First: men don’t use toilet paper at urinals. (Look, just admit it.) Even the ones who opt for stalls don’t bother wiping when they urinate, or, at least, they don’t wipe as commonly as women. There’s more toilet paper mess in women’s bathrooms because women actually use the stuff. And there’s so much on the floor because of the half-assed design of commercial toilet paper dispensers, the kind of paper they hold, and the way they’re installed. To start, the paper is single-ply, wraithlike; you need great gobs of the stuff to get anything done with it. It’s manufactured on hulking rolls the size of extra-large pizzas, the weight of the things so heavy compared to the lightness of the toilet tissue that one semi-aggressive pull instantly rips it. The plastic dispensers are likewise no match for the beef of those giant rolls, so the paper clunks out in frustrating stop-starts. And here’s the kicker: the dispensers are, so often, installed too low – women are grabbing up and under at the paper from a trapped seated position. The paper flies off in Lilliputian bits as we awkwardly tug.
And yet…how can this be?! Anyone accustomed to sitting on a public toilet and using toilet paper could ferret out the appropriate height for a dispenser. Here’s my stab at the reason that simple user-friendliness is so elusive inside the toilet cubicle: men install the dispensers. It hearkens back to the point Clara Greed made to me when she was laying out the reasons women so often wait in bathroom lines: men dominate planning, design, and construction. Men aren’t the ones usually sitting on public toilets to pee, scrounging for paper to wipe. Women are. But women either aren’t doing the installing, or they aren’t being asked what works and why.
So, as women sit on the toilet clawing at the paper; as we work with more complex clothing, and live the biological fact of taking longer to empty our bladders than men; as we change tampons and children’s diapers and assist elderly relatives – what happens? Lines form for women’s bathrooms. Longer and longer and longer. I mean, just ask Hillary Clinton. In December 2015, the then presidential hopeful was late getting back to the stage after a commercial break during a live televised Democratic debate. As the moderator posed a question to Bernie Sanders about median household income, Clinton strode to her podium, in front of the cameras, her opponents, and 6.7 million viewers and pronounced a deadpan ‘Sorry.’ Turns out, she was in a lineup for the ladies’ room. The solution here, and for every woman kept waiting in line, isn’t to fix the women. Women aren’t what’s broken. What’s broken is bathrooms. And the fix is potty parity.
Potty parity is a movement that seeks to reduce bathroom waiting time for women by treating men and women, boys and girls, equally. Which is to say, unequally – because, as we’ve seen, an equal number of toilets does not make for equal waiting time. So the ‘parity’ ratios mean an increase for women: sometimes there are two facilities for females to every one facility for males; sometimes it’s 3:1; sometimes it’s 3:2. Potty parity begs the question: Why should women have to wait and men not have to? Ask yourself, and you’ll find there’s no good reason – it’s garden-variety gender discrimination. That’s why the American Restroom Association has been fighting the parity battle since the 1990s and has seen legislation passed at the municipal and state levels. New York City, Philadelphia, California, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and other jurisdictions have all enacted parity laws recognizing the greater needs of women.
Canada has potty parity laws, too. The National Building Code of Canada enshrines 2:1 provision in favour of women, and most Canadian provinces and territories have adopted the rules wholesale. Yet, if you’re keeping track, the Halifax Common Pavilion bathrooms I’ve been telling you about rank 5:4 in favour of men. What’s up with that? you ask. What’s up is the intractability of many public bathroom problems – laws apply only to new construction, and older bathrooms aren’t subject to parity code until they’re extensively renovated. We may be starting to think about equity, at least from a statutory level, but we’re still using the same damn bathrooms.
The fight for potty parity goes beyond the battle for more stalls. It’s about getting more bathroom access generally in cities, because women need bathrooms more often than men. Mandating governments to provide public bathrooms at all, let alone to build up standards for the numbers of public bathrooms that should exist based on population, has mostly eluded public toilet advocates. Bathrooms are a political football; their existence is often by the grace of business improvement organizations or parks associations, rather than by law.
While potty parity is squarely about women and people who identify as female – we’ve all got the same problem if we’re in the lineup under the stick figure wearing the skirt – more and better bathrooms don’t benefit women alone. People with invisible disabilities like incontinence, shy bladder syndrome, and inflammatory bowel disease all get a lift from more loos. So do parents of small children and caregivers of adults. There are scores of bathroom users out there who could really use the leg up.
Clara Greed knows that her favoured bathroom fixes – including double provision for women and wider stalls – are hard to swallow for governments and businesses. They stretch budgets as they reach for parity. She often hears how challenging retrofits that make more space for women can be. ‘There won’t be any room left for a stage,’ one theatre-owner whined to her. ‘It’s going to all be women’s toilets.’ Governments, at least those up the food chain with the job of legislating changes rather than paying for them, have been more receptive. Greed herself helped write the UK government’s standard on public toilet provision.
The planner is at home with the stodginess of committees and code by way of her training. But she’s unrepentantly grounded in the practical. No wonder. Greed is a woman. She waits in bathroom lines just like the rest of us. Or, perhaps, unlike the rest of us, who fail to notice the injustice or who pass it off as the way things are. ‘I do toilet evangelism standing there in the queue,’ she says. ‘You need to raise consciousness.’ Greed wants to lead a revolution, and not the velvet sort.
If there’s any revolution happening in public bathrooms now, though, it’s being driven by the transgender community. Trans individuals often report feeling out of place in public bathrooms, which are typically strictly sex-segregated and tightly policed by users. To wit: most people, I’d wager, would walk silently past someone they suspected was shooting drugs in a stall. Yet watch a man step foot into the women’s bathroom and he’ll be urgently ushered out for his social transgression. My dad once accidentally strolled into the women’s room at a ski hill as my young daughter tried frantically to alert him. We still talk and laugh about it years later.
This is not the experience of trans people using public bathrooms that fit their gender. Being transgender in a gendered bathroom is rarely funny. Trans people report facing verbal and physical threats and abuse in the bathrooms that are right for their gender, but can be perceived by others as not matching their sex. A solution is unisex or gender-neutral or gender-free (my preferred term) bathrooms, which are being embraced in public schools and universities across North America, in chain restaurants like Tim Hortons, and in government buildings. In 2013, then Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter signed legislation requiring such bathrooms in city-owned buildings; it’s the same in Oregon’s Multnomah County, which includes Portland. But on several fronts, gender-liberated bathrooms fail.
The legislation mostly works like potty parity – only for new construction, so it can take a long time for change to happen. When it does, not everyone’s on board. The conversion from traditional side-by-side, sex-separated bathrooms with multiple stalls to single-user bathrooms