In the queue for the loo

I went to see The Deep Blue Sea at the Theatre Royal Haymarket last night, which was interesting and poignant and rather close to home at times. It raised a lot of issues that we Samaritans face in our work. The ending was what one of our volunteers might term “a good call.” This post is not about that, though.

At the interval, I joined the queue for the ladies loo, which was into the dozens already by the time I got there. You forget if you don’t go to the theatre regularly, that you must jump up from your seat the instant the rest of the audience raises their hands to applaud the first Act in order to stand of chance of a loo break and a trip to the bar.

As we women stood patiently rolling our eyes some passing man quipped that we should use the men’s loos. I retorted, under my breath (because I don’t want an argument every single moment of the day) that we were no longer legally allowed to do that, now being required to stick to the loos assigned us by reference to our sex designation at birth.

The largely middle-aged women in the queue around me thought that the whole situation where there are never enough loos for the ladies was ridiculous and that we should just have unisex loos at the theatre, just as we do at home or in aircraft or whatnot. Transphobic culture wars hung in the air, unvoiced. We all knew what we were talking about.

We concluded that the people who frame the discussion about women’s toilets have obviously no idea that women’s loos are all cubicles and you can’t see what happens when someone enters one. And we also decided, wrinkling our noses, that we’d rather not go into a men’s toilet anyway.