Tag: bathrooms | David Coveney

Design Dilemmas: When bathrooms become battlegrounds

In the world of transgender rights, the battle for the bathroom has reached fever pitch, especially in the USA. Now, I’m not here to referee in this brawl – because on one side of the debate you have the ‘TERFs”, and on the other, the trans rights activists sometimes labelled “handmaidens”. Both are terms about as socially acceptable as weeing all over the toilet seat, and on the extreme fringes of both you find calls for violence. It seems every modern campaign group needs its villains and its sycophantic followers.

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Cuban bathrooms

Cuba has, shall we say, a more relaxed approach to electrical safety than some other countries. In part because it’s poor – good electrics are expensive – but also, I suspect, because of some ignorance and lackadaisical enforcement too.

But I was still surprised to see this shower in our first B&B:

I will say one thing, however – in a lot of the finer houses the bathrooms remain as they were in the fifties, prior to the revolution. It’s an interesting perspective on design standards of the time, and mostly things were pretty good if you could afford good tiles. The fact that a lot of these bathrooms are still serviceable fifty years on is pretty impressive.