It is unedifying to think too much about toilets. Yet here we are. Some of the richest and most powerful people on the planet have devoted their attention to where the proles piss and shit. And where their attention goes, ours must follow. When they look to Mars, we too turn our gaze skyward, following the arc of interplanetary colonial ambition. As their activities deplete the world’s resources, the billionaires too feel they are ‘out of space’. And when they decide that a culture war must be waged on gender non-conformity, wearily, we take up our defensive position. Let me be clear: there’s nothing wrong with our bodily functions, nor the need to exercise them outside our own homes. Nonetheless, it is undignified to discuss toilets with such regularity. We must concede, this is a clever trick on their part, to place us through sheer force of repetition next to the loo in the associative chains of cultural meaning, the ‘webs of significance’, through which people apprehend the world. 

As Judith Butler pointed out, however, these contestations are never ‘merely cultural’.¹ Beneath each battle is an infrastructure (medical, educational, residential) and a legal regime which shape, though never fully determine, a set of everyday practices. As such, toilets – like housing, railways, bridges, buses – are not only infrastructures but what, in his book The Broken Promise of Infrastructure, Dominic Davies calls ‘infrastructures of feeling.’ Extending Raymond Williams’ iconic intervention, Davies insists that ‘seemingly mundane infrastructures are always thick with cultural meaning, shaped by and shaping what it is possible for us to feel, think, and imagine.’² Toilets, certainly mundane, are a good example, because, as Grace Byron argues, ‘the ability to be in and of the world requires the ability to use the bathroom.’³ Byron’s point here chimes with the premise that underpins Davies’ larger project. He observes: ‘Our citizenship is running water, safe housing, and flushing toilets: it is these infrastructures that allow us to stay in an area, to be there for a while – to be-long there – and not to have to move on’.⁴ In looking to infrastructure as that which determines our access to the means of life, and so also contours our sense of belonging, our relations to others, and our capacity to cohere politically, Davies uses the concept – and the  degradation of infrastructure – as a way to think in big, universal terms. He states ‘None of us are immune from a state infrastructure that divides its populations into hierarchies of first-class, second-class, and noncitizens.’⁵ And it is this tension – between that which coheres and that which divides – that animates my argument. (Perhaps this is the tension that always animates my argument.) Can we think about the divisions seeded by organised transphobia as an attack on public infrastructures? What conceptual and political avenues are opened through conceiving of organised transphobia not only as an attack on a minoritised group, not only an attack on women more broadly, but an attack on the ‘public’ itself? 

Organised transphobia has begun something of a ‘long march through the institutions’, to use Rudy Dutchke’s Gramscian phrase.⁶ Though it might sometimes seek to organise or rely upon prejudice, organised transphobia is distinct from the looser, even if more ingrained, forms of cissexism that organise social life. As Fran Amery and Aurelian Mondon observe, organised transphobia is ‘generated and promoted by a highly organised social movement in a top-down manner.’⁷ While a residual biologism may continue to generate an aversion to gender non-conformity, the hard right is an ascendant project that relies not on ambient prejudice but on libidinised obsession. Where everyday life runs in the direction of relaxed acceptance, organised transphobia seeds paranoia and suspicion. Where everyday life remains subject to an inchoate suspicion of gender non-conformity (such as in professional sport), organised transphobia attempts to entrench, extend and libidinise prejudice into active exclusion. In the past decade, transphobia has been intertwined with a larger crisis in international sport. Women of colour athletes have been targeted by brutal campaigns of delegitimisation, with the ongoing harassment of South African runner Caster Semenya and last year’s attacks on Algerian boxer Imane Khelif acting as a flashpoints for hard right recruitment. Though a larger conversation about sport is beyond my interest here, it’s worth noting as a particularly powerful site for fantasies of an ordered, gendered, and racially hierarchised world.

But here, I want to stay closer to ground level, closer to the infrastructures we all share — the spaces of work, leisure, health, and education. And, toilets. Oren Gozlan observes, the public toilet becomes a productive space for playing out ‘phantasies of control and expulsion, abjection, anxiety, relief, anticipation, and hate,’ as well as for understanding how ‘these unconscious resonances stall our capacity to think.’⁸ I would add too, our capacity for empathy and connection.  By making public spaces hostile, shot through with anxiety, the forces of reaction discipline gender non-conformity back into the domestic sphere. The implication: in your own home, the plumbing is your affair, but when you are at work, at school, at the gym, in a restaurant, or otherwise in public space, JK Rowling gets involved. And given the UK’s housing crisis, at its most acute in London, the domestic cannot be relied upon as a refuge. Much of the capital’s housing stock is not, in fact, domestic space at all, but rather an asset for the global elite. ‘We’ve been building the world’s most expensive safety deposit boxes,’ one real estate consultant said in 2017. ‘You just put your valuables in and then never visit.’⁹ While property is a speculative asset for some, London’s residents suffer damp, pests, rents that eat up well over half an income, and the constant threat of eviction. As such, the private remains as contested, as riven with risk, as the public. 

Following the money that propels organised transphobia illuminates the material foundations that are at stake beneath the hallucinatory moral panic. Prominent lobbying organisation the LGB Alliance, for example, rents an office at 55 Tufton Street. The Georgian townhouse, just parallel to Millbank, is also home to the Adam Smith Institute, the Centre for Policy Studies, Leave Means Leave, Migration Watch UK, the TaxPayers’ Alliance, Global Warming Policy Foundation, New Culture Forum, BrexitCentral and the Institute for Economic Affairs. The Institute for Economic Affairs is a particularly significant office-mate: inspired by Friedrich Hayek, founded in 1955 by businessman and battery farming tycoon, Anthony Farmer, the IEA was central to the development of neoliberalism and its adoption in Britain. In Thatcher’s own words, the IEA ‘created the climate of opinion which made [her] victory possible.’ We can read the tenants of 55 Tufton Street as a guide to the connections between, on the one hand, financialisation, deregulation, and the destruction of the welfare state and, on the other, the culture wars that dominate public discourse. The LGB Alliance, of course, are keen to downplay any connection, with their managing director, Kate Barker saying, ‘our detractors will seek to draw conspiratorial conclusions from our address. I can tell you that the office was chosen because it, handy, flexible and that it became available at the right time.’¹⁰ They would perhaps consider this article rather conspiratorial, though they are prone to seeing conspiracies where none exist; indeed, it is their modus operandi.

The most recent and most destructive legislative win for organised transphobia in the UK is the Supreme Court ruling. Five judges at the UK Supreme Court ruled, in a judgement doctors described as ‘medically illiterate’, that for the purposes of the Equality Act, gender is defined by ‘biological sex’. In fact, as members of the University College Union have recently asserted in branch motions, ‘The UK Supreme Court has conflated a brief visual inspection at birth and the consequent administrative claim with “biological sex”. In response to the ruling, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) issued new guidance, roundly celebrated by ‘gender critical’ campaigners, yet entirely unworkable in practice. The ruling and accompanying guidance insist that people ought to use the facilities of their assigned (“biological”) sex, rather than the gender that they live in. Then, a further caveat: it might be proportionate to exclude trans men if ‘reasonable objection is taken to their presence … because the gender reassignment process has given them a masculine appearance.’ Anti-trans campaigner Maya Forstater parses this point in blunter terms: ‘Not being allowed into the mens by rule does not mean you have the right to go into the ladies. That may seem unfair, but these are life choices people make. If you make extreme efforts to look like a man don’t be surprised if you are denied entrance to ladies.’¹¹ As David Renton puts it, ‘It is hard to convey just how bad the decision is as law.’¹² Indeed, in its pull towards using the law to make new micro-categories of governance, it recalls Tony Blair’s flagship experiment with ‘Anti-Social Behaviour Orders’ which sought to legislate the behaviours of individuals: an ASBO could prevent someone from drinking, hanging out in certain areas, wearing hoodies,  playing music, or even swearing. Everyone is equal in the eyes of the law — except you, over there, wearing that. 

This attempt to make Swiss cheese out of the Equalities Act bears a curious resemblance to the hard right’s obsession with perforated sovereignties. In Crack Up Capitalism, Quinn Slobodian documents the rise of ‘micro-ordering, or the creation of alternative political arrangements at a small scale.’¹³ The basic unit of economic or geopolitical space for the hard right is not, therefore, the nation or the company but the zone, ‘an enclave carved out of a nation and freed from ordinary forms of regulation. While, of course, the free trade zone, the special economic zone, the free port and so on are the familiar legal and infrastructural technologies of neoliberalism, this ascendant capitalist project is one that seeks to further generalise the rule of the zone. The billionaire hucksters of reaction such as Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel or Balaji Srinivasan are circling the notion of ‘exit’: simply put, if you have enough money, you should be free of the constraints of the nation-state with its pesky tax collection and environmental controls. Instead, billionaires should be able to control their own territory, whether private island or simply an enclave of pure licence scooped out of an existing national border. As Britain found out in the 2016 Referendum on EU membership, the case for ‘exit’ is easier in a highly unequal polity.

It’s worth considering the portioning off of trans people from cis (and assuming everyone is easily identified as either one or the other) alongside these potent imaginings of billionaire bunkers. It is not only a rhetorical gesture when Sophie Lewis refers to Britain’s distinctive branch of organised transphobia as ‘feminism’s Brexiteers.’¹⁴ Together, they gesture towards a world in which we can all be separately legislated: a techno-capitalist horizon of total individuation. When described in geopolitical terms, as the creation of new micro-territories, it sounds far-fetched. As Slobodian describes it, ‘Promoters of perforation cast themselves melodramatically as guerrillas of the Right, reclaiming—and decomposing—the nation-state, zone by zone.’ Yet if we read perforation across scales, something else emerges: zoning is what we already experience through data-driven platforms and algorithmic governance. The Supreme Court judgement seeks to extract this logic from the platform economy, and use it to perforate public space. 

Our forebears set their sights on revolution — now we are playing a defensive game, trying to establish our right to piss with dignity. It’s easy to feel demoralised. And we have some reason to be. In his survey of the twenty-first century left, Goran Therborn assesses the changes. As he puts it: ‘The 21st century harbours no grand social dialectic; the new forms of financial and digital capitalism do not develop and strengthen their adversaries.’¹⁵ The argument will be familiar: in Britain, unlike in its industrial heyday, financial and digital capitalism does not tend to recruit us into factories or factory-like workplaces; processes of downward mobility, of state abandonment or neglect are not necessarily proletarianising, don’t tend towards coalescing us into a class. That’s not to say such industrial conditions no longer exist, but that they are far from the norm in Britain.  As such, political organising cannot rely on an organic site ready to be politicised, but instead the site itself needs to be found, made, sustained. In this sense, Therborn is right: a minority being subject to a moral panic, harassed by the rump of corporate media, divided into incoherent legal categories, and hounded from public space doesn’t generate political strength. But I want to suggest that nonetheless, we have to seek political opportunities even under conditions that don’t seem to furnish us with many openings.

Returning to the Supreme Court ruling, some on the left suggest we ought to focus on prisons, mental health wards, and other carceral institutions. In the face of this form of state violence, they argue that the toilets in a university or the bank might be something of a minor concern. I suggest, however, that there remains something useful in a simultaneous contestation over the most general infrastructure. While horizons of universalism come with the taint of liberalism’s failures, a left retreat from the universal comes with immediate benefits for the hard right, whose ascendency is propelled by an insistence that left politics is merely a game of self-interest played by unscrupulous minorities. More urgently, my hopeful proposal is that an orientation towards the universal is a vernacular ethical position that cannot be reduced to the particular universalism of liberal hypocrisy. Further, as that liberal project completes its stuttering implosion, this vernacular ethics – the humanism from below that drives millions on to the streets in solidarity with Palestine – should not be left to founder. Rather, we must consider how the universal might be the foundation for class consciousness, rather than a barrier to its development. As such, infrastructures that speak, even in the most banal idiom, to a general condition must be defended.

There is an under-appreciated lineage of fights over this particular infrastructure. London’s first public toilets were established by London’s first mayor, Richard Whittington — a 128 seat toilet that hung over the Thames, with the waste carried away by the tides twice a day. Gender segregated, but with equal conveniences for women and men, this piece of public infrastructure remained unusual. In 1851, the Great Exhibition showcased the first public flushing toilet, created by George Jennings, a plumber from Brighton. These remained open after the exhibition, at the cost of a penny per use, from which the phrase spend a penny enters our vocabulary. Broadly, in this period and for several decades longer, public toilets remain almost exclusively for men, therefore restricting women’s access to public space, keeping them tethered to a ‘urinary leash’. Various campaigns ensued, first by middle class women, then by working class women, both of which saw some success, though not without dispute. Men opposed the women’s toilets being situated next to the men’s, and when a model toilet for women was built on Camden High at the turn of the twentieth century, cab drivers deliberately drove into it to prove that its location was not suitable. The big shift around this issue comes after the mass entry of women into the workforce in World War One, though even then, building toilets for women was seen to cement their presence in workplaces, and some men expressed concern that this would threaten their own employment. In the 1960s, accessible toilets designed for wheelchair users were first introduced, and the fight to make public space wheelchair accessible by ensuring adequate toilet provision continues.

While, as I indicated, there is something rather dispiriting about talking at length about loos, their banality can illuminate wider questions of public life. They demonstrate an idea presented by the anthropologist Susan Leigh Star in 1999 which is now foundational to the study of infrastructure: infrastructure ‘is by definition invisible, part of the background for other kinds of work.’  Infrastructure therefore only ‘becomes visible when it breaks,’ when ‘the server is down, the bridge washes out, there is a power blackout.’¹⁶ The infrastructure of toilets is, as this history of contestation indicates, an essential one: to be denied access to toilets is to be denied access to public life tout court. As Jules Gill-Peterson observes in the US context, ‘The state has, at all levels from federal to local, attempted in different ways to exclude trans people not so much from citizenship as public life.’¹⁷ The EHRC interim guidance in the UK, following the Supreme Court ruling, shows a similar dynamic at play here: the guidance refers to workplaces, services that are open to the public (such as hospitals, shops, restaurants, leisure facilities, refuges and counselling services), sporting bodies, schools, and associations (groups or clubs of more than 25 people which have rules of membership). In essence, this comprises most of civil, public, and commercial life. While the initial aim is clearly to exclude trans and gender non-conforming people from these spaces, it will not end there. And the list of tenants at 55 Tufton Street offer some indication as to why.

The residents of 55 Tufton Street are like the key to a wider map of reactionary forces. They tell us what the proponents of a techno-capitalist, financialised future are worried about, what they identify as having some potential to disrupt their vision. Because it has the capacity to cohere a broad coalition, climate politics are on their hit list: the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Britain’s most prominent deniers of climate change, run from the building. Because campaigns for better public infrastructure require taxing the wealthy, whether by targeting assets or profits, taxation is a site through which a left project might cohere. (The huge following the former trader Gary Stevenson has amassed for his content advocating for a wealth tax is evidence of the popularity of this idea.) As such, we shouldn’t be surprised to find the Taxpayers Alliance is also housed at 55 Tufton Street. It’s a member of the Atlas Group, started by the aforementioned Anthony Fisher, the man responsible for both battery farming and, potentially, Thatcher’s success. That the LGB Alliance now number among the building’s residents makes clear the central role of organised transphobia in this larger project, and is indicative of the kinds of strategies it is likely to use and the kinds of alliances it will likely be able to forge.

Yet by setting their sights on all manifestations of the public, they may help us to cohere our own vision. We may not unify on the shop floor, but we do all have a body. Where that body meets the social world is always the site of political possibility: we leave it unclaimed at our peril. I want to suggest that we can start small, that perhaps turning any space towards more collective ends might be worth doing. I’ll end with a simple example: in the Stalled! Project started in 2015, trans activist and writers Susan Stryker began a collaboration with architect Joel Sanders, to reconsider public toilets more broadly, thinking about how they can better serve everyone. As Stryker puts it, ‘Rather than focus on gender alone, Stalled! uses transgender issues and the concept of “binary abolitionism” as points of departure for a much broader reimagining of the public sphere.’¹⁸ So perhaps it might become edifying to set our sights on toilets. In a moment of weakened dialectical possibilities, universal horizons become essential. Even basic bodily universals might need to be asserted in a historical moment dominated by the techno-capitalists who are trying to transcend their own mortality. They hope to perforate the law and escape through this legal hole into their bunkers. They know, however, that this depends on punching holes in public infrastructure more generally, not ones through which we can escape, but ones in which we can be held apart, trapped in their individuating, data-driven, algorithmic vision, underwritten by new and destructive laws. Yet, as Stryker suggests, other infrastructures and other desires remains possible: ‘To figure new bodies and patterns of movement, to craft space in ways that transform relations with others, is a technical problem of design and engineering; to unleash desire for a collective life that might carry us across the fear of our own undoing is by far the harder challenge, but it is the challenge of our times.”