Adventures in Gender-Free Bathrooms
It’s August! Let’s be silly!
After blogging for over a decade, I am humbled to admit that the most popular post I ever wrote was about squat toilets: Personal Hygeine Tips from the Developing World. Published in 2014 — so long ago the accompanying photos no longer link.
Proof positive that potty humor is always in vogue.
A few weeks ago I enjoyed a completely opposite, yet notable experience with bathrooms. Forget the questionable sanitation of squatting over a hole along with others in Cambodia. The natives of Boston are equally amusing, cordoning themselves off in the brave new world of gender-free bathrooms.
Gender-free bathrooms are not new. I encountered them in virtually every restaurant in the Pacific Northwest back in 2015. Like most trends, the idea flew back East. Likely, it is seeping this very moment into Middle America, where new ideas grow old and comfy.
It’s all well and good to label a pair of restaurant bathrooms as gender-free, with a vanity and toilet in each room, and a privacy lock on the door. It’s quite another matter to turn large, multi-fixture bathrooms into gender free-for-alls.
I attend lots of live theater, establishments that have large bathrooms that are used by hordes of people all at once. Intermissions. A few years ago, the restrooms at the Calderwood became gender-free. No renovations, just a name change. Women who dared would go into the former men’s room, where the line is always shorter (unless the play is about male homosexuals). I, however, being a man of bashful bladder, started going into the former women’s room. All stalls!
Well!!! You should have the seen the looks, the snickers, the comments. As far as females were concerned the point was for them to be able to use our bathroom — most definitely not the other way around. “It works both ways!” I smiled as the women distracted themselves with unnecessary primping.
A.R.T. in Harvard Square switched over next. No biggy. Cantabrigians are so intrinsically cool that everyone just filed into whatever restroom they pleased without a thought.
This year, The Huntington underwent a tremendous renovation, which included completely renovated, completely gender-free bathrooms. The Huntington’s audience is, shall we say, a tad older, a tad more staid than A.R.T.’s. The Lehman Trilogy is a looooong play. Two intermissions. No geriatric patron, no matter how Brahmin, could avoid having to use the bathroom.
Enter the lower-level lobby and encounter a snaking line of men and women, all looking disturbed and wondering, “Am I in the right place?” Some figure it out and resign to new-fangled ways in silence. Others are less astute. “Where is the line for the women’s room? What do mean, there isn’t a women’s room?” The men are doubly discomforted because first: they never had to wait in line before (The Lehman Trilogy is about many things, but not male homosexuals); and second: they’re missing their accustomed respite from their wife, now standing awkwardly, making small talk, at their side.
Thankfully, the line moves fast. The renovation architects did a good job estimating restroom demand. When we enter the formerly separate restrooms, now combined into one Olympic-worthy stretch of floor-to-ceiling laminate stalls, occupancy lights flash red or green over each door. Each person hesitates, eyes a fresh green light, and makes the dash to their private space. Where they are greeted with a smiley-face sign admonishing you to put the seat down.
It’s all very functional and au courant, but not in the least elegant. I don’t get the sense that anyone likes the new arrangement. Which is irrelevant, since the point of gender free bathrooms is to give everyone, regardless of gender-state, the same experience.
Then I recall another hidden benefit of putting everyone’s bodily functions in the same space. Years ago, after a too-long though important meeting about a new project at Yale-New Haven Hospital, some outstanding issues filtered into the post-meeting chatter among the execs in the men’s room. The few females who had attended the actual meeting missed the finale. We can now all rest assured that won’t happen anymore.
