‘Lavatory deserts’ mean we are all likely to be caught short

One of the side effects of last week’s heatwave was the rich dark smell of urine. There were other smells too – on a tube train travelling north, a young woman turned to me with wide terrified eyes as she was hit by the reek of our fellow travellers’ armpits, undried clothes and sweaty hair. I tried to silently placate her, a wry little oh dear smile to say, one thing the heat does is remind us we have a body. She kept her hand over her mouth all the way to Camden. 

But the body persists – the reshuffling of body parts to enable a vest, the frantic application of cream to skin you’d forgotten about since September. Even now, at dusk the pavements are still vibrating with the hot weekend’s desperate pee, the result of people out in the sun with only a handful of public toilets between them. It’s coincidence that the heatwave came at the same time as a new code of practice from equalities watchdog the EHRC, insisting that single-sex toilets must exclude trans people. But that news provided, I think, a chilling mirror to how rightwing debate now distracts from what most people, people with bodies, both want and need. 

The British Toilet Association reported that 40% of public toilets have closed since 2000, the buildings being converted into bars, cafés and florists. Last month, the Royal Society for Public Health explained how lack of local authorities funds has led to lavatory “deserts”, meaning older or disabled people, or women who are pregnant, might stay home rather than risk needing the toilet when shopping or walking in the park. Homeless people, who can’t afford to buy a coffee at Pret every time they need the loo, are especially impacted by this growing lack of public toilets. And, of course, all women have become accustomed to queuing in bathrooms designed shortsightedly, with the same number of cubicles as the men’s despite women’s needs being greater. 

It’s into this awkward legs crossed crisis that the new EHRC document lands, setting out how public bodies and businesses should respond in practical terms to last year’s Supreme Court ruling that sex in the Equality Act refers only to biological sex. Trans women, it says, cannot use female toilets, and should instead be offered a “third” space. In practice this will lead not only to the humiliation and grief of trans women being pushed out of public life, but also to the harassment of any women who don’t present as feminine enough when using ladies loos, and the employees of these places being expected to act as vigilant gender police. And, insisting that trans people use the already dwindling number of “third space” accessible toilets will inevitably impact the disabled people who rely on them. It’s all, ironically, going to shit. 

I’m writing this in the last of the unusual heat – at home with the window open the city smells of old beer and urine have been replaced by cut grass and barbecues, but the bodies with their sweats and bladders remain, lolling on the green outside, smoking in the shade. This week, the sun has affected my migraine pills, leaving me fainty, pained and a little mad, and news I may just have rolled my eyes at before has taken on a crazed and psychedelic sheen. Everything is revealed to be, actually, bonkers.

Like, when debates on “benefit cheats” run and run while in the background millions of vulnerable people struggle to access the benefits they’re entitled to, benefits that are, by the way, insufficient to live on. Or when uproar about an asylum seeker committing a sexual offence is used to argue against immigration, rather than to understand and minimise the society-wide issue of violence against women. Or when people are shamed for destroying the environment by using things like plastic straws, rather than legislating and forcing shame upon the businesses that make billions from single-use plastics. You know?

The question we should be concentrating on today is not about who is allowed to use public toilets, it is: why are there now so few of them? Why are local authorities so chronically underfunded? Why has a toilet break become a luxury? Why are we being distracted from the realities of life in a body, as summer approaches fast? People just want to piss in peace.