Gender neutral toilets can bog off

Everyone is sick and tired of hearing about the Liverpool Guild of Students’ refurbishment, but what you haven’t heard about (or care about), is the new toilets.

The  Sphinx bar and Courtyard bar in the new Guild both share a set of toilets which have been garishly labelled “gender neutral”.

It couldn’t be clearer

The first thing that strikes you when you are searching for the toilets in these  bars is the sign post to the gender neutral toilets.

The Guild is so proud they couldn’t just put an arrow with toilets, they had to emphasise how wonderfully liberal they are with their gender neutrality when it comes to weeing and pooing.

If the Guild really cared about gender neutrality, surely it could remove the VAT on tampons and sanitary towels like other student unions have, then maybe we would see some true gender equality.

But no, instead of a money saving initiative we can all do our business in the same place.

They are signposted in bright green and white

No tax on tampons

When you go through the clinical grey door to the gender neutral toilet area, there is one disabled toilet off to the left, and in front of you two doors with the transgender symbol staring out at you.

Let’s face facts: it just isn’t pragmatic to have three toilets for two bars in the Guild with a capacity for around 500 people. Just think about that – three toilets.

Any man will tell you urinals just make sense. You can piss quick and easy without fear or hitting a toilet seat that some poor girl will have to sit on.

Any girl will tell you how depressing it is to sit down and realise someone else’s wee is on your bum.

The two gender neutral toilets standing proud

Yes it has advantages for transgender people, but how many transgender people actually go to the University of Liverpool? There shouldn’t be a  tyranny of the majority or anything, but how many girls are carrying around a shewee so they can stand up and piss? Zero that’s how many.

So why don’t we just have a row of urinals and a row of cubicles? Simple.

These gender neutral toilets are just for show. The Guild President and co will be patting themselves on the back that the Guild is so gender neutral, but a better gender neutral system would surely have been a big toilet area split in two with both urinals and cubicles. That way there’d be no queuing issue and girls wouldn’t have to share with messy boys and vice versa – females aren’t angels or anything.