Beyoncé’s gender neutral move has brought sense to a truly mad debate
AT 8pm on Wednesday, a social media floodgate opened onto my screens, straight out of Stockholm. Beyoncé, the global pop star who most intuitively defines her times, had kicked off her Renaissance tour.
But it was not what was going on centre-stage that first caught my eye but an Instagram post from the public passageways of Stockholm’s Melody Arena. “And this is why we love her,” read the caption on my friend’s post, below a picture of a sign printed in the semi-legendary Renaissance font. It read, ‘Gender Neutral Restrooms Renaissance World Tour’.
Two years ago, it was this same friend who’d first made me aware of the real world consequences of an infuriating thunder cloud hovering over what public toilets transgender women should and should not be allowed to use. This ‘debate’ added the bladder to the many individual body parts which have been ritualistically sequestered off to be weaponised against them, from Adam’s apples to shoulders to hand and shoe size to, yes, genitalia.
We’d arranged to meet at Westfield Stratford for a catch-up. “I can give you an hour and a half, maximum,” she said, before adding that she’d rather go home now than use a public convenience. The noise gathering meant she would have to subject herself to shifty looks at the wash basin from people who’d been told by an increasingly hostile media to see her presence as a threat to their safety.
This is why Beyoncé’s Gender Neutral bathrooms, a touring edict which will follow the artist around the globe, matters. It may be gestural. It might be commercial. Who wants less audience when you can have more? It may just be a stroke of clever PR, prompted by a fleeting LGBT+ backlash to her dedicating her Renaissance Grammy win for best Electronic album to “the queer community”, two weeks after playing a blockbuster show in Dubai, where homosexuality is illegal.
Regardless, this practical help has actual repercussions in real time to her real audience. It sends out an unequivocal message on progressive gender politics by a cis-gendered artist at the absolute peak of her powers, furthermore by one feted for her indomitable street-level feminism. It works as a catch-all embrace, saying everyone is invited, unimpeded, no matter what your gender expression happens to be. For all three hours of the show. On May 29, the Renaissance tour makes its way to the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
As it reaches the US, the Renaissance tour will pass through states politicising a gender non-conforming minority and currently legislating hard against teenage healthcare, school placements and the rights of children to play games together.
London is a free-thinking city, by instinct. Nobody will blink an eye at the reconfiguration of toilets in Tottenham. But in Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, Florida, Georgia and Arizona, they constitute a civil rights win. The Renaissance tour gets to honour its name in full.
Paul Flynn
It may just be a stroke of clever PR, but this practical help has repercussions in real time for her real audience