then continued to join in the discussion arising from the thread along with other posters.

I asked you if you were the poster, did that not jog something in your mind that you had made an error? Asking you to clarify is not me making an accusation, it is me trying to sort out the confusion.

Just like me copying and pasting now in two posts to clarify what has and hasn’t been said. I do it because this forum platform doesn’t allow multiple posts to be referenced clearly using the platforms quote function in a post to show you what my post/s were referring to.

I am now quite confused again as to what is the ‘non-existent point’ that you are referring to. Could you please explain what point is non-existent?

When describing sex differences I feel hampered by trying to avoid either too much negativity, (poor women with their disability of being female) or too much earth mothery/religious woo (women with their divine purpose blah blah blah).