I think a much better question would be "Why aren't they all private?" If you create individual bathrooms with lockable doors, you just label it "rest room" and you don't need to assign a gender or make a private matter a public issue.

Why should trans individuals have to deal with the question of which bathroom they "belong" in? What's next? Questioning which bathroom gay people belong in?

Making private individual bathrooms the norm would also eliminate many other issues. The line to the women's room tends to be longer than to the men's because using a urinal takes less time and the use of urinals is more space efficient, so a men's bathroom sometimes has more toilets plus urinals than a women's bathroom has toilets. This has caused some people to decry this as yet another form of sexism that they would like redressed.

Meanwhile, the men's room can have a long wait if you need to have a bowel movement. Lots of urinals is great if everyone just needs to pee, but problematic if that is not the case. Small public men's rooms often have only one toilet, the rest urinals. What if two men are traveling together and both need the actual toilet?

Historically, men's bathrooms tended to not have changing tables, reinforcing the expectation that only women change diapers. Individual bathrooms also eliminates that issue.

The list of problems it would solve is no doubt much longer, but you get the idea.

I think that just skips the original question by assuming the answer. Why is there no convention for privacy from other members of the same gender? You have to consider the economy of providing totally private bathroom facilities too.

> Why should trans individuals have to deal with the question of which bathroom they "belong" in?

Because everyone does.

> This has caused some people to decry

If those people have good arguments, let's hear them.

> The list of problems it would solve

But are we forcing establishments to provide these facilities? It's easy for Google to spend another million on individual cubicles to impress its employees; not all small businesses will find it so easy or rewarding..

> This has caused some people to decry

If those people have good arguments, let's hear them.

So, you are open to hearing these arguments, but out of hand dismissing my solutions.

> Why should trans individuals have to deal with the question of which bathroom they "belong" in?

Because everyone does.

But it isn't some big burden for most people the way it is for trans people. Trans people are a little bit like platypuses: they defy our established categories and don't readily fit our little boxes. That fact will never really change. But it doesn't have to be some big problem wrt bathroom use if we just have more private restrooms in public spaces.

I was homeless for nearly six years. I got off the street earlier this month. Private bathrooms allowed me to do things like brush my teeth without being thrown out. There is very much a classist double standard in what is socially acceptable use of a public bathroom.

Traveler brushing their teeth in a public bathroom? Totes fine. Homeless person doing the same thing? Excellent excuse to ban them from the premises.

Muslim washing their shoes and feet before praying in the hallway on a college campus? Totes fine. Homeless person washing their shoes or feet in the same bathroom? Misuse of the facilities and we need to ask you to leave.

There are lots of ways in which public bathrooms are burdensome for anyone who does not readily fit in with whatever the social norms happen to be. Some of the groups for whom it is burdensome lack the means to make their problem part of the public debate. Other than me occasionally commenting on it in public forums, I am not aware of anyone advocating for the rights of homeless people where it comes to public bathroom use.

There are old TV shows where, for example, cross dressers have to decide which bathroom to use. If someone is successfully passing for female socially and not trying to sleep with me, I gives a damn what bits are between their legs and I don't see why we need a public debate about their bits and bathrooms. There is an available robust solution that could make it a non issue.

Why is there no convention for privacy from other members of the same gender?

Most people are not actually comfortable pooping or dealing with their period, etc, in a public toilet with other people around. There are some people who cannot make themselves poop in public.

In private homes where we share bathroom facilities with our closest people, such as blood relatives or a spouse, the convention is that bathrooms are private and the door gets closed. Most folks don't want to use the toilet with witnesses, even when those witnesses are their most intimate friends and family.

So, I really fail to see why anyone would give push back on this idea. Most people do not actually like using public bathrooms to begin with and public facilities create undue friction for the most marginalized people, like homeless people and trans people. If private bathrooms were the default, we wouldn't even be having a public, nationwide debate about which bathroom trans people should be using. That wouldn't solve all their problems by any stretch of the imagination, but it would remove one burden from their life that is excessive and that unnecessarily sets them apart from other people.

If you think it is not excessive, try spending the day just not using the toilet at all. Most people use the toilet multiple times per day and cannot hold it for eight or ten hours straight. Unless they work from home and basically live as shut ins who get all groceries delivered, etc, this will be a nightmarishly large problem on an ongoing basis.

> So, you are open to hearing these arguments, but out of hand dismissing my solutions.

What do you mean? What "out of hand dismissing"?

> But it isn't some big burden for most people the way it is for trans people. Trans people are a little bit like platypuses: they defy our established categories and don't readily fit our little boxes

Are many (pre or none op) trans-women refused entry to male toilets? The controversies I hear are of the opposite nature.

> If someone is successfully passing for female socially and not trying to sleep with me, I gives a damn what bits are between their legs

Again - why are bathrooms segregated in the first place?

If it's to protected women from predatory men, is the suggestion that trans-women are not predatory?

> Most people are not actually comfortable..

This doesn't answer the question though. Why are toilets not totally segregated within the same sex already?

I have seen parks where toilets were in individual little rooms and sinks were outside and public. I have also seen arrangements where each little room had both a sink and toilet. They both work okay, though it is nice to have the sink be private as well. I don't see any reason why we can't work on coming up with new standard patterns to try to address issues like cost and space efficiency while improving privacy.

As for the existing toilet situation and why it is the way it is, my suspicion is that it was something that worked reasonably well historically when more than half of all people were rural residents. Sometime in the lifetime of my children, we crossed the point where more than half of all people live in cities.

Things that work reasonably well in a relatively homogenous small community or rural area don't work so well for highly diverse big cities. Times have changed. The ongoing national debate about bathrooms makes it clear that our current setup is now problematic.

I fail to grasp why you are so hung up on this detail. Historic precedent is very often a matter of "it was what they could afford in a poorer society than modern America" or "it was the first thing someone thought up without really studying the problem space in earnest." The fact that this is the status quo in no way whatsoever suggests that it is some kind of best practice that we should dread altering.

When I was growing up, I lived on the edge of town. In one direction, there was more housing, plus shops and businesses. In the other, there were wooded areas. It was really common for men to relieve their bladder on a tree somewhere while out and about. I also learned to relieve myself in the woods, though it is less convenient for a girl.

In a situation like that where it is logistically feasible and socially acceptable to just pee on a tree, there is less need for public toilets. But that does not translate well to the big city. You don't have sufficient privacy nor sufficient greenery. Peeing on a tree occasionally in a wooded area is not a threat to public health. The tree will consider it to be fertilizer and it will not cause the spread of disease amongst people.

But in the big city, if lots of people pee and poop on sidewalks or in alleyways, this is a public health hazard. There is currently a hepatitis A epidemic in Southern California that is killing people. It is related in part to large numbers of homeless people relieving themselves exactly that way.

Public toilets are just less of an issue in rural settings. People routinely just pee on a tree. In some parts of the world, population densities reach small city levels, but they are too poor to build the kind of infrastructure for modern bathrooms. People continue to relieve themselves in a nearby field. One result: Women get raped and sometimes murdered while trying to pee and poop.

Bathroom facilities are a real need in highly populated areas in a way that they just are not with fewer people. We now have 7 billion people on the planet. This is unprecedented. It should be no surprise at all that it leads to unprecedented problems in areas that no one would have ever expected.

https://www.livescience.com/54692-why-bathrooms-are-gender-s...

http://theconversation.com/how-did-public-bathrooms-get-to-b...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_crime