A very British obession
Sunday 24th May, 1998
Adapted from a posting to the UKPFC-News mailing list
It seems to me a very British thing to be hung up about the lavatory.
It’s not a thing to trouble the French … a quick peer in the window of any self-respecting French pharmacy window will reveal an entire arsenal of products dedicated to ensuring that our friends across the water can go faster, more copiously and far more often than anyone else in Europe. Across the other side of the Atlantic, too, a charming feature of many household loos which I’ve had the pleasure (sic) of visiting, is one of those curious little platforms permitting you to pick over the remains of last night’s dinner in detail, if that’s your fancy. Around the world in fact, everywhere you go, you’ll see an acceptance of the rather simple fact that human beings need to excrete the remains of what they’ve consumed now and then … and sometimes even entire social rituals dedicated to celebration of the fact.
Back home, however, even though the invention of the modern day "Water Closet" is credited (by some) to a late Victorian sanitary engineer called Thomas Crapper, who put an end to the need for us to commune with nature in a little hole at the bottom of the garden, some Britons don’t seem to have quite got the hang of what the rooms designed to house his machines are for.
For a business traveller like myself, of course, toilets are something you are merely thankful to find. A cubicle door that locks, soft paper, healthy looking seat, a clean bowl (flushed by the last user), and somewhere to put your bag (rather than on the floor) are "nice to have’s" … just as it’s desirable, afterwards, to be able to wash your hands in warm water, and dry them on something clean. A well lit mirror, in which to pull faces at yourself whilst reapplying makeup and brushing your hair, just about completes a travelling woman’s definition of heaven.
One learns the need to compromise though … so when I popped into South Mimms services on the busy junction between the M25 and A1 a few weeks ago, I didn’t turn a hair when the sign outside the ladies informed me that there was a male attendant on duty within. Neither, it seems, did the thirty or so other women already in the place when I entered. Whatever secondary purposes a lavatory may have, you see, two cups of tea followed by three hours of driving have a way of setting their very own agenda. In fact these days it’s really quite common to find man-shaped men working in the public toilet areas, whilst women go about the real business of being there.
And that’s the crucial thing about toilets. You go there principally to do one thing … and you do it alone. Other countries may behave as though there’s a local shortage of wood when fashioning the little cublicles which separate one woman’s affairs from another, but the British have got that taped. There could be a riot going on outside the cubicle, but you can rest assured that if you really want some privacy in our crowded isle, you merely need to step into the nearest lavatory cublicle to find it.
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ALL OF WHICH makes the latest example of the British obsession with trans people and toilets so very sad.
Two months ago, of course, it was one of the many "problems" filling the minds of the civil servants’ at the Department of Education and Employment, who actually wanted to define who could and couldn’t use the toilets and when … which would have been bad news for any woman with the misfortune to not fit somebody else’s idea of what a woman should look like. It’s tempting to draw comparisons with the only precedents which history gives us in those sort of circumstances. Not very long ago it was considered repugnant by our more "enlightened" societies, that a certain country still erected signs designating public facilities on the basis of people’s skin colour. Physiognomy? Skin tone? What’s the difference? You might not feel comfortable sharing the toilet area with a black woman if you’re a xenophobic white one, but does your dis-ease qualify for a legal sanction to put it into force?
This isn’t to diminish the feelings of women faced with the issue of a colleague, whom they previously knew and accepted as a man, transitioning and asking, at some reasonable point, to share the facilities which they share together. It is a difficult issue, which most work communities have to find their own way in. Compromise is essential, as is good sense … and sensitivity all round. But the key word here is "all round" … and sensitivity is a two way street. The problem for many trans people is that they face an assumption that the compromising has to come from them all the time, and that objections to their presence in a women’s space (which amounts a rejection of them as women) are something they should just accept. For a sex which takes a smug pride in ownership over all attributes sensitive and caring, some of our sisters seem curiously blind to the way in which their own obsessions can be cruel and selfishly insensitive to others.
There’s an inconsistency too, of course. For if you are hell bent on perceiving a transsexual woman as a man, and concerned about excluding them from the toilet you use, the corollary is that you should have no objection to a transsexual man … with "Girl" inscribed on his birth certificate … occupying the adjacent stall. We know the response though, of course.
It’s therefore sad, but not altogether surprising, that whilst the general understanding and acceptance of trans people in British society continues to forge ahead in many areas, a contributor to the UKPFC forum should, last week, have been discussing the refusal, by some of her colleagues, to let her use the Ladies toilet at work, when she returns from SRS.
The dilemma, of course, lies in how to handle such a challenge … especially when, as the correspondent said, she found she kept bursting into tears when trying to find the best way to assuage her colleagues’ sensitivities. One wonders how many tears her colleagues shed in return. Can they comprehend hers?
THESE DAYS, of course, the well educated PFC campaigner knows how to use the law … right down to the forms you use!
The law is really a weapon of last resort though … and so it was heartening to see forum contributors last week rapidly coming to the conclusion that gentle persuasion is better than force.
But what if gentle persuasion fails? To what point should an employer indulge a worker’s refusal to accomodate a colleague? I may object because the woman from the next office always leaves a pungent smell in her wake when she’s used the toilet … but do I have a right to insist that my employer makes her go elsewhere? And if we push her off to the disabled toilet, what about the views of the people for whom it’s really provided?
And when our poor forum correspondent travels outside her school with those colleagues and they all want to use the loo … what then? Should she apply different standards when her colleagues are around than when she goes shopping with a friend? Suppose she’s drafted across to a neighbouring school because of staff illness too, should the rule follow her? Or does she need to negotiate her way through other people’s opinions before uncrossing her legs?
These are not simple questions, but they’re generally resolved sensibly when tackled by reasonable people. The Ladies toilet isn’t just a place for excretion. It has a social dimension too. In public toilets we may largely practice gaze avoidance … or at best make nervous and self conscious conversation about something trivial, to avoid the awkward reality of why we’re all there. In an office where people know one-another it’s different though … whole conversations take place in the loo, which is prized as a special man-free zone, where confidences can be traded and delicious gossip exchanged. The conversations carried on under and through the walls of the cubicles, and over the sound of water meeting porcelain, have a ritual bonding quality … which extends in the freedom to carry on adjusting our underwear in surprisingly blatant ways, in company with our peers. So, to admit a formerly excluded colleague to this space speaks volumes about acceptance, far beyond the simple confounding necessity of meeting their need to "go" somewhere.
In the end, however, it is for the women who reject their trans colleague to justify their actions and their reasons for wanting to go on treating her as an outsider. In other contexts such behaviour would be construed as bullying, and it is not enough to simply repeat that you’re not comfortable. Ultimately, too, it is a management responsibility to weigh up and accomodate the needs of all staff in a reasonable way … which doesn’t simply mean giving in to a majority, if that majority’s behaviour is plainly unreasonable. Making the act of going to the toilet into a psychological demeanment for a member of staff, in direct opposition to what is judged to be their best clinical interests, is not a reasonable act. An employee who feels obligated to resign in such circumstances has every reason to complain that a constructive dismissal occurred, in this case on grounds of their transsexualism.
We do hope, therefore, that our correspondent’s colleagues … who are supposed to be TEACHERS in a CHRISTIAN school will eventually therefore acquire some of the qualities which one presumes they’re expected to teach.
