Toilet Gender Signs, Changing the World and the Betraying Sound of Your Urination.
Go piss, honey.
The other night I banged a book against a desk in time to my rant. “The toilet isn’t ‘gender-neutral’! Toilets don’t have fucking genders! People do! Every person of every gender can use this fucking toilet!”
It was 10pm on a Friday night in the office of a major arts festival.
Myself and the last, lonely producer were the only people left in the building. We’d both been toiling all day, both been hard at work at our own respective coalface. Them on delivering a gargantuan performance work of international and cultural significance. So much so that it will put Brisbane on a tour list that includes Paris, Tokyo, New York and London (suck it, Sydney!). And me? My labour?
I spent my day making signs to direct punters to where they can take a piss.
You see, it’s that time of year where I spend more time than the average person thinking about toilet signs. In fact, it’s around this time of year I spend a significant amount of my time thinking about toilet signs… talking about toilet signs… lecturing people about toilet signs. It’s okay, I’m not a pervert, I’m a graphic designer (also a pervert but that’s for unrelated reasons). All of this is because for the last decade I’ve been blessed to work on a major arts festival. I was regaling this marvellously talented producer about how in my little niche, my tiny graphic design corner, I’ve been blessed to witness cultural change first-hand. In the last ten years I’ve seen tidal shifts in the way Indigenous work is platformed and profiled. I’ve seen local emerging artists grow from having tiny, fringe-festival scale works to sold-out concert halls. And yeah, I’ve also seen the shift in the way gender diversity is placed in public view.
I’d like to think I had some influence.
That’s a lie. I know I did, hence why I was doing a dramatic retelling of one of my unhinged rants to the producers, bullying them into agreeing with me about how toilets don’t have genders, that people have genders and the whole purpose of a sign on a damn door is to indicate to the person reading it if they are damn welcome or not! [Breathe. In. Out. In. Out. It’s gonna be okay.]
Did I use my “privilege” in that moment? The privilege of being a class/category of minority that the kind, progressive people I work with want to support and protect?
Yes. I fuckin’ did.
Because I cannot fucking stand the way we STILL struggle to deal with the concept of expelling urine and faeces in publicly toilets accessible to the public. It makes we want to set my fucking hair on fire that people are so bamboozled by the concept of “a toilet that any gender can use”… because guess what? Any fucking gender, CAN use a toilet. Be they cis, trans, non-binary, all genders, no genders or some other as-yet unforeseen combination of genders… if they piss and shit via conventional means than THIS TOILET IS FOR THEM! [Breathe, dammit! I told myself when I started this, I wasn’t gonna get this worked up.]
So, what the fuck is the point of toilets signs then?
Fundamentally they’re the designation: “Go here if you want to piss and/or shit.” Beyond that? Any other information is about applying a gender binary. The overwhelming majority of transgender people can attest to the stress of navigating public toilets. It’s something I felt long before I transitioned, long before I even consciously realized I was trans. I was never comfortable in public toilets. I detested going into “The Men’s Room”. As a teenager that loved to squander hours upon hours in cafes, I’d know all the spots to duck off to. When you drink that much coffee you gotta have a plan. Each hotel that had a lobby that was open to the public but not too open to the public. Which toilets were regularly serviced. Which ones had minimal stalls. Which were private with floor to ceiling doors with solid latches.
I just thought I was picky about it.
Occasionally my discomfort would be queried by my circle of fellow soft-boys. I’d proudly proclaim that “I am not an animal who just shits wherever they stand.” Or if pointing out that I sit down to urinate I’d tell the smirking men to their faces that “pigs use troughs, are you a fucking pig?”
Strange… I think I pee standing up more now that I’m living as a woman.
Honestly, what woman wouldn’t want to pee standing up right? It’s far simpler an operation. You don’t have to the the whole “hover sitting” thing? The problem of peeing standing up? It is abundantly clear (to me at lease) that the sound of my urinating is so specifically that of someone with a penis. Cause y’all know that the sound of men peeing and women peeing is different, right? Like y’all are aware that the sound of urine exiting a penis and urine exiting the vaginal vestibule is distinctly different? The person in the stall next to me may be sitting there minding their own business and the then have it suddenly dawn on them… “there is a MAN in here!”
Am I saying I have dysphoria about the sound of my own piss? Maybe I am?
Even now I feel the discomfort, the fear I will be discovered and thrown out, accused of being a predator. All it takes is one nosy bitch to complain, to bring it all down. The tenuous grasp I have on my comfort in public spaces that “yes, I AM a woman.”? All it takes is one small, nasty act. A pin popping a balloon. This beautiful lofty thing to marvel at can be destroyed by something small and mean and hateful.
To the uninitiated it might seem that toilet signage isn’t really something I should get so worked up over. But when the sign says “Female” and there is currently a raging debate on what that word includes it suddenly becomes very important to use specific language. All this debate and discourse to me seems to boil down to people for years having operated under the assumptions that the M/F signs on bathroom doors are just code for “has penis” and “has vagina”. So much so that there’s a bar here in the Valley that doesn’t have signs saying Male or Female, but instead giant hairy effigies mounted to the walls. Gargantuan and imposing, these lacquered sculptures glisten in the dim lighting. Neither of these options are particularly welcoming to me, neither really provide clarity to me.
And ultimately isn’t that what these signs are supposed to do?
So, seeing as I’m snatching the much-sought-after mantle of “authority on directing people where to shit”, I should put my defecation where my mouth is and tell you my rules for making signs to indicate the location of the toilets.
By all means use silhouettes of a man and a woman. But I swear to fucking Christ if I see another half-man-half-woman icon to indicate an all-gender bathroom I’m gonna burn your restaurant to the fucking ground. I’m not half anything. Do a better job in designing your iconography.
Oh, you know what else can get in the fucking sea? Those signs that have a yeti, and alien, and then a little “we don’t care what you are just wash your hands”. I swear this is the sort of cisgendered nonsense that people are just blind to. Of course YOU don’t care. YOU haven’t had to contact the department of home affairs to ask them to reissue your citizenship documentation in order to be recognized as your actual legal gender. You haven’t had to sit through hours of psychological assessments in order to justify receiving medical care that cisgendered people can get from their GP immediately. I care about what I am. People care about what they are. Show some goddamn respect to people who have had to fight tooth and fucking nail to have their identities recognized.
You’re used to calling them “Female Toilets” and “Male Toilets”? Fine. For the ones that anyone can use call them “All-Gender Toilets.” They are not “Gender Neutral Toilets”. Only a very small subset of the trans/nb community would be what you call “gender neutral” and even then, I’ve never come across it in the wild.
Consider actually explaining what’s behind the door. “All-Gender Toilet (cubicles & urinals)” and then on the other put “All-Gender Toilet (cubicles only)”. Trust people to know what they need and give them the information and stop making the debate about Biological Existentialism a factor when someone is bursting to take a piss.
And on that note, just say the fucking word “toilet”. And say the word “urinal”. Don’t dress it up. It’s a fucking toilet. It’s not a washroom. It’s not a water closet. It’s not a fucking bathroom. No one is going there to bathe! Obfuscating your language, couching it in a demure coded nomenclature breeds a fear of talking about the thing itself. It creates a culture where people hesitate to ask, where feel shame and embarrassment about the functions of their bodies. Call it a fucking toilet.
And on that note… Go piss, honey.
– S