A modest proposal for ending the gender toilet wars

This morning, in the men’s loos at work, I had a revelation – or possibly a near-death experience by ammonia.

The smell hit me first: that unmistakable tang of stale wee.

Then the sight – the seat thoughtfully left down, but thoughtfully used as a target.

As I tiptoed between puddles of uncertain origin, it struck me that perhaps this is what the TERFs are really afraid of. Not penises. Not chromosomes. Just men – or rather, men’s aim. The sprinkler attachment that turns every lavatory into a swamp.

I pretty much always sit down to wee. I know that my hose came with the sprinkler rather than jet setting – its not unknown for the pee to come out in two separate perpendicular streams impossible to simultaneously aim. Besides, I have always read on the loo, which you can’t do if you stand up.

It’s funny, isn’t it, how much of the “bathroom debate” is really about disgust? About who we think is dirty, or unclean, or contaminating. As though the purity of a space is determined by what’s between someone’s legs, rather than by whether they wipe the seat and flush the loo.

And let’s be honest – men’s loos are empirically worse. Study after study has found higher bacterial counts, stronger odours, and more unflushed surprises. One report even found men’s washroom door handles eight times dirtier than women’s. It’s not a moral failing, but a cultural one: men are taught that someone else will clean up after them.

The whole thing collapses under the weight of its own hypocrisy. The same people who claim to be protecting women from danger seem unbothered by the actual, everyday horrors of the men’s lavatory: the rivers, the odours, the unwashed hands.

If they truly want to protect everyone from a biological threat, they should worry less about trans women and more about the airborne particulate matter emanating from the average male stall.

So here is my modest proposal: Forget bathroom apartheid; let’s embrace bathroom hygiene. If you sit down, flush, and leave the porcelain sanctuary cleaner than you found it, you are a citizen of the bathroom. Your aim, your chromosomes, and your political fixations are irrelevant.