Filthy Matters

Calvin Gimpelevich writes on the history and politics of public bathrooms, in this essay from LARB Quarterly no. 47, “Security.”

By Calvin GimpelevichDecember 9, 2025

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This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 47: Security. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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TO CONSIDER THE PROBLEM, we have to go back to the start.

The earliest preserved forica dates to the fourth century BCE. It is a little room with stone walls and four seats, denoted by apertures shaped like keyholes. There are two holes carved into a bench opposite the entry and two more on perpendicular solo benches. The benches are sturdy, permanent. Excepting the entrance, they line the whole room. There is just enough space in the angular horseshoe center for an ancient man to have squeezed past his seated fellows toward an available hole. He would have positioned himself over the apertures and pissed and shat, in full sight of the others, into channels dug under the floor.

“Forica” (singular) and “foricae” (plural) refer exclusively to multi-seat public toilets, as opposed to private household latrines. They are not by any means the first plumbing or flushing toilets, simply the first shareable ones. Romans expanded and standardized what was originally a Greek innovation, making them truly public, available from Africa to the British Isles, throughout their former empire. Forica is a Latin word.

As with the Greeks, most Roman toilets were low-roofed, modest, separated from the street or sheltering institution by a door, without any further partitions between bench apertures. Tiny open windows provided minimal light and airflow. They were truly public, as far as we know, available to senators, soldiers, commoners, poets, and slaves. The distance between the center of one hole and that of another was a little over two feet—meaning that 10 or 20 or 50 users sat within hand-holding distance of one another to dump their excretions in a down-sloping trench whose melded fetor wafted back into the room. Running water, from adjoining baths or fountains, flushed the collective muck into sewers that emptied into local rivers, which (mostly) kept gasses from accumulating to toxic or explosive levels but did little to harness the stench.

It’s easy to imagine a romantic, shining Rome, filled with classical architecture and dominated by figures like Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic philosopher-emperor. We know that the marble statues in our museums were once garishly painted, but it’s still hard to believe. Rome and Athens are the great examples Western democracy hearkens back to. It takes some effort to remind ourselves that Rome was filthy, its grand structures smeared with feces and surrounded by long-collapsed slums.

Romans shat into pots, over private cesspits, by tombs, by statues, in doorways, on roads. Chamber pots were emptied out of windows, at night, onto unfortunate heads. Corpses, garbage, sewage, and other wastes mingled on the streets, to be picked over by animal scavengers who left their own fly-covered and maggot-laden feces—and eventual carcasses—in turn. Because the nutrients in excrement were vital compost, human and animal droppings were collected by specialists and sold to farmers. A urine-specific market existed for fullers, who found its ammonia useful in dyeing and cleaning laundry, though the collection system was far from perfect, as the vases were liable to crack and spill their sunbaked contents onto the road. The existence of foricae is seen as an argument for Roman hygiene, but they were not (given the empire’s expanse) very common, existing mostly in those crowded places, like theaters, at risk of drowning in sludge.

Like us, the Romans suffered constipation, diarrhea, gluey or ropy or viscous stools; like us, they had to wipe off. For this reason, it is hypothesized, the small shallow gutter running before forica benches provided a constant flow of water within easy reach. Romans may have scooped water to cleanse with, or used it to rinse xylospongia—sponge sticks, a Roman classic, featuring sea sponges fixed to wood rods. Some academics declare, emphatically, that the sponges were used to wipe with, while others insist they were more like toilet brushes for mopping external spills. Alternate materials—papyrus, plant husks, wood shavings, corncobs, and rags—have been found and used as evidence of the latter theory, but most experts believe the sponges were indeed a form of recyclable toilet paper. Seneca recounts the story of a German prisoner, condemned to public execution, who asked to use the toilet and “seized the stick of wood, tipped with a sponge, which was devoted to the vilest uses, and stuffed it, just as it was, down his throat; thus he blocked up his windpipe, and choked the breath from his body,” rather than face the savage beasts of the arena. As comfortable as they may have been about digestive matters, Romans were not free of disgust: “Yes, indeed,” Seneca writes, “it was not a very elegant or becoming way to die; but what is more foolish than to be over-nice about dying?”

It is unclear if Roman toilets were sex-segregated. There is no evidence that they were. Our nearest example is their public baths, where in certain times and places, men and women bathed separately; on other occasions, they mixed together nude. Because they wore tunics or togas, there were no pants to pull down; clothing thus draped around the seated user, exposing less than modern urinals would. Archaeologist and Roman toilet expert, Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow believes foricae were “mostly a men’s world.” The public latrines, she argues, “were constructed in the areas of the city where men had business to do”—though we see them at baths and stadiums where chaperoned or lowborn women showed up. Women had partial rights and were capable of citizenship, but they were unable to hold public office and were thus relegated, with some exceptions, to domestic concerns.

In the second century, dark and dingy toilets were joined by restrooms of splendor. At the height of imperial power, foricae were as much a showcase of wealth and grandeur as any great construction. Monumental toilets, capable of seating 100 people; toilets arranged in semicircles; toilets carved from marble, set into marble facades. Ruins exist of a courtyard forica whose shaded benches faced a pool surrounded by a mosaic floor; there are alcoves for statuary and great Ionic columns bounding the open center. There are toilets with frescoes and stucco reliefs, toilets resembling temples.

Whether modest or epic, foricae brought risks that decorations helped avoid. Decor could, for instance, draw a user’s gaze, to keep them from gaping or cursing each other with the evil eye while in a vulnerable state. Fortuna, goddess of luck and fate, appears so often that one ancient Christian ridiculing paganism wrote that the Romans who “believe her to be the greatest deity, carry her statue to the privy and erect it there, thus assigning to her a fit temple.” And yet one sees the necessity of a protective figure, considering that sewer gases trap and explode; that rats, snakes, and spiders were known to crawl up and bite the flesh exposed on the benches; and that demons too, it was thought, liked to reside in the stinking dark holes. “Crapper, beware of evil,” reads the inscription beneath a painting of Fortuna gazing benevolently upon a shitting man, which was excavated from a latrine in Pompeii. So you see, the elimination of bodily wastes, in an architectural space shared with others, has always been fraught.

Typhoid, diarrhea, cholera, dysentery, polio, hepatitis A and E, intestinal worms, and parasitic infections are all communicable through feces. Bacteria in urine causes leptospirosis, which can be fatal if left untreated. The average adult male produces about a pound of stool per day. In the second century, the city of Rome held an estimated one million people. New York City currently has over eight million people, flushing seven billion pounds of wastewater each day. The more people crowd together, the more urgent excretory disposal becomes. In modern cities, a lack of public toilets is a crisis, and yet their existence can be unsettling. It is not pleasant to enter the single unoccupied stall of a restroom and find that, for some ignoble reason, the seat is broken, urine has spattered the flushing handle, there is no more paper, and the bowl is murkily clogged. How many times have I hovered above such disorder, hoping to finish my business before the strength of my squatting muscles gives out? What could be more unpleasant than the sudden, frigid contact of bare ass on stale pee? There are very good reasons to regulate the wastes of a population, but populations, from antiquity to the present day, do not always behave as they should. Every broken or horrible toilet is an example of the social contract’s breakdown.

There is not much talk of public toilets in the West between the fall of the Roman Empire and the 19th century. Human bodies did not change, but their disbursement and cognizance did. Roman metropolises gave way to smaller, more localized settlements administered by the youthful Catholic Church. Architectures of civic pride were replaced with cathedrals. The last vestiges of Rome’s res publica—literally meaning “public thing,” and the root of the word “republic”—gave way to monarchical feudal power. Public buildings, even aqueducts, were allowed to decay; columns from imperial temples were reused for domestic housing. Poverty and the collapse of urbanism, combined with a shift in public values, meant limited funds went to churches and fortifications. The civically disciplined body gave way to an inherently sinful one. Refuse went into the streets or into outdoor latrines or the garderobes—toilet rooms above cesspits or moats—of wealthy castles.

Sanitation, in this period, did not reach a historical high, and even the comparatively luxurious garderobes invited certain problems. “In 1183, when the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire held a Diet in the palace of Erfurt, the floor of the main hall broke, precipitating the lords and knights into the cesspool below, where many perished, the Emperor himself barely escaping death,” according to Harold Farnsworth Gray’s 1940 essay “Sewerage in Ancient and Mediaeval Times,” and, in “1326, Richard the Raker, having entered and seated himself, the rotten flanks of the [privy] floor gave way, and Richard perished most odorously by drowning in the contents of the pit.”

Public toilets remained an extreme rarity throughout the Renaissance and early modern era. Gray continues:

[T]he Louvre was a mess. People defecated without restraint or attempt at secrecy in the courtyards, on the stairs and balconies, and behind doors, without hindrance by the palace attendants. […] On August 8, 1606, an order was given prohibiting any resident of the palace of Saint Germain from committing a nuisance therein. That same day the King’s son urinated against the wall of his room.

It was not until the rise of industrial cities in the 19th century that a mix of urbanization, germ theory, cholera epidemics, moral hygiene, and piss-pooled cobblestones convinced urban dwellers to banish effluvium from the streets.

Public life is open, social, revealed, as opposed to the private, which is hidden, withdrawn. The concept of a “public,” including the question of who belongs to it, is a political idea related to citizenship and the ability to move through and alter the world. The European and American public in the 19th century was a male sphere. Men (ideally) moved through the streets, while women stayed in the home. The men availed themselves of the semipublic facilities of pubs and clubs, in open urinals, and, soon enough, in public toilets built especially for them. By now, it was socially uncomfortable to shit next to a stranger on a forica-style bench, and so stalls were introduced. And it was unthinkable for men and women to share a privy, the sexes being separated in almost all aspects of life.

There were no special toilets for women because women, particularly those of the upper class, had no public needs. A variety of arguments were made against female restrooms, including redundancy (women can hold it until getting to the shops or private dwellings), propriety (what if “ladies” were forced to use the same toilets frequented by the poor and working-class?), and modesty (the horror of admitting they excrete).

The mere proposal of women’s toilets brought hostile feeling. Urban historian Maureen Flanagan, recounting a debate (among men) over a suggested toilet, writes: “One claimed that 90 per cent of the women passing through the spot lived in the area and thus would use facilities at home. In response, one councillor quipped, reportedly to much laughter, that a ‘suitable house’ could be found for the ‘use of [other] ladies’”—in other words, a brothel.

Another protester decreed that “ladies” out shopping would not be able to endure the sight of this toilet, ignoring the point that women had been passing the men’s toilet for several years, while others declared a woman’s public toilet to be an “abomination” and that any women supporting such a structure “so far ‘forgot their sex’ [they] should not have anything provided for them at all.”

The attachment to respectable female privacy was so great that “public woman” was slang for a prostitute, open to any and all.

When they did exist, women’s public facilities were both less numerous than men’s and less widely used. A New York toilet built in 1869 was torn down a few years later for quiescence. They were, indeed, too open, dirty, and mixed. “Privately-owned restrooms,” as another historian, Peter C. Baldwin, writes, “were better screened from public gaze, offered a wider range of personal services, and openly segregated the affluent from the poor.” Hotels, railway stations, and department stores offered more appealing options, “replicating in exaggerated form the divisions within fashionable homes. Many hotels offered separate entrances for men and women. […] Women’s entrances to hotels led to more secluded parlors, often one floor up, with comfortable seating, carpets, and drapes,” with the routes to toilets shielded by sets of increasingly secluded nooks. Department stores offered, in addition to libraries, nurseries, and ladies’ parlors, luxurious “marble-floored lavatories designed after those in elite women’s clubs. Store employees posed as maids catering to the needs of their guests in all of these faux-domestic spaces.” Bargain basements, with humbler accommodation, served the poor.

The problem with the public is that it is by necessity filled with strangers, and strangers are people we do not know. We can project our fears onto strangers, whose cleanliness might be suspect, who may be grotesque or carry disease. In late 19th-century US, this fear expressed itself as the “socialism of the microbe.” Germs undercut the miasma theory of illnesses (which posited that illness was caused by bad smells), and so it followed that other people, especially poor immigrants, carried germs. At best, awareness of physical interdependence resulted in public health initiatives where the entire society concerned itself with the health of its most vulnerable. At worst, it demonized the impoverished as vectors of contamination. A refined woman did not wish to seat herself on a bowl previously occupied by slum dwellers. She wanted to use the hotels.

In addition to strangers’ microbes, public toilets provided contact with the behaviorally suspect. As is the case today, public toilets saw theft, vandalism, muggings, sexual contact, intoxication, litter, insufficient flushing, and menstrual cloths clogging pipes. No images of Fortuna protected users from misconduct. As in Rome, in the modern era there were pests.

And yet they kept getting built. Prohibition brought new urgency to restrooms: men could no longer use the saloons. The Victorian era faded and women of all classes became more public. The opulence of commercial spaces was toned down. By the early 20th century, public toilets in the United States resembled current ones. Widely used by the general public, they functioned, but were often crowded, dirty. Stalls provided visual, if not auditory or olfactory, separation.

Further segregation, by race, occurred in the Jim Crow South—but the expense of doubling “white” and “colored” stations resulted in fewer facilities overall. As Richard A. Wasserstrom writes in his classic 1977 report “Racism, Sexism, and Preferential Treatment”:

A significant feature of [Jim Crow] ideology was that blacks were not only less than fully developed humans, but that they were also dirty and impure. They were the sorts of creatures who could and would contaminate white persons if they came into certain kinds of contact with them—in the bathroom, at the dinner table, or in bed, although it was appropriate for blacks to prepare and handle food, and even to nurse white infants.

White women needed special protection from the supposedly violent intrinsic sexuality of Black men (the primary rationale undergirding the need for segregation to begin with) and, it was believed, were at risk of contracting syphilis from sharing toilet seats with Black women.

In the North, where most public facilities were located, class, race, and linguistic divisions streamlined into one final, nonnegotiable barrier—that between male and female. Its existence continues into the present day, upheld by communal taboo.

The first milestone of my gender transition took place in a public restroom. I say “gender” here and not “sex”—as in “sex change”—because I am referring to the intersection of how I dress, walk, talk, perceive myself, and am received by the world. It was 2012 and I was recently legally male, a few months on injected testosterone.

You can picture me at 23: short, slight, acne-ridden, with a cracking voice, and the same mustache my grandmother sported in her final years. I couldn’t tell if people perceived me as an adult lesbian or a 12-year-old boy. I wore button-ups that did not quite hide a deflating chest and men’s pants that did not fully cover up my hips. You can picture me walking, gossiping excitedly, through a grassy Astroturfed city park with a female (feminine) friend who said that she needed to pee.

We walked to the freestanding toilets. At any other period in my life, I would have followed her into the women’s restroom and kept talking at the sinks while she used a stall. We would have talked as she peed, talked as she fixed her makeup, talked as she washed her hands. If the bathroom wasn’t disgusting, we might have lingered, sheltering from the elements or social dramas like Victorian women in their original capacious restrooms, for which toilets were but a partial draw.

Instead, manfully, I waited outside, shouting my part of the conversation in a voice like a penny whistle, while she answered from the depths of the stalls. I didn’t realize that the woman standing nearby was waiting to use the toilet, or that my presence inhibited her, until my friend exited, and this other woman darted into the facilities as we left. My lingering near the women’s entrance was suspicious enough to keep this other woman from entering a public restroom. I had transitioned to being a threat.

Sociologists Sarah E. H. Moore and Simon Breeze argue, in a 2012 study published in The British Journal of Criminology, that men are more fearful of public restrooms than women are, that it is men for whom the threat of violence lingers. Based on observations of, and interviews with, (presumably cisgender) men and women regarding public toilets, the researchers find that, while both sexes view them as uncomfortable, “for women, public toilets are at worst smelly and unloved places where you risk embarrassment, but they are often places of relaxed communality, where you can speak openly to strangers, share cubicles and have mobile phone arguments with boyfriends.” In other words, the restroom culture I grew up in and was suddenly exiled from.

Men reported a darker atmosphere:

[T]he most significant problem with public toilets was, simply, the co-presence of other men and the possibility of violence if a breach of toilet etiquette occurred. They were concerned about being looked at by other men and being mistaken by other men for voyeurs. […] Covering up, avoiding exposure and not allowing oneself to be looked at were all deemed to be important tactics in guarding against these threats because they demonstrate lack of sexual interest in others and non-belligerence.

Men fear being preyed upon sexually, and being mistaken for showing interest. “The interviewees were cognizant that physical violence would be the likely result if one was perceived to be looking at another man or seen to be inviting other men to look.” Indeed, some interviewees shared stories of minor interactions quickly escalating to violence.

 Men’s toilet code extends, in subtler versions, to locker rooms, saunas, communal showers—any space where men are fully or partially nude together that is not explicitly gay. The code has allowed me to move (briefly, since passing) through these naked places without anyone seeming to notice my chest scars or lack of a phallus.

I thought, transitioning, that I was the only one feeling vulnerable in men’s rooms, but it turns out I’d joined a common fear. Over and over, the researchers note how similar men’s anxieties in public restrooms are to women’s moving through public space at any time. “To put it starkly,” Moore and Breeze explain, “women generally fulfill the role as object of male sexual interest; their absence may prompt men to worry that they, potentially, will be fitted out for this position.” The assumption is that male sexual aggression is ever-present, and without women, the miasmic inevitability of this aggression will vent itself on other men.

Sex, of course, happens in public restrooms, along with drug use, sleeping, bathing, eating, and other illicit doings. By the 1890s, there were already complaints of homosexual activity in men’s toilets. A century later, in his 1988 novel The Beautiful Room Is Empty, Edmund White lays out the following scene:

Someone comes in, heavy brown cordovans before the urinal, worn-down heels and scuff marks on the leather—neglects himself, can’t be gay. I can hear his urine splatter but I can’t see its flow. I wait for it to stop—the crucial moment, for if he stays on, then I’ll stand in my stall, peek through the crack, soundlessly unbolt my door as an invitation. Now, in this indeterminate second, I can put one head after another on his unseen shoulders, invent for him one scenario after another. I get hard in anticipation, stiff before the void of my own imagination. […] [J]ust as I was ready to cash in my chips, someone sat beside me, dropped his pants to the floor in a puddle, revealing strong tan calves above crisp white ribbed athletic socks. A silence like a storm cloud gathered over the room, blocking out the hall noises. He tapped his foot slightly; I tapped mine. Then two taps, matched by two of mine. Three and three.

And without further prelude, he sank to his knees shoving his brown thighs and white groin under the partition, and I also knelt to feast on his erection.

The description isn’t of a predatory encounter but one invested in maintaining security through plausible deniability, secrecy, and consent. The game, for bathroom cruising, involves long periods of waiting, making sure the stranger in the next stall isn’t lingering due to constipation but carnal desire.

I don’t think cruising is the actual reason for fear in men’s rooms. The risk, for practitioners, is higher than it is for the unsuspecting shitter who might be propositioned or hear a blow job. Cruisers hazard violence and arrest, as they have since the 19th century. Instead, the sense of ambient danger in the men’s room lies in the possibility of not belonging in this intentionally segregated location where vulnerable physical processes happen in relative isolation, where one can be assaulted in private. There is a danger in men’s spaces, in a culture where manhood is not intrinsic but something that must be earned and performed, in being insufficiently masculine. Desiring another man’s penis makes one less-than, feminized, deserving of a feminine role—subject to the indignities and sexual dangers emasculated men and women are subject to in the public world. The aggressive responses to violations of etiquette in the men’s room are forceful assertions that one is, indeed, a man and manly. They are a refusal of sexual passivity, an announcement that the male body is inviolable. This is what can make a look harrowing; this is how a simple breach in manners can lead to a punch in the head. This is our evil eye.

There are people for whom neither men’s nor women’s toilets are comfortable. There was a period of transition when I did not fit in any gendered space. It took a year of hormones and a double mastectomy to pass with most people most of the time. I know people who will never pass, either because their genders do not fit into the male/female binary and this gender difference is visible in their appearance or because their physicality is innately ambiguous. I have friends who are intersex, shunted to an ill-fitting gender since childhood; friends who are binary trans, like myself, who don’t pass; and friends who have easily passed, in a second gender, for decades. I’ve known a few cisgender women, often tall and short-haired, who get yelled at for using the women’s room matching both the sex on their birth certificates and their self-evaluative gender.

By comfortable, I mean predictably unhostile. I found it very uncomfortable to pee for a couple of years and used accessible single-room unisex toilets whenever possible. Lacking those, I darted into the men’s or women’s stalls quickly, trying to guess how strangers would read me that day. If there were other people at the sinks, I didn’t use them, scurrying out without washing my hands. At this point, in my thirties, the only toilets foiling my equilibrium are those rare men’s stalls without doors, usually found in parks. It is a distressing few minutes to sit, with my pants down, on full view to anyone who happens to enter the men’s room, transsexual history exposed. The issue here is not shame but the disconcerting sense that I might be preyed upon—a sense I remember keenly from living as a young woman—that snaps back like a rubber band.

Fear, for the women in Moore and Breeze’s study, fastened to the areas outside public restrooms: dark spots where assailants might linger, the lonely walk to and from a bathroom at night. In other words, places containing men. Freedom, in the women’s room, is simple: it’s the freedom from having to think about men.

In the climactic scene of Anna Burns’s 2018 novel Milkman, a stalker assaults the (female) narrator in a women’s restroom. The man is first beaten up by all the women in the restroom, then in the bar by their boyfriends, and then again by the local branch of the IRA, whose members convict him of “quarter-rape” for the violation. The narrator is clear that this response is not to the assault itself but to the man’s presence in the women’s restroom—his breach of a gender taboo.

This horror around breaching the bathroom taboo spills messily into the paranoia of trans panic. Its victims are not always trans. Recently a cisgender lesbian was accused of being a man and forcibly removed from the stall of a hotel lobby bathroom in Boston by a male security guard, as other women heckled her, saying “He’s a creep.” The woman and her girlfriend were asked to leave the hotel.

And then there’s the trap for actual trans people. For example, the young transgender woman arrested for entering a women’s toilet in Florida’s State Capitol building and sent to a men’s jail, wearing a frilly white dress and pink bow. The flurry of laws restricting people to the bathrooms matching the sex on their original birth certificates that immediately break down, as in the case of a South Carolina trans man who was arrested for using the women’s room at a bar—the very room such laws would force him to use. The constant guesswork of how you read in a given moment, to strangers, on a given day; the risk of violence, humiliation, and police if there is no right answer or if you guess wrong.

Public fury over transgender people is mostly about transgender women—in bathrooms, in sports, and so on. Trans men, rhetorically, are an afterthought, whose main offense is contagion: what if your beautiful young daughter is convinced, through social media and gender ideology, to cut off her breasts, ruining her lovely figure? Trans men, in transphobic thought, are laughable, intrinsically emasculated, subject to those dangers wrought on other emasculated men and women. Trans women, by contrast, are a peril. Sometimes this peril is located in the penis (“Its [sic] this simple: If you have a penis then use the men’s room. If you do not have a penis then use the women’s room,” reads a typical comment from a college news site), but sometimes it reaches beyond genitals to some supposed truth encoded in chromosomes. Nonbinary people are not much considered at all.

The argument against trans women in women’s bathrooms goes something along these lines: a) trans women are really men, and men in women’s toilets must be up to no good, and b) if trans women are allowed in women’s restrooms, any man could put on a dress to use the women’s room for nefarious means. The rallying cry is for (cisgender) women’s safety, ignoring the most basic facts. States that enacted policies supportive of trans bathroom use did not see any increase in sex crimes. Trans women, particularly trans women of color, experience significantly higher rates of violence than cisgender women, just as trans men suffer more violence than cis ones. The argument says that a trans woman who has undergone vaginoplasty, who transitioned young and has only ever experienced female puberty, who reads as female, retains some taint of maleness making her presence offensive, unsuitable, and dangerous to other women—that trans women who do not pass are beyond horrible. It’s a logic that would put me, with my dicklessness, in women’s restrooms, despite the fact that most people don’t realize I’m trans. It also ignores the possibility of predatory cisgender males infiltrating women’s restrooms by impersonating passing trans men. This fantasy insists that men bent on violating moral, cultural, and legal prohibitions against murder and rape could be kept in check by placards on bathroom doors.

We expect our places of elimination to be sacrosanct, for would-be assailants to respect their hallowed prohibitions. It’s a mistake for which we can also find a mirror in ancient times: the Historia Augusta relates how Rome’s scandalizing, gender-transgressing emperor Elagabalus sought safety in just such a spot when fleeing assassins:

Next they fell upon Elagabalus himself and slew him in a latrine in which he had taken refuge. Then his body was dragged through the streets, and the soldiers further insulted it by thrusting it into a sewer. But since the sewer chanced to be too small to admit the corpse, they attached a weight to it to keep it from floating, and hurled it from the Aemilian Bridge into the Tiber, in order that it might never be buried.

Most people I know prefer private toilets in clandestine rooms devoted to bodily care. And yet, sometimes we must leave home, and without public options, a urinary leash restricts wandering distance to the capacity of one’s bladder. This is the argument made by disability rights activists for widespread accessible toilets. In the words of activist Judy Heumann, “When you erect buildings that are not accessible to the handicapped, you enforce segregation.” Without being able to assume that one will be able to find a suitable toilet, daily journeys must be planned around friendly terrain—or prepared for in other ways. As David Serlin, in his 2010 essay “Pissing Without Pity,” notes, “It was not uncommon even in the 1970s and 1980s for disabled people traveling on public transportation such as trains or airplanes to have to wear adult diapers or use catheters and collection bags for the length of their journey due to inappropriate or nonexistent facilities.”

I know many trans people of varying shapes, sizes, colors, cultures, ages, and genital configurations. Some of them pass, some of them don’t, or do or don’t at differing times, or find the issue irrelevant, but they all, at some point in their day or their week—like every other mammal—need to shit, and sometimes this requirement strikes far from home. The contention around trans people using public toilets essentially results in a criminalization of public existence. It is the endangerment of basic human rights, including bodily autonomy, the pursuit of livelihood, the full extent and privileges of citizenship. This applies even to trans people with some ostensible power. When the United States’ first openly trans congressional representative was elected, her Republican colleagues passed a ban keeping her from women’s toilets and locker rooms on Capitol Hill—her place of work.

Certain groups are dangerous by nature of existing. Their presence symbolizes all that is wrong. “If only it were all so simple!” Solzhenitsyn exclaims in The Gulag Archipelago (1973). “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

If only it were other people—narcissists, maniacs, the homeless, transsexuals, junkies—soiling commons with the stinking products of their shameful organs, abusing facilities, engaging in nefarious practices. If only we could control our neighbors and excise villains, the perfect society that is always just around the next corner (or left behind in lost glory) would be ours.

The United States has responded, for the most part, to a complicated and occasionally discordant public by giving up. Once ubiquitous pay toilets were demolished as an equity issue and replaced with—nothing. Today, the country has about eight public toilets per 100,000 people, far beneath the standards of Europe and Asia, on par with Botswana—whose per capita wealth is less than a 10th of our own. Fiscal crises, combined with vandalism, fear of criminality, fear of strangers, and fetishization of privacy have all contributed to the decline and fall of our public restrooms.

Historian Peter C. Baldwin again:

The large, underground comfort stations of the early twentieth century are almost all gone now throughout the United States. City pedestrians are usually forced to rely on facilities in semi-private buildings such as hotels, stores, restaurants, and coffee shops. Instead of a right conferred by government on all citizens, bodily privacy is a purchasable commodity. Even if provided free of charge, the use of the toilet is understood to be the result of an agreement between an individual and a business. It is an awkward, grudging agreement, inflected by judgments of the individual’s social status.

Subway station restrooms are locked, freestanding ones demolished. And yet, despite the risks of providing facilities for such things, people continue to excrete—sometimes, like their forebears, in the streets, when their wastes are not provided with specialized homes. “The state of public restrooms in the U.S. is pretty deplorable,” the president and co-founder of the American Restroom Association says. “It’s been a mess.” A mess we smell and see and step in, where the impoverished are denied sanitary accommodation and those with expendable income buy coffees they do not need—hoping, if they belong to a vilified or visually ambiguous demographic, that this particular outing will not end in arrest.

Instead of catering to the public as it is—in its messiness and contradiction, with darkness existent in each human heart, and goodness and empathy and hatred and grief in all those hearts too—we have simplified the problem to an abstracted black-and-white that has no relationship to reality, scapegoating some and ignoring many others. “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster,” James Baldwin writes. A society denying the humanity of its composite parts becomes monstrous, and a country stifling its public loses democracy. Everyone, as a result, is soiled.

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Featured image: Carole Raddato, photo of Lararium wall painting from a corridor leading to a latrine with Isis Fortuna protecting a man relieving himself and the words Cacator cave malum (Shitter beware the evil eye), Naples Archaeological Museum, July 4, 2014. CC BY-SA 2.0. Accessed December 8, 2025.