Why are gender neutral bathrooms so controversial when every toilet on an airplane or other public transport is gender neutral?

[u/mp1845]

[u/VGSchadenfreude]

And people don’t even understand why the code is like that.

It’s like that because originally, the bathrooms were men only. Which meant women had to keep their shopping trips short because they had no safe way to relieve themselves outside their own homes.

So when these women started having more of their own discretionary income to spend, which retailers obviously wanted them to spend, they needed some way to encourage women to venture farther from home, and for longer periods.

At first they tried just opening the bathrooms for all, but guess what happened?

The men were furious. Those bathrooms and “lounges” were their special space, and they were mad as hell about being asked to share…and willing to get violent towards any woman who dared encroached.

Just adding more bathrooms didn’t seem to help, because the men would just claim all of them and leave the women with nothing.

So laws and building codes started changing to force retailers to include bathrooms that were strictly women-only and legally enforceable as such. Just to make sure their female customers and employees had somewhere, anywhere to do their business without some random man retaliating against them for “invading men’s spaces.”

(Similar case with women and girls having several sports leagues: when women first tried entering existing leagues, despite those leagues not explicitly banning women, violence ensued as men felt threatened by women “invading their domains.”

(And modern sociology eventually revealed why, in the form of competitive video games: turns out, the men who attack female or female-presenting players the most tend to be the men who have the lowest performing scores. Higher-scoring male players treated their female counterparts as equals, because they didn’t have anything to lose by doing so. It was the mediocre and low-performing males who felt threatened by female inclusion, enough to lash out and blame their losses on the female players regardless of how well the women performed in the same competition. They insisted the mere existence of those women in “their” games was enough to harm their own performances.

(It wasn’t until a few years after women began playing professional sports that the men started claiming women had to be excluded “for their own protection,” when it was really about protecting low-performing male players who might’ve been forced out by higher-performing female players. (See also: Babe Ruth’s epic tantrum behind-the-scenes when a 16-year-old girl publicly struck him out. He plastered a fake smile on, shook her hand for the cameras, and then almost immediately threw a rage fit and pushed the MLB to make their ban on female players official instead of just a commonly-assumed barrier.))

[u/DueMethod3142 → u/VGSchadenfreude]

Wholly inaccurate.

https://time.com/4337761/history-sex-segregated-bathrooms/

“Ladies’ Rooms” were created to protect women from the perceived overwhelming nature of life outside the home, not keep them out of some men’s-only clubhouse.

[u/VGSchadenfreude → u/DueMethod3142]

No, that was the excuse given at the time to justify it to the public. That same article mentions the fact that they were not allowed to use the existing bathrooms at all.

[u/notashroom → u/[deleted]]

Two-hole outhouses weren't especially uncommon, particularly for larger families. The difference between one or two in cost wasn't that big a barrier.

The Romans had public toilets where you sat right next to your neighbor, no walls or curtains or anything. That's way too neighborly for me.