Busting

This isn't a thing I was expecting to write - and truly, you've got New Zealand First to thank. Welcome to my unplanned memoir of toilets, mates, being a woman, and my love for my transgender kid.

Content warning: this post covers a range of potentially uncomfortable topics, from birth injury to bigotry.

Here’s a curious tale for you. It comes from the work of Associate Professor Annabel Cooper, an academic from the University of Otago, and her colleagues. The first of our stories, it’s crafted from the incompleteness of historical record. Some voices are loud, and some are all but absent, just like today. With that caution in mind, let’s figure out what Cooper’s story has to tell us.¹

Ōtepoti Dunedin is both where the story is set, and where I learned it many years later. When Pākehā arrived there in the mid-1800s, they brought certain things with them and left others behind. A New World town, Ōtepoti Dunedin offered an escape from the harshness and filth of industrial Britain. Modernity, the settlers believed, held the promise of a different society: one shaped by advances like public health and sanitary engineering. But even as the settlers came with New World aspirations, they also lugged old world baggage. In this modern town, the public sphere with its important matters - its public health and sanitary engineering, its architecture, politics, and commerce - would be for men. The private sphere, the home and its duties, would remain the arena of women.

It was the next wave of immigrants to Ōtepoti Dunedin, many of them Irish and lower-class, who upset the original settlers, staid and Presbyterian. Gold had been discovered in Central Otago in 1861, drawing single men in fantastic numbers - and as a gateway to the goldfields, Ōtepoti Dunedin burgeoned into a wealthy port town. But many of the new arrivals were uncouth: drinking, sometimes in days-long binges, and urinating and defecating in public. With the harshness and filth of Britain within living memory, the town’s elite was appalled. The Inspector of Nuisances even urged flax bushes be torn up, so men couldn’t use them to do their business.

That’s how Ōtepoti Dunedin got its first public toilets in 1862. Critically, though, they were only for men: after all, it was men who were causing the havoc. Women, you’ll remember, were thought to belong in the private sphere of the home. Civic leaders must have assumed public toilets for women were unneeded - and that assumption probably helped keep women from the public sphere.

When the women of Ōtepoti Dunedin did leave home, how did they get on? It’s possible their mid-1800s clothing allowed them to pee undetected, because cage crinolines held their skirts away from their bodies and could be worn without underwear. Some women would have been caught short and squatted, as suggested by stains on surviving clothing from the time. We know little about how women managed menstruation outside the home. But if women somehow made do with these messy arrangements, it wasn’t to last. Society was changing.

From the 1870s to about 1900, the need for women’s toilets gained recognition - but from the town’s businesses, not its civic leaders. You see, women were becoming responsible for a new and growing facet of life: consumerism. They did the shopping. Certain small businesses would provide toilets to women, likely because those women had children in tow; although this was little use to women visiting town, who didn’t know which businesses to ask. Early department stores followed suit. Catering to women was becoming good for the bottom line, but even so, toilet provision was far from adequate.

The city itself wasn’t off the hook. Around the turn of the century, a fierce debate kicked off in the pages of the Otago Daily Times. One Murray Aston wrote, ‘In London and other great cities places marked “For ladies only” are quite usual. I fail to see, therefore, why this colony should be 25 years behind the times’. And since women had gained the vote in 1893, a notion of women as citizens like men was gaining ground. A slow move began towards civic provision of toilets for women - but not on the same terms as men.

In 1908, the city got its first women’s public toilet. However, the imbalance continued, with significantly fewer toilets available to women than men. Urinals were free - great for men - but water closets, the only option for women, cost a penny. The little we know suggests women kept on managing by planning ahead, not drinking before leaving home to avoid the need to go. But it wasn’t long until they took matters into their own hands. Over 1925–26, a vast event called the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition was held in Ōtepoti Dunedin, attracting 3.2 million visitors, over double the then-population of the country.² Several women’s groups got together, fundraising with the help of mayoresses of other nearby towns. The restrooms they had built were used by an astonishing 36,000 attendees. Once the exhibition was over, the women donated the restrooms to the city - perhaps embarrassing civic leaders into playing their part once and for all.

Toilets are about our dignity, our health; our ability to access public spaces, to be full citizens. They’ve been the site of civil rights struggles - the kinds of struggles you’d hope in this day and age would long be behind us.

I learned much of this first story from Annabel Cooper herself, in the early 2000s. I’d recently gone back to study after having my first child, a baby girl. I was trying to be a mum and a student and a worker, all at once - my baby coming with me almost everywhere. When there were no suitable facilities, I’d changed her on the toilet floor, spreading a cloth nappy on the lino beneath her.

I’d had a rough pregnancy, but you pee a lot during any pregnancy, rough or smooth. I’d worked the whole nine months, at Otago Polytechnic; and one day, I’d got chatting to a colleague working in the building where trades were taught. I could see the gents’ room, and I asked about the ladies’. There wasn’t one. As the colleague explained, it wasn’t needed: women don’t learn trades.

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Not so long before I got pregnant with my daughter, back in Ōtepoti Dunedin, I met a woman who’s been one of my best mates for more than two decades. Her name is Awhina. We’ve both moved north across the motu since that time: Awhina now back home in Napier with her three kids, and me a few hours south in Te Awa Kairangi Upper Hutt.

Here is our next story. Rāmari is Awhina’s daughter. She loves ice cream and movies and fun, sharing the same joy in shenanigans as her two brothers. She has a congenital condition called cytomegalovirus, or CMV. For Rāmari, the effects of CMV mean she is non-verbal, uses a wheelchair and a hoist, and needs someone to help with activities like toileting.

Awhina’s back isn’t as strong as she’d like - and even if it were, lifting her daughter is becoming an impossibility. Rāmari’s not a baby anymore, even if her nickname’s still ‘Pēpi’. More and more, she’s becoming a young woman. She needs a nappy change every three hours, or she’ll be wet through. If they’re at home, Awhina can manage: she’s got the gear. If they’re not, it all becomes a game of logistics that’s increasingly difficult to win.

Rāmari is one of about 20,000 New Zealanders who need a fully accessible ‘Changing Places’ bathroom - one equipped with an accessible toilet, hoist, and adult-sized changing table.³ There are seven of these toilets across the country, although the Changing Places organisation is fundraising for more, like the women of Ōtepoti Dunedin did back in the day. Without enough of these toilets, there is no choice but to make do. Awhina is wry: she says it’s normal for them to do a ‘bush wee’, quoting Bluey.

It’s not just Rāmari who’s affected by the lack of accessible toilets. If they’re out and about and Awhina needs to go, she can’t just leave her kid outside and alone. She’s got two options: find a sufficiently accessible toilet with room for Rāmari and her wheelchair too; or if she can’t, pee with the door open a little, eyes on her daughter.

It all came to a head on a family trip to Gisborne.

The cyclone has made a three-hour journey into five hours. Of necessity, Awhina knows intimately the facilities on that route - their insufficiency and inaccessibility. And so, as ever, the family made do that day. After a roadside change on a blanket, Awhina and her dad went to lift Rāmari back into her chair. Rāmari had, of course, grown a little since the last time, and that little was enough to tip the balance. Awhina and her dad struggled, grappled. She looked around her as they tried, hoping no one could see them fight to lift her girl. It was the beginning of the end: she knew it.

With four adults, yes, Rāmari could be lifted safely, but four adults on a simple outing isn’t really feasible - and wouldn’t be fun if it were. Now when Awhina drives somewhere, Rāmari must stay at home. I don’t need to ask Awhina how that makes her feel. Rāmari, nearly a young woman, is still her mother’s little girl.

I don’t see my friend Awhina often, and when I do, I drive up to Napier. I know she would come to visit me if she could.

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What’s the deal with women and toilets? Are the stereotypes true?

When our family moved from Ōtepoti Dunedin to the Hutt Valley, in the late 2000s, my daughter was six, and had been joined by a younger brother then aged two. My bladder, as far as I know, is in good working order, never having been damaged by childbirth or anything else - but I still need to plan around it. That need became more acute in my new big city life. I now had a daily commute from the Hutt Valley to my government job in Pōneke Wellington.

The women’s toilets at Wellington station are my trusty friends. I’ll often skip to my loo with relief in the morning, straight after disembarking, or swing past them on my afternoon return trip, before I board for home. (You never know when a train might break down, leaving you stranded on the tracks with your straining bladder and your worst fears.) The problem is the queue. I’ve never seen a queue at the station’s male toilets: men move nonchalantly in and out. The women’s? On a bad day, the line extends right through the narrow door, so users jostle one another and apologise as we enter and exit.

Our third story is set in Pōneke, my kind-of adopted home, although the capital’s toilet woes are far from unique. Like our first story from Ōtepoti Dunedin, it unfolded over years, and mostly because advocates pushed for progress. One of those advocates, it turns out, was Fleur: a student politician contemporary of mine from years ago, later a Wellington City Councillor, and someone I have a deep respect for. That’s Aotearoa for you. You can’t even research toilets without bumping into someone you know.

The Basin Reserve, like the train station, is one of Pōneke’s iconic features. Construction began in 1863, with inmates of a nearby jail labouring to raise up the site from swamp, and the first cricket match was held there in 1868.⁴ You’ll remember how settlers brought their baggage to Aotearoa, including the idea that that the public sphere was for men, and the private sphere for women. This was certainly true of the Basin at the time of its establishment, as well as in the years that followed, the venue’s new stands and structures built for a man’s world. And it was still true in 2017, even as Aotearoa had its sights on hosting the ICC Women’s Cricket World Cup in 2022. Fair Play, an RNZ podcast hosted by Zoë George and dedicated to women in sport, decided to up the ante.

At the point Fair Play began its crusade, the Basin had only 27 toilets, one accessibility toilet and one family room available to the public - for a venue with a crowd capacity of 6000. Of that paltry number of toilets, twice as many were accessible to men as to women. Why was that a problem? Well, in some ways it’s obvious: women were queuing for loos at the Basin for up to half an hour. In other ways, it’s a little less obvious. Fair Play enlisted the help of Dr Rosaline Stanwell-Smith, a UK public sanitation expert, to understand.⁵

Wasn’t the answer just making sure women have the same number of toilets as men, at the Basin or elsewhere? Stanwell-Smith didn’t think so. The issue is that women take longer to go the toilet. And it’s not because we’re in there giggling in groups or admiring ourselves in the mirror. Women can have different needs. Pregnancy. Periods. Clothing that requires more adjusting. On average, it takes us three times as long as men to go to the loo. And that creates queues: Stanwell-Smith’s research found 59% of women queue regularly for the toilet compared to 11% of men. She discovered history was on auto-repeat: lack of toilets was still creating a ‘loo leash’, deterring one in five people from venturing from the house, and causing more than half of people to restrict drinking before going out. In her view, there should be two women’s toilets to each men’s toilet.

Fair Play were only getting started. After speaking with Stanwell-Smith, they brought together a panel to discuss the toilets at the Basin: Fleur, then a councillor; Paula Tesoriero, then the Disability Rights Commissioner; and Louisa Wall, then a Labour MP and a former double international sportsperson. The women got to talking. As a writer, I never expected to describe a podcast about dunnies as uplifting - and yet here we are.⁶

Straight out of the gate, Fleur acknowledged the Basin Reserve situation was unacceptable. Like she said, the Basin is a public facility, paid for by everyone, so everyone has the right to access it. Fleur outlined Wellington City Council’s then plans to upgrade the Basin toilets, including more women’s toilets, disability toilets and gender neutral toilets.

Louisa Wall chimed in, noting that public toilets need to reflect not the way things used to be, but the society we want to have - one in which people can participate and feel equally included. Give more people the chance to go to the Basin, she reckoned, and they probably will: demand will reveal itself. She pointed out that the rise of menstrual cups underscores the need for facilities with both privacy and soap.

Paula Tesoriero spoke next. She raised, respectfully, that combining disability and gender neutral toilets, as per the Council’s plan of the time, is not best practice. She said, ‘Nobody standing outside a bathroom should have to justify why they are using that bathroom’, and she urged the Council to involve disabled people in the design of the new toilets. Fleur said, ‘I take that on, and I totally agree with you’. She admitted she hadn’t thought about Paula’s point before, and committed to taking it up with the Council.

It’s almost as if when people come together respectfully, listen to one another speak, we can find solutions.

Probably, things still aren’t perfect, but the advocates got a significant win. During 2022, under the worst yet best headline ever - Basin Reserve unclogs the bogs for female fans by increasing capacity 200 per cent - Stuff gave an update.⁷ The Basin had bowled two toilet blocks. In their place would be 18 women’s toilets, plus disability and unisex toilets open to the public 24/7. Change tables would also be made available around the ground.

Fleur was quoted. She said, and I think I could sense a smile:

This is a positive step towards making the Basin Reserve a modern and inclusive venue. The Basin Reserve have listened to women and non-binary people. This has to be just the start of more inclusive toilets all over Wellington. There is more to be done, but this is a positive step in the right direction.

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Hanging on for half an hour in a queue? Just writing those words made me cross my legs and feel desperately uncomfortable. But for some people, that kind of wait isn’t uncomfortable. It’s impossible.

I’d lived in the Hutt Valley a few years when I met Jess. We worked together in Pōneke - around the time the Basin Reserve toilet advocates must have been fomenting their plans. Jess is fearless in an understated way, and our fourth story is about her. When I got to know her, I learned she’d once written an article about her vagina.⁸

I’m almost embarrassed to say that, despite having given birth twice, reading Jess’s article was the first I knew about birth injuries. Historically, those with birth injuries have had to make do in a sometimes excruciating silence - and even now, conversations tend to be whispered. Jess tipped all that on its head with her upbeat account of her prolapse repair.

Some babies don’t come easily into this world. Each time she gave birth, Jess went through a perineal tear and stitching. But then there was pain. There was a slippage of her vagina, so it began to protrude outside her body, and tampons refused to stay in place. It took time for Jess to seek help - in fact, she wrote her article in the hope that others experiencing the same things wouldn’t delay. When she finally went to her GP, she learned the normally thick wall of muscle between her vagina and anus was so damaged it could barely hold everything in place. Surgery would be needed.

There was something in Jess’s article that particularly stuck with me over the years. I re-read to find the passage, a very Jess description of an early sign that something was wrong:

One particularly interesting time, I appeared in a play wearing a see-though negligee and underwear. The fella I was acting besides had to drop me on my arse. As I hit the ground (on the stage. In front of an audience. Wearing next to nothing) I felt the unmistakable escape of wee. What did I do? I got up as rehearsed, kissed the gentleman passionately and walked off slowly, wiggling my hips suggestively. Then the second I was off, I ran to the loo to empty my bladder and speculate as to whether there was a wet spot on the stage floor (there wasn’t – but this was all too close for comfort).

Because her vagina wasn’t held in place, it was pulling downwards, putting pressure on her urethra - hence the urge to pee and the leakage. Jess went on this way for years.

It’s a hell of the thing to write an article like this, and it’s another thing to have a mate message you out of the blue, a decade later, with the idea to bring it up again. Jess had no hesitation. I asked if she’d like to read my piece before I hit publish. She replied, No need to show me. I totally trust you. It was a characteristically generous thing to say - and it made me think about trust, what it means.

To share a story like this, well, it’s a leap of faith. Leaving your home with a medical condition, hoping you’ll get lucky and find a toilet if you need one, shouldn’t have to be.

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About the same time as I met Jess, something else happened.

This is our fifth and final story, and it belongs to me, my whānau, and most of all my older child. One day, my daughter sat beside me on the couch. By the time our conversation ended, and I’d unfolded him from my arms, my daughter was my son. I had to work on the pronouns, but I got there in time: grammar falters, love doesn’t.

Both grammar and love came to no one more easily than my younger son. Today these two are 22 and 17, and they’re as quietly joined at the heart as they were back then. In those days, aged about 14 and 9, they were snugglers, lookers-out for one another, readers beside each another in bed. They loved to swim together, even though neither could swim to save themselves. They’d splash about instead, in their own happy world, the bigger one carrying the smaller one in the deep end.

Ask just about any kid from the Hutt Valley, the Wainuiomata outdoor summer pool is exactly what childhood’s meant to be: shrieks of joy, running when it’s not allowed, bombs that splash over the sides onto hot tiles. Parents in sunnies sprawled on the grass, calling kids over to rub sunblock on small arms and backs and faces. One scorching day, both my boys wanted to go to Wainui for a swim. We drove as a family over the hill; but it was only when we got there my older son told me he was nervous.

I can’t quite recall, but I think the outdoor pool was old school - concrete changing rooms and toilets, one for ladies, one for gents. Whatever the case, this was the first time my older kid had been to the pool, used the changing and toilet facilities in togs as a boy. I felt like I often do, even more afraid for my kid than my kid felt for himself. My instinct, and I know it was wrong, was to say to him: pretend to be a girl, just for a day. Please. It’s only a day. It’ll be safer.

I kept my fears to himself. My boy used the gents’ facilities.

He made it into the pool. It was then the worst happened. He spied a girl he’d gone to primary school with, a bit of bogan kid, along with her mum. My boy tensed. The woman recognised us too and moved to come over. I knew we couldn’t hide my son’s gender and new name. I braced myself.

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I am a cis woman writing mostly about cis women. We must be a fragile bunch, brains as weak as our bladders, because Winston has stepped in to protect us.⁹ It makes me wonder what exactly he thinks goes on in the ladies’ room.

The Fair Access to Bathrooms Bill would, amongst other things, create a fine of up to $2000 for a person ‘who uses a single-sex toilet and is not of the sex for which that toilet has been designated’.¹⁰ As an example of lawmaking, the Bill deserves to be printed on a scented two-ply. It doesn’t define ‘sex’ - the entire concept on which it hinges. To be enforced, it would rely on bathroom busybodies having hunches about people’s genitals and ratting them out to the authorities. As a member’s bill, it’s unlikely to be picked from the ballot, and wouldn’t succeed if it did; meaning it’ll never even serve the bigots it’s meant to placate. And it looks suspiciously like some kind of one-upmanship within the coalition government - the political equivalent of men casually weeing while everyone else waits their turn in the queue.

I could go on. What I really want to say is this, like I said when we started.

You’ve read the stories above, and you’ve seen how toilets are more than just toilets, for any of us. They’re about our dignity and our health. They allow us to access public spaces, to be full citizens; and so the lack of them takes these most fundamental things away from us. Amongst the stories I have told - amongst the everyday indignities of women, disabled people, and plenty of others - you will not find a single moment that a trans person was some kind of culprit: not one. But then, that’s not what this is about. It’s the erasure of dignity and citizenship as a political weapon, whether the Bill succeeds or not.

It is a politics beneath contempt, a tactic of the sewer.

Winston, in case you’re wondering, here’s what women do in public toilets. First, we hope we can find one, and it’ll be accessible to us when we do. We queue sometimes, muscles clenched to hang on long enough. When we reach the head of the line, we go into a cubicle. We do what we need to and come out again to wash our hands. We might give a polite smile to the woman at the sink next to us, or if we know her, say hello.

We do this the same if we are cis or trans. I can’t speak for all of us, but here’s what I believe as a woman: we’re being used as a pretext for a game played by a handful of men. I’ve picked my team in this game, and all women are welcome. Cis or trans, you will not take our dignity from any of us.

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I didn’t finish the fifth story.

I stood at the side of the outdoor pool, my older boy anxious in the water at my feet, both of us watching the woman as she approached. She and I made the awkward small talk of near-strangers whose kids hadn’t quite known one another. She looked down at my son, and because she didn’t know, she asked after my daughter.

It couldn’t be avoided any longer.

And the woman lit up, a smile across her face. Animated and friendly, she said she had family who were the same. And she said, yeah, that’s cool. It takes a strong person to be who you are! There are some folks whose hearts are out-turned by default, their minds curious for the stories of others, seeing the good no matter what anyone thinks. I smiled too. We went our ways.

I’d made an assumption, a hurtful and baseless assumption, about someone I didn’t even know, and who never deserved it. That can be an easy thing to do, perhaps because you’re feeling unsure or afraid - or you’ve got wrong ideas in your head, maybe put there by someone else. But it doesn’t have to be that way. People will co-exist pretty well, given the chance.

I stood there, poolside, still smiling after the woman had gone. Kids squealed and birds sang. Water splashed up at my legs and the sun fell on my face. The world turned.

1. Rooms-of-Their-Own-Public-toilets-and-gendered-citizens-in-a-New-Zealand-city-1860-1940.pdf (researchgate.net)

2. New Zealand and South Seas International Exhibition opens | NZHistory, New Zealand history online

3. Fully Accessible Public Bathrooms | Changing Places New Zealand

4. Basin Event History - Wellington Basin Reserve

5. Toilet equality - piss poor | RNZ

6. RNZ Audio Player

7. Basin Reserve unclogs the bogs for female fans by increasing capacity 200 per cent | Stuff

8. Jess’s article comes highly recommended: How my Vagina got her Groove Back (TMI) – Jessica Hammond (archive.org)

9. New Zealand First Member’s Bill to protect women’s spaces - New Zealand First (nzfirst.nz)

10. Fair_Access_to_Bathrooms_Bill.pdf (scoop.co.nz)