#bathroompolicies

When I competed in the Regional Culture and Arts Festival, we were housed inside the host university’s facilities because there was not enough funding to accommodate delegates in proper hotels. One evening, while several of us were taking a bath in the women’s restroom, two men walked in. There was no hint of the expectation of rejection, they only said the men’s restroom was crowded.

“Hello, we are going to pee here, okay? Men's restroom is too crowded right now,” they said casually, as if that somehow justified entering a space where women were bathing.

This was not a private facility. It was a typical public restroom with wide gaps above and below the stall doors for ventilation and cost efficiency. Anyone inside could easily tell that people were bathing because of the water hitting the cemented floors. A female professor in the next stall immediately confronted them and said, “You are still men. Why are you here? Don’t you realize we are all bathing in here?”

And she was right.

Femininity is not a free pass into women’s spaces. Being effeminate does not erase the fact that you are male, nor does it override the boundaries women are entitled to expect in places where they are vulnerable.

What frustrates me is having to explain this over and over again to people who insist these concerns are imaginary. Do you really think women willingly invite backlash, ridicule, and accusations of bigotry because they are desperate for attention? There are far easier ways to get attention than speaking about an issue that often results in social and professional consequences.

The fear and disgust many women feel in situations like this are difficult to understand if you have never had to experience them. If you have spent your life assuming you belong in every space, then perhaps it is easy to overlook what it feels like to lose one. I told my coach about the incident afterward, and we considered reporting the men involved. Unfortunately, we never identified which university they came from because we were in the middle of bathing and could not see their delegate tags or university shirts. 

That, by the way, is the kind of situation people defend when they dismiss women’s concerns. Not some abstract theoretical debate, but real instances where men gain access to spaces reserved for women, while women are expected to suppress their discomfort for the sake of appearing inclusive. I am grateful that someone in a position of authority spoke up. Had it been us, the female delegates, there was a real possibility that we would have been painted as the problem for objecting.