ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on existing scholarship on gender and bathrooms and addresses the question: why are bathrooms gendered? The gendering of toilets has always been a contentious issue. It includes historical accounts of architectural transitions of public and private toilets, alongside changing understandings of gendered, sexed and classed bodies. The chapter draws on interview data, as well as media sources and stories, to examine normative and transgressive gender experiences of bathroom spaces. It also focuses on the politics of policing gendered and sexed bodies in bathroom spaces. The chapter presents a quote about bathrooms in two Wellington secondary schools in Aotearoa New Zealand. It provides examples of high school students lobbying their school principal and school governance board for inclusive bathroom spaces. Schools, universities and other large institutions are often understood, and legislated as, public space, even when they may be privately owned.
