You know what sucks? Being a dude and being out with your baby, needing to change their nappy, and realising the only available changing facilities are in the ladies’ toilets.
All things considered, it’s one of the few times dads have it worse than mums – yet it’s a pretty big inconvenience. And think about it: if a couple are out with their child and the only changing table is in the ladies’, dad gets a few minutes to play Words With Friends on his phone, while mum has to do the nappy change – even if it wasn’t her turn.
Why is it acceptable to assume the only people changing nappies are women? In January 2019, New York became the latest state to require all new or renovated bathrooms in public buildings to have changing facilities in both male and female bathrooms. Similar laws are in place in California, but there are no laws about baby-changing facilities in the UK. There are guidelines – the British Toilet Association advises that for every 10,000 people using an area, there should be at least one unisex baby-changing facility – but no legal requirement.
[Read More: Dad fixing son’s nappy ‘mid-quad-crunch’ shows why fathers need baby changing facilities too]
Nobody relishes the thought of kneeling on the floor of a gents’ toilet cubicle, their head inches from a still-warm seat with bounce marks on it. It’s a tiny room specifically designed for dudes to wee and poop in – and let’s be honest, men have never been celebrated for their aim, so even somewhere that regularly cleans their bathrooms, you basically want to have your knees amputated.
God forbid you’re wearing shorts. Holy shit. It’s not somewhere you want to lay your child or the changing mat that’s going back into your bag, carrying strangers’ filth back to your house.
Less disgusting is using space in the restaurant or pub itself – benches, couches, chairs, tables – but this can draw dirty looks from others, making an occasionally stressful experience all the worse. And if there’s been a grotesque poo explosion then, yeah, nobody needs to see that while eating their roast.
Perhaps you can understand it in a really old pub – the kind of place that only installed ladies’ toilets in the 1990s – but it’s especially galling when you’re somewhere that’s fairly recently built. I often find myself in a cavernous gents’ toilets with loads of space that could easily accommodate a changing table – and there’s just nothing. Is it asking too much for pubs and restaurant to drill a few holes and chuck a fold-down changing table in there?
Businesses install baby changing tables at their own discretion, and many don’t entertain the idea that someone might have both a penis and a child. Amid calls from campaigners to even the balance, Raymond Martin from the British Toilet Association recently told Sky News: “We’ve been campaigning for 20 years to say to the government: do we really need high-speed trains? Aircraft carriers? We see more and more single dads, and we’d like to see more money from the government for facilities and better facilities. We all need baby-changing facilities and to have them isolated into a female toilet is wrong.”
More and more places with changing facilities put them in the disabled toilet – a measure that, while it makes sense in a lot of ways, feels a bit of an imposition to the people who need to use that toilet. Sometimes a change can take a while (see “grotesque poo explosion” above), and for that time, any disabled patron who needs to use the toilet simply doesn’t have one.
Everyone stands to benefit from gents’ toilets having baby changing facilities. Dads out alone with their babies get to change them in comfort. Mums aren’t seen as the default changer. Babies get changed. Disabled toilet users aren’t inconvenienced. And the couple having a romantic lunch together at the next table don’t get an eyeful of poo.