by users. To wit: most people, I’d wager, would walk silently past someone they suspected was shooting drugs in a stall. Yet watch a man step foot into the women’s bathroom and he’ll be urgently ushered out for his social transgression. My dad once accidentally strolled into the women’s room at a ski hill as my young daughter tried frantically to alert him. We still talk and laugh about it years later.
This is not the experience of trans people using public bathrooms that fit their gender. Being transgender in a gendered bathroom is rarely funny. Trans people report facing verbal and physical threats and abuse in the bathrooms that are right for their gender, but can be perceived by others as not matching their sex. A solution is unisex or gender-neutral or gender-free (my preferred term) bathrooms, which are being embraced in public schools and universities across North America, in chain restaurants like Tim Hortons, and in government buildings. In 2013, then Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter signed legislation requiring such bathrooms in city-owned buildings; it’s the same in Oregon’s Multnomah County, which includes Portland. But on several fronts, gender-liberated bathrooms fail.
The legislation mostly works like potty parity – only for new construction, so it can take a long time for change to happen. When it does, not everyone’s on board. The conversion from traditional side-by-side, sex-separated bathrooms with multiple stalls to single-user bathrooms may level the peeing field, but it is wickedly expensive and usually decreases provision and adds to lineups. Where once there may have been two stalls in the women’s and a stall and three urinals for men – allowing six people to go at once (unfairly benefiting men, I grant) – there may now be two toilets in two single-occupant rooms that are designated gender-free or ‘family.’ In the less commonly seen conversion to gender neutrality – where signs are simply replaced to declare multi-stall spaces gender-free – there’s been backlash ranging from outright transphobic to merely wary. Even declaring existing single stalls gender-free has its detractors.
Clara Greed, for her part, likes the idea of gender-free washrooms, but won’t stand for them if it means the removal of women-only spaces. She points out the prohibition against sharing such space with biological males among some Muslim women, fundamentalist Christian women, Hindu women, and Orthodox Jewish women. She says there’s a social function of public bathrooms that’s being lost with sex desegregation: ‘The public toilet is one of the few places left where women can be actually separated from men.’
Uprisings of any stripe are becoming more complicated, at least in England and its surrounds. Whereas North Americans, and certainly Canadians, haven’t enjoyed much on-street public provision, the UK has a long tradition of recognizing the need for stand-alone public bathrooms in city centres (even if they have been designed, in the main, for men – more on that in chapter six). But today, public toilets are disappearing. A 2016 BBC report found, through Freedom of Information requests, that at least 1,782 facilities had closed across the UK in the preceding decade. In London alone, it’s estimated that about half of council-managed public bathrooms have closed: city governments don’t see their value justifying the cost of their maintenance. Some of London’s ornate underground Victorianera facilities are being sold off and transformed into kicky little cafés and hip restaurants. I love charcuterie, sure, but there is a limit. Today’s toilet campaigns, increasingly, aren’t for better provision, but to keep what’s there now.
Greed turns to the business case. When visitors come to Britain, she says, ‘they are disgusted by our public toilets and the lack of facilities.’ But she’s also convinced that better provision helps breathe life into dusty downtowns. Public bathrooms, she argues, are far from money down the drain. ‘I keep asking god for a toilet miracle, but I haven’t seen one yet. It’s like the miracle of the five thousand loaves and fishes. I want five thousand more toilets.’
3
SOME HISTORICAL SHIT
Someone wipes her bottom, drops a pre-moistened flushable wipe into the toilet bowl, and watches the swirling mess sloosh south. In a restaurant down the street, an employee pours the dregs of a kettle of fryer oil into a sink drain and watches the warm, lardish goo gurgle down. Then each walks away from the place her home or work connects to the underground wonder of the modern sewer. I mean, that’s how it’s supposed to go, right? The sewers lie waiting for our worst. They accept our shit, our shower water, and our tampons; our flushable wipes, used medications, and the leftover fat from our Sunday-morning bacon and eggs. Our approach to sewers is dump and run. We rarely give these accepting labyrinthine marvels a thought.
Until the sewers push back.
The pipe leading from that home and the pipe exiting that restaurant connect at a trunk line, well below the sidewalk and street. By this point, the hot fat is no longer hot. And the flushable wipe, while flushable in name, is not in nature – wipes are designed to withstand being wet for long periods in storage and hold their shape even in the face of sustained abuse. The wipe enters the trunk line as durable as ever, swimming along with dozens of equally sturdy tampons, applicators, and used condoms. It snags on a sewer wall. On it, the congealing fryer fat finds a home. More fat from more restaurants passes and sticks. More wipes from more homes greet the tumescent mess, along with more tampons, more sanitary pads… You get the scene. The New York City Department of Environmental Protection estimated in 2015 that wet wipes had cost the city $18 million for blockageclearing and disposal over the previous five years. And used cooking oil is a problem for sewers all over. Austin, Texas; Washington, D.C.; and Tulsa, Oklahoma, have all started ad campaigns begging homeowners to quit dumping leftovers down their sinks. Animal fats, vegetable oils, and lard – even dairy products – stick to the walls of sewers like cholesterol plaque on the inside of an artery.
The frightening apotheosis of this problem is the mythically dubbed fatberg – a terrifying blob that adheres to the walls of sewers like concrete. A fatberg the size of a double-decker bus was discovered under Kingston in 2013 by Thames Water, London, England’s water and sewage utility. In 2017, the biggest fatberg on record was discovered under the Whitechapel district, the kind of monster that makes the 2013 Kingston fatberg sound quaint: more than ten times bigger, and longer than two football pitches. The Museum of London put a portion of it on display in 2018 (exhibition title: Fatberg!). Thames Water crews – eight members strong, working seven days a week – took two and a half months to remove this puppy. No doubt all the while looking over their shoulders for the next fatberg around the sewer bend.
See, these things really do pop up out of nowhere. Sure, it seems wild to imagine something growing, undetected, underneath your house that’s the length of eleven double-decker buses, like the Whitechapel fatberg. But the whopping great volumes of oil from restaurant fryers and residential cooking, congealing around sewer joints and the reams of wet wipes, collect bit by bit by tiny bit. One frying pan of bacon fat? How could that hurt? A tampon here? Some dental floss there? No biggie. No one pictures these minor cast-offs mixing with gelling blubber to become a sturdy fecal-fat blob looming below the asphalt. Yet Thames Water clears some forty thousand fat blockages a year. The pinguid terror of the Kingston fatberg was only discovered when residents reported trouble getting their toilets to flush. As Simon Evans, a Thames Water spokesman, told the Guardian, technicians discovered a ‘heaving, sick-smelling, rotting mass of filth and feces’ stuck to the roof of a neighbourhood trunk line. The good news? Kingston upon Thames avoided – narrowly – having the contents of its every toilet bubbling up out of powderroom loos and laundry-room sinks.
Modern city sewer systems, despite the abuse they withstand, have limits. And in growing cities, it’s not only flushing the unflushable and draining the undrainable that sinks the sewers, it’s a simple question of volume: the more of us there are, the more shit we collectively produce. And the more shit we produce, the better we have to be at finding different ways of dealing with it. Humans have the benefit of millennia in our back pockets on this one. But different and better aren’t exactly the hallmarks of our relationship with removing what we excrete. Consider: North Americans and
