Should all public toilets be gender-neutral?

[Serious trigger warning for discussion of sexual assault]

I think there are good arguments both for and against making all public toilets gender-neutral public toilets. I find myself leaning to the "pro" camp, but I'd like to hear comments, especially from women.

The basic proposal is that all new public toilets be constructed along the following lines:

• A large room with toilet stalls and washing area; and 
• (optionally) a smaller room, adjoining this main room, containing urinals

To this basic plan, one might also add smaller private rooms for changing infants, disabled facilities, etc. The important feature, for present purposes, is that all facilities will be available to everyone, regardless of gender and anatomy. Older facilities might be retrofitted to this plan in various, by knocking down walls and installing new partitions, relabelling existing facilities as "bathroom with urinals" and "bathroom without urinals", etc. 

The case for:

1. Accommodation of people who don't comfortably fit into the gender binary

This includes trans*, intersex, agender, genderqueer people and so on. The motivation for this is that many such people do not identify with either gender and so will feel uncomfortable being forced into choosing one. Moreover, they often suffer harassment and even violence by other members of the public when they use the bathroom they do choose. (Some cases are discussed here, but there are many examples). Such harassment might, of course, continue. But it must be recognised that many people think they are "doing the right thing" when they attempt to prevent someone who they read as belonging to the "wrong" gender from using a given facility. This applies even more strongly in the case of facilities with security personal stationed at the toilets (e.g. clubs and bars), who have explicit powers to bar entry to person of the "wrong gender". Of course, people who do not fit the enforced gender binary are sadly likely to continue suffering harassment in various contexts for some time to come. But it is hoped that explicitly stating that everyone is entitled to use all facilities would eliminate at least one pretext and so diminish the overall amount of harassment. 

2. Accommodation of carers

Many people are taken care of by people of a gender different to their own. For instance, a young boy accompanied by his mother; a frail elderly woman accompanied by a male nurse. It seems clear that many such people would need to be accompanied by their carers into toilets, because they have mobility difficulties, need to be helped with hygiene, may get lost, and so on. There is already an implicit social convention in many places that young children may accompany parents into the toilet designated for the parent's gender. But there is no such convention for cases where both parties are adults. Even with children, there is often an uncomfortable "transition" during the time when the child starts to be "read" as possessing something like adult gender but cannot safely be left alone. 

3. Fairness

Women's toilets are often designed with much less capacity than men's, as anyone who has observed the queues outside a busy public toilet will have noticed. This is a defect in what is charmingly known as "potty parity", or fairness in provision. Public toilets are often designed in such a way that men's and women's facilities occupy equal floor space. However, since stalls take up more space than urinals, this means women's toilets actually have fewer facilities. Moreover, even if there are equal facilities, urinating at a stall takes considerably longer than urinating at a urinal. Fairness would require allocating considerably more facilities for women than for men. This whole issue can be avoiding, however, simply by creating gender neutral facilities. This is especially so where retrofitting is required - rather than trying to reallocate floor space in an existing building, and installing new facilities, the walls between men's and women's bathrooms can be knocked down (they're usually adjacent to each other) to create a larger space. 

4. Efficiency

This is a less important set of arguments, but I thought I'd throw it out there. The basic idea here is that there's going to be random "unevenness" in the number of men versus women demanding toilet facilities. This can result in a queue for the women's toilets while the men's toilets sit empty and (more rarely) vice versa. Resources are used more efficiently if any available facility can be used by anyone. 

Another argument is that, if it was made clear that urinals are available for anyone's use, more women might make use of them, possibly with the help of a shewee. Since using a urinal is much quicker than using a stall, this would also result in time savings for everyone. 

The case against:

The major argument against instituting gender-neutral toilets is one of safety, specifically in respect of sexual assault. The thought here is that, since the majority of sexual assaults are committed by men against women, it is a bad idea to allow men to enter enclosed private spaces where they might find a woman alone. Since most sexual assaults are committed by people known to the victim, the scenario of being assaulted by a stranger in a public toilet is relatively uncommon, but it definitely does happen (a random selection of news articles). 

There are a few responses we might give to this argument. Firstly, sexual predators are certainly not deterred from entering women-only bathrooms. Indeed, in many of the cases cited above, the assailant specifically followed his intended victim into the bathroom, correctly believing he would be able to corner her there. So the safety of such spaces is arguably somewhat illusory. But perhaps it is at least more difficult for an such a predator to do this with gender-segregated toilets, since anyone noticing him entering the women's bathroom would immediately raise the alarm. 

Another factor to consider is that a predator will tend to avoid potential witnesses, so generally the more people there are in a bathroom, the safer it will be, even if those bystanders are also men. However, the presence of men would only prevent attacks where the victim is specifically followed and isolated, buy may also facilitate opportunistic attacks. So it's important that we know which sort of cases tends to predominate. Additionally, while a male bystander might step in if someone is obviously being violently attacked, he might be more likely to join in on more minor harassment and abuse. 

Finally, there is something a little uncomfortable about the idea of segregating facilities as a response to bad behaviour by men. I think similar issues arise, for instance, in the introduction of women-only train cars specifically in response to pervasive sexual harassment . This solution seems like something of a cop-out, an unwillingness to deal with the underlying problem of male entitlement. That said, the bottom line is that it is for women themselves to decide how best to protect themselves, so a rather abstract argument like this shouldn't be given too much weight in the face of actual demands from women.