Quest for gender neutrality may mean we end u p with nothing at all

HOW do you feel about gender-neutral urinals?

Not feeling it? Me neither. The obvious issues of modesty and aiming ability aside, these new public conveniences seemingly come without toilet paper – and what woman wants to hover over a communal piece of porcelain without first giving it a good clean?

But none of this is the point. The point is they will be gender neutral, and in this world where anything gender specific can teeter over into gender stereotype at a moment’s notice, this has got to be a good thing.

So. Gender-neutral urinals. Before we know it, men will be embracing their two weeks of paternity leave and women will be taking all the top jobs in academia and excelling in Stem, and all because they have mastered the art of peeing while (sort of) standing up.

Progressive Berlin is planning to introduce these urinals into public toilets – admittedly not with the aim of creating equality between men and women, but because they use less water. Apparently, women flush public toilets up to three times in one visit (gender stereotype alert: my guess is they are flushing away all the paper they first used to clean the seat).

Could we embrace gender-neutral urinals in our own public places? Or what about in our workplaces, or in our schools? With more and more awareness of the spectrum of gender identity that exists, communal toilets make sense – after all, we manage to use them at home – but gender-neutral urinals? They’ve got to be a glitch in the matrix, or the second law of thermodynamics in action.

For me, they are a sign that for all we push for gender equality, gender neutrality isn’t the answer.

A British documentary this month charted an experiment amongst schoolchildren at first-class level, to see if gender-neutral treatment could change how seven-year-olds think about their place in the world.

The experiment had much to recommend it, as it worked to make educators in the school aware of the sexism ingrained in the teaching process, and to make the children revise the negative assumptions they had formed about their abilities, based on their gender.

Why seven-year-olds? Because girls start believing men are smarter than women at six years old, according to a study published in the journal ‘Science’. By this age, experts reason, children have a grasp of what gender they are and have noted how society defines members of their gender, and they begin to apply that definition to themselves.

Dr Javid Abdelmoneim asserted that the experiment was not about removing gender identity, but rather about removing the gender stereotypes that were already holding the children back from achieving their full potential.

Importantly, he stopped the male teacher using the sexist prefixes ‘love’ and ‘mate’ when addressing girls and boys respectively. Actually, I’m surprised it wasn’t raised as a child protection issue. He also introduced gender neutral lavatories. He installed signage in the classroom reading ‘girls are strong’ and ‘boys are sensitive’. He did away with the girls’ dolls, and books featuring needy princesses and manly superheroes.

Parents are generally aware such gender tropes are influencing their children’s perception of themselves, and are working to give girls and boys a more equal upbringing. It’s only a matter of time before the Disney princesses are classified as banned material, and any parent found pedalling such filth will be locked away for crimes against humanity. Yet I suspect many of us struggle with the blanket message that everything we thought about gender was wrong.

It’s only a matter of time before Disney princesses are reclassified as banned material

The idea that men and women are deeply, fundamentally different has informed gender roles for centuries; is it really so wrong to be comfortable with difference?

A few years ago Australian psychologist Steve Biddulph was parenting guru gold for his advice on ‘Raising Boys’ and ‘Raising Girls’ in fundamentally different ways. A decade before Biddulph, we were in thrall to the idea that women are from Venus and men are from Mars. Separate planets? Now we don’t even have separate loos.

Curiously, the unisex lavatories turned out to be one of the most contentious issues of the British experiment, and the old system of girls’ and boys’ toilets has since been restored in the school. The school refused to give a reason.

Here in Irish schools, communal toilets shouldn’t be so much of an issue, as a quarter of all primaries and a third of all secondary schools are single sex. Whatever about Cinderella and superheroes, here is a concrete message society is giving children that gender differences exist – or at least, that the Government can’t afford a gender-neutral school building project that would enable us to prove otherwise.

Maybe we should thank them, in a backhanded way. Sure, to be neutral is to be open-minded and objective, but it is also to have an absence of decided views, expression, or strong feeling. If we strive to make everything in this world – from urinals to children – neutral, we run the risk of making everything nothing at all.