A wee rant re: urinals

I am all for gender-neutral washrooms. Have you heard Ivan Coyote's TED Talk on the topic? Gender nonconformists need to pee too. Toilet segregation should end: "Kewpie dolls and urine stalls," right?

Another interesting thing online about gender neutral washrooms is in ContraPoints piece on JK Rowling, I think. It's movie-length, be warned! Sorry not to find the exact passage, but it's very entertaining overall, if you can make the time to watch the whole thing. The chunk that really caught my imagination deals with the hysteria over men in dresses being allowed in the ladies room, whereas in fact historically the people who have suffered the most from gender-policing toilet discrimination are masculine-presenting women (is the term "dyke" still considered acceptable? I remember listening to the Animal Slaves having fun with the word, eavesdropping onto Rachel and Ross and Elizabeth and maybe one or two others creating off-the-cuff Dr. Seuss-style rhymes on the theme of, "I like dykes." I've mostly encountered it as a reclaimed word. But I'm out of date, maybe?). 

I mean, no one wants Norman Bates in the stall next to them, but such representations also (as ContraPoints also discusses) tie into a hysterically extreme, transphobic reaction to trans identity (ditto Silence of the Lambs and Dressed to Kill). Avoiding gender neutrality in washroom design because of stereotypes from horror movies... it just doesn't make sense. I get why some women feel nervous, but there's a greater good to consider. 

And I am fine on pronoun change, while we're at it. I find it mildly hilarious that Jordan Peterson has been ordered to receive therapy for his online behaviour. It's interesting to see someone so determined to be on the wrong side of history.  I don't want to be on the wrong side of history, myself, one of the sorry, angry-seeming people clinging to "the old ways." The old gods are cruel, savage, worth avoiding: Jordan Peterson should read less scripture and more HP Lovecraft.

All the same, what the hell is wrong with having urinals in gender neutral washrooms? I mean, I have seen tampon dispensers in them (in the gender neutral washrooms, not in urinals, that is). I personally do not use them. But I don't mind if there are facilities in the, uh, facilities that I need not avail myself of. Yet a couple of places, remodeling or in the process of remodeling to have gender neutral cans, are going with the all-toilet-stall/ no-urinals-nohow way of doing things. 

I have some thoughts about urinals and their seeming forthcoming demise. I do not think my fear for their future is related to patriarchal indoctrination or castration anxiety (or transphobia). I mean: 

1. Urinals waste vastly less water when you flush, compared to toilets. 

2. Regardless of issues of gender, they are better designed to capture the urine of people who stand than toilets. They are ideally designed for those moments when your spray shoots off at an angle or drips or splashes back or otherwise behaves unpredictably. Toilets actually require better aim; it requires vastly less precision to piss on a wall, which is closer to what a urinal looks like, than to piss in a bucket, which is closer to a toilet. This is why it is in everyone's interest if men raise the seat, or turn on the light when they pee (they wouldn't have to, if it were a urinal they were dealing with). It's also why it is better all round that men have a place to pee where there are no points for accuracy, because...

3. ...there are a LOT OF MEN out there whose aim is for shit and who have no desire to assume responsibility for this. This seems sadly universal, a feature of male behaviour, though there may be other psychological, class, age or cultural elements at work in some cases, too: some types of men seem less inclined to raise the seat, lower it when they leave, and wipe up when they miss. Young unmarried  men from wealthy male-dominant societies, perhaps, are a demographic you do not want ahead of you in the line to use the toilet, if there is to be no urinal provided.  

Whatever demographic features we target, there are some men's rooms I have tried to use, in places that have gotten rid of urinals, that have reliably and consistently been GENEROUSLY SPRAYED IN YELLOW. Not all, but some of them, there's a "stall of yellow horror" factor: you open the door with great trepidation, step carefully, cover your fingers in toilet paper before lifting the seat... 

As an older, married man from a reasonably gender-egalitarian society who has used his share of public washrooms, I have been civilized into checking that I haven't missed a drop, and wiping up after myself if I have done so. I don't dig it -- and not wanting to wipe such things up is one reason I like urinals: I don't want to pass the buck onto the person behind me. Especially if I'm married to her, but not only if. 

But one thing I like even less than wiping up my own pee is wiping up OTHER PEOPLE's. Male pee, female pee, gender-neutral pee -- it's all the same to me; I don't want it on my fingers. 

I mean, women know whereof I am speaking, right? Especially ones married to men? Surely it is better all round for EVERYONE if men pee in urinals, so as not to paint the whole stall? Men may not be stalking women in toilets in any great numbers -- that is a transphobic slur, a horror movie cliche that we probably can lay to rest -- but they're PISSING ALL OVER THE PLACE.

If I can just ignore the tampon dispenser in the corner, can't we also leave the urinals in gender neutral washrooms? I mean, if you're remodeling your washrooms to be gender neutral, do you really have to take the urinals out? 

Barring that, could we start installing paper towel dispensers and stocking gender neutral toilets with desanitizers?

Possibly a mop?

End rant. PS, Contrapoints has some fun stuff on Jordan Peterson, too.